📢 Join us on 17 June for an online webinar on Quantitative Text Analysis in the Age of LLMs. With @seraphinemaerz.bsky.social and Bertrand De Longueville. 17:00 UK, 18:00 Brussels, 19:00 Vilnius Register here: tinyurl.com/2pkcjxsw #QTA #LLMs #TextAsData

📊 FIRSA webinar on building research dashboards with R and Shiny is now online. It covers the basic structure of a Shiny app and practical design choices for clearer dashboarding, using the FIRSA dashboard as an example. 🎥 www.youtube.com/watch?v=FICw... #RStats #Shiny #OpenScience

Playing with census data, I built this interactive map of population density for Rome (my city 🫶). Data is v granular, you can zoom down to specific blocks 🤯. Rome is the EU's largest city by area, ~ the size of London, but with less than a third of its population teretalo.github.io/rome-pop-map...

📊 Free webinar on 12 May Building Research Dashboards with R and Shiny RShiny basics for researchers, students, analysts, and other R users interested in interactive dashboarding for research communication. 18:30 Vilnius time (EEST) Registration: forms.gle/f9t9dpYTT3Gc... #RStats #dataviz

Happy to see our most recent tutorial on RSelenium featured in RWeekly (2026-W16)! The screencast below shows a minimal example of what can be done with automated browsers. Use responsibly! Tutorial: firsa.eu/posts/rselen... Follow RWeekly rweekly.org #Rstats #OpenScience #DataVisualization

Want to an easy way to learn web scraping? 🤖 Check out this new tutorial on Selenium in R. It covers how to automate web browsers to collect data from dynamic websites ➡️ firsa.eu/posts/rselen... #RStats #RSelenium #WebScraping #DataScience

State of the world today: I got an email notification “The Great Taco Party”, Not immediately clear if it was from Uber Eats or @foreignaffairs.com …

Some hot takes on AI: 1) LLMs are amazing editors but atrocious writers. They lack the creativity that comes from having an underlying model of the world. #AI #LLMS #coding #writing

Trump will soon put his signature on the dollar. Why does this matter? I discuss this in my new Substack post. Link: alfredohs.substack.com/p/dollar-sig... #DonaldTrump #USDollar #AmericanPolitics

What are the odds you own crypto assets? 📉 How is financial literacy related to ownership? 📖 Our new dashboard lets you simulate the probability of recent crypto-asset ownership based on a statistical model. 🔗 dashboard.firsa.eu #bitcoin #rstats #shiny #crypto #fintech #OpenScience

📄 New FIRSA working paper. Are crypto holders really more overconfident? Using recent EU-wide data, I find the answer depends a lot on how overconfidence is measured. Pre-print version, comments welcome. 🔗 firsa.eu/posts/crypto... #FinTech #OpenScience #EUData #RStats

The roadmap to your 2026 research goals starts here. 🗺️ Join the MethodsNET Summer School with CEU for advanced methodological training. Designed for researchers and faculty. Apply by April 20th. 🔗 docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

🚨 New Medium article on AI and expertise. We talk a lot about what AI can do for researchers, but much less about the precarious human labor quietly training these systems in the background. I wrote a short reflection on that tension here: medium.com/@alfredo-hs/... #AI #Inequality #FutureOfWork

Now do the scam LIS jobs popping up on sites like Indeed that claim to be hiring for librarians but are just AI training.

✊For International Women's Day, I built an interactive map tracking attitudes like "a man earns, a woman stays home." The east-west divide is stark. And as an Italian… yeah, Italy is not doing great 🙁 Built with Claude Code 🤯 → gender-attitudes.netlify.app #IWD2026 #GenderEquality #DataViz

🚨 New substack post AI and the future of social science research Will AI's speed "break" academia? What if AI changes what counts as research output in the first place? Link below: 🔗 substack.com/home/post/p-... #AI #SocialScience #ResearchMethods #AcademicTwitter

🔴 Los objetivos atacados por Israel y Estados Unidos, la respuesta de Terherán y el resto de mapas del ataque lanzado este sábado contra Irán

💰 Is Bitcoin money or myth? 📢 Presenting this Saturday at the 6th Money View Symposium hosted by @ineteconomics.bsky.social Register here: 🔗 fs8.formsite.com/CNZLjX/0acgs... 📍 Online event, free attendance 📅 Saturday, February 28 ⏰ 12:30 New York #PoliticalEconomy #Monetarytheory #Bitcoin

FinTech isn’t upending global finance as much as it’s being harnessed by central bankers to serve a controlled narrative. This paper presents a unified stance among regulators: innovation is welcomed but must be balanced against financial stability. By @alfredo-hs.bsky.social buff.ly/UJly81U

🚨 I just released easytable 2.1.0. It is a small R package I built because I was tired of spending more time fixing regression tables than actually writing. Still in early stages, feedback is much appreciated! Tutorial alfredohs.com/posts/easyta... #RStats #openscience #datascience

Who owns crypto in Europe? Join the FIRSA Academic Roundtable (link below) to learn more about research on FinTech (CBDCs, Crypto, Regulatory Sandboxes) from top scholars. 📣 20 Jan · 10:00 CST (Chicago) / 18:00 EET (Vilnius) zoom.us/j/9443773243... Passcode: 995511

🚨 Academic roundtable on fintech regulation. Join the conversation with Colin Chia (University of Victoria), Ghita Chraibi (University of Virginia), and Vytautas Kuokštis (Vilnius University). 📣 (TUE) 20 Jan · 10:00 CST (Chicago) / 18:00 EET (Vilnius) 🔗: zoom.us/j/9443773243... #fintech #finance

A quick scan of UNGA speeches shows a huge gender gap. From 1946 to 2024 almost all pronoun mentions are he/his. The only real bumps in she/her appear in the few years with a woman as UNGA President 👇 GitHub 🔗: github.com/alfredo-hs/u... #DataViz #TextAnalysis #GenderGap #DataForGood #RStats

New tutorial out! 🚀 Learn how to chat with ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini inside R using the {ellmer} package. Covers safe API setup, workflow integration, and structured outputs for text + images. 👉 alfredohs.com/posts/ellmer... #RStats #LLMs #DataScience

Vibes capitalism ♈ 💰 didn’t start with Musk, it started in 1995. In my new Medium article I argue that the mid-90s shift lines up with shareholder-value culture and the rise of the celebrity CEOs. 🔗 medium.com/@alfredo-hs/... #SP500 #Markets #ShareholderValue #DataVisualization

🇺🇸💔🇪🇺 Trump’s 2025 UN speech was the longest U.S. address on record and the most negative toward Europe. This is the focus of my first Medium article, where I track how Europe appears in U.S. UNGA speeches from 1946–2025 and visualize the results. 📖 Read on Medium: medium.com/@alfredo-hs/...

💡 FinTech = financial technology. ✅ Cheaper, faster, more inclusive finance ❌ New risks for consumers & regulators FinTech is central to the EU’s Digital Finance Strategy. 🔗 EU Digital Finance Strategy: finance.ec.europa.eu/digital-fina... #FinTech #DigitalFinance #EU

Perhaps we're getting closer to that day. Can't help but think of those who said it was "too complicated", who cast doubt on the death tolls, who claimed the images from Gaza couldn't be trusted.

Are you an R user tired of missing out on the LLM craze? In my new tutorial I show how to use OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Gemini models to classify political texts. I connect to the APIs directly from R using reticulate. alhdzsz.net/posts/llms_r... #rstats #dataviz #ai #python #textdata

Zero-shot classification and natural language inference (NLI) offer a powerful way to analyze political texts without labeled training data. This tutorial shows how to classify sentences using a pre-trained transformer model. Google Colab Link: colab.research.google.com/drive/1gCZBy...

I’ve just published a hands-on tutorial on how to perform Named Entity Recognition (NER) using Python’s transformers library from within R via reticulate as part of my @firsa-eu.bsky.social project. #rstats #dataviz #python #ggplot2 #tidytuesday #nlp #ner firsa.eu/posts/ner_re...

Total *number* of valid resident permits in the EU *by reason* (2023)

First post on Bluesky!

This map is art! Source: https://buff.ly/3V0rRSV

I had so much fun giving this vintage map of Europe a fresh twist by adding exaggerated relief! The original map comes from the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection. Want to learn how to bring old maps back to life? Check out my tutorial here: youtu.be/0HFEQU-ELKk

If you recently found a romantic (heterosexual) partner in the US and you haven't met through an online platform you are part of a minority. Source: buff.ly/3NoN05y