Tessera
Folgen

Carl Müller-Crepon

@carlmc.bsky.social

Human, Learner, Voyager, Citizen. Polisci research on the state, development, and conflict. Assistant Professor @ LSE Department of Government. Previously Oxford and ETH Zurich. http://carl.muller-crepon.com/

348 Posts3182 Follower1059 Folgt
Ben Ansell@benansell.bsky.social · 4d ago

Glad someone senior from the sector is pushing back. Labour MPs need to understand the serious real anger from graduates and the people who produce them. And the dangerous financial situation they have allowed to fester, or indeed worsened, in one of Britain’s leading sectors.

Labour has harmed universities as much as Trump, London School of Economics head says

LSE vice-chancellor Larry Kramer points to domestic student fees freeze, international student limits and rise in employers’ national insurance

ft.com

Noah Nathan@nlnathan.bsky.social · 2w ago

Working on this paper was so fun! Excited that it's now out in the world and I hope you can check it out. It builds on broader agendas on the built environment and how space structures social contact from both Paige and I, w/ more info here: paigebollen.com and nlnathan.mit.edu

Paige Bollen

paigebollen.com

American Political Science Review@apsrjournal.bsky.social · 2w ago

From our FirstView: Vernacular Architecture and Grassroots Urban Politics: How Politics Is Embedded in Residential Design by PAIGE BOLLEN and @nlnathan.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1017/S000...

@gquaggiotto.bsky.social · last mo.

"While the terms used to describe fractal patterns often lie in mathematics and semiotics from nature, the settlement patterns in Africa, which are a precursor to these terminologies, are drawn from cultural practices and societal norms" www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/fractals-a...

Fractals and Euclidean Geometry in Pre-colonial African Architecture: A New Perspective

Fractals occupy a prominent place in African geometry and architecture, but they represent only one of several forms of mathematical ordering reflected in African settlement patterns and architecture

africanhistoryextra.com

Isaac Samuel@rhaplord.bsky.social · 4w ago

*not-so-fun fact There is still no authoritative translation of the Ethiopian bible, more than 500 years after the outside world learned about it So it will be long before we get any translations of the hundreds of thousands of African manuscripts discovered in the last 30 yrs

BildBild
Tarik Abou-Chadi@tabouchadi.bsky.social · 2mo ago

It seems a good day to remind people that in the UK 3 times as many people work in Indian restaurants or for McDonalds as in the whole coal and steel industry. 5 times as many are academic staff at universities. If Labour does not understand its electorate, there is no way to appeal to it.

Bild
Tore Wig@torewig.bsky.social · 2mo ago

We're hiring 2 postdocs at @uio.no on my ERC-Cog project on how authoritarian regimes shape scientific knowledge. 3–4 years, U. of Oslo. Deadline: 10 Sept 2026. Great dept., terms, well funded, bustling & green Scandi capital. Apply! 👉 jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/303060/postdoctoral-fello

Postdoctoral Fellow  (303060) | University of Oslo

Job title: Postdoctoral Fellow  (303060), Employer: University of Oslo, Deadline: Thursday, September 10, 2026

jobbnorge.no

Ryan Heuser@ryanheuser.com · 2mo ago

Surprising: frontier models (Claude, ChatGPT, Deepseek V4) produce the most predictable text of any local AI model or human text I've ever tested. Not surprising: Finnegans Wake is off the charts, by far least predictable—Shannon & Lydia Liu proved right—and Hemingway the most predictable human.

Horizontal boxplot comparing information density (BLT 1B bits/char) across 27 text sources, ordered from most compressed (top) to most information-dense (bottom). Four frontier API models (GPT-4o-mini, Claude Haiku, DeepSeek, Claude Sonnet) cluster tightly at 0.85-0.90 bits/char, below Shannon's English rate of 1.0 bits/char marked by a dashed vertical line. Seven local aligned models (red) span a wide range from DeepSeek-7b aligned (0.94) through OLMo aligned (1.43), with most falling between 1.0 and 1.3. Seven base models (green) occupy 1.04-1.50, overlapping substantially with human text. Eight human text sources (blue) range from Hemingway (1.12) and abstracts (1.20) through dream reports (1.24), waking journals (1.26), and Basic English stories (1.39) up to C20 fiction (1.50) and Joyce (2.30). OLMo aligned is a notable outlier among aligned models, with higher information density than its own base model. DeepSeek-7b base (1.04) is unusually low for a base model, sitting near Shannon's threshold alongside Hemingway.Lydia Liu, The Freudian Robot, p. 37: "...interesting questions that his experimental work raises for us is: how does a stochastic view of writing correlate to the received theories of language, literature, and modernism on the one hand and to psychoanalytical speculations about the unconscious on the other? This question is pertinent to our inquiry because many of the earlier modernist literary and psychoanalytical experiments on language, automatic writing, and thought-reading had anticipated Shannon’s Printed English and his “mind-reading machine” in numerous ways. For instance, Shannon cites James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as one of the texts exemplifying the lower threshold of redundancy and higher entropy rate in his stochastic model of Printed English. What makes entropy and its possible linkage with Freud’s Todestrieb (death drive) such an interesting problem for the study of digital media is the ways in which certain ideas migrated into psychoanalysis first and then got into information theory. Furthermore, Freud’s work and psychoanalysis in general may suggest some interesting clues as to the shared theoretical impulses or implicit exchanges among information theory, cybernetics, and modernist literature. Spanning across these moments of broad intellectual confluences is the techne of the unconscious that continually articulates itself to digital writing, machine, and social engineering. We turn next to the invention of Printed English by Shannon and its implications for a theory of digital writing."
Ryan Heuser@ryanheuser.com · 3mo ago

Shannon measured the information rate of English at ~1 bit per character. According to a byte-level LLM measuring next-character predictability in LLM & human text (diaries, abstracts, dreams, fiction), aligned models produce sub-English information rates & LLM text is more predictable than humans'.

Bar chart comparing information density (BLT bits/char) of AI-generated prose versus human text. Shannon's English rate (1.0 bits/char) shown as dashed red line. Aligned OLMo models (SFT, DPO, RLVR) fall below the line at 0.89–0.99 bits/char. The base model sits just above at 1.14. All human text types are higher: waking reports (1.24), abstracts (1.28), dreams (1.32), and fiction (1.49). Alignment compresses model output below the information density of all measured human writing.
Rory Truex@rorytruex.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Universities run on what we might call "integrity tasks"—little pieces of work that are expected to be done honestly, by a person, but with minimal policing and oversight.

Carl Müller-Crepon@carlmc.bsky.social · 3mo ago

So exciting to see my paper "Ethnic Geography and the Colonial Design of Administrative Units in Sub-Saharan Africa" out in @cpsjournal.bsky.social ! Administrative regions and districts are important but why did (colonial) rulers shape them the way they did? A 🧵 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Ethnic Geography and the Colonial Design of Administrative Units in Sub-Saharan Africa - Carl Müller-Crepon, 2026

Subnational administrative units are fundamental to territorial states and their political topography, but we know little about how their borders are designed. ...

journals.sagepub.com

Adam Scharpf@ascharpf.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Thrilled to see Making a Career in Dictatorship featured in The New York Times @nytimes.com My favorite line: “[The book] reads like what you might get if you crossed Hannah Arendt’s ideas about the ‘banality of evil’ with a business school guide on how to get the most out of low performers.”

Actually, Democracy Dies in H.R.

nytimes.com

Adam Scharpf@ascharpf.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Russia, Venezuela, Iran, China, the Sahel region, the United States ... Want to know why state agents carry out brutal repression — or participate in illegal coups? Our new book "Making a Career in Dictatorship" provides answers — it just got published by @academic.oup.com: tinyurl.com/ystwm3tf

Carl Müller-Crepon@carlmc.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Very grateful for this excellent review of our recent book *Nationalism and the Transformation of the State* by Michael Hechter in Perspectives on Politics: doi.org/10.1017/S153...

Nationalism and the Transformation of the State. Border Change and Political Violence in the Modern World. By Lars-Erik Cederman, Luc Girardin, Carl Müller-Crepon, and Yannick I. Pengl. Cambridge: Cam...

Nationalism and the Transformation of the State. Border Change and Political Violence in the Modern World. By Lars-Erik Cederman, Luc Girardin, Carl Müller-Crepon, and Yannick I. Pengl. Cambridge: Cam...

cambridge.org

Melanie Sauter@melinscribe.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Somewhere Bismarck is looking down in confusion as Germany projects power by sending 4,000 pensioners, 12 buffet stations and a TUI loyalty program through the Strait of Hormuz

Marcel Dirsus@marceldirsus.com · 4mo ago

If you think the nuclear-powered supercarrier USS Gerald R. Ford is the most powerful ship in the world, you are wrong. It's actually the German cruise ship Mein Schiff 4 (pictured), which successfully transited the Strait of Hormuz over the weekend