The Call for Proposals #CPSA_ACSP27 is live. ⏰ Nov 10 2026 Meet the colleagues behind next year's programme — and send them your work! 📍 UBC-Vancouver-CANADA|May 26–28 2027 mycpsa-cpsa-acsp.ca/cfp/cfp_index @traceyraney.bsky.social @svallejovera.bsky.social @ryancbriggs.net @randybesco.bsky.social

All academics fantasize of either opening a bakery or escaping to a remote cabin in the mountains

When I was visiting my mom she gave me some bottles of alcohol that she was never going to drink, and I just opened this one and turns out it’s maple syrup

Nice place to take an APSA panel

This is clever

Institute for Replication@i4replication.bsky.social · 2w ago

🧵 New DP from I4R co-director Lester Lusher, with Sonia Ale, Md Shafiqui Islam, Huda Osman & Jacob Stenstrom (Pitt): "When Samples Shape Significance." What happens when you re-estimate published results using fresh draws of the same data? Some evidence from Google Trends!

It has been embarrassing reading this and similar critiques, because they accuse the report of not doing things that it manifestly does do (like adjusting for time to accumulate citations). I hope everyone involved is more careful in their regular work. You hurt your causes by flubbing this hard.

Alex Usher@alexusherhesa.bsky.social · 2w ago

Here is my letter to the MacDonald Laurier Institute on the subject of their appalling research. Use as you will. I recommend sending something of your own, though. And if you know anyone associated with MLI - and Board directors, say - send it to them, too.

The haskaps finally came in at my parent’s place! We made jam and haskap sour cocktails and a haskap pie is in the oven.

It's quite neat that the 1954 Salk Polio trial in the US had both a "matched" observational arm and a conventional RCT arm. There is an R package with the relevant data (PolioTrials in HistData) as well as an article about it by Paul Meier (webpages.math.luc.edu/~mgb/courses...).

Incredible. When E—n M—k & his crew obliterated USAID in a weekend, they deleted a vast trove of publicly-funded knowledge: the Development Experience Clearinghouse. A Canadian high school student (!) happened to have downloaded the entire thing for a project. AidData has now posted it for all.

Before reimagining development data, remember what we’ve learned

Why we’re publishing a free, searchable, and ungated archive featuring a quarter-century of USAID evaluation reports.

aiddata.org

I enjoyed this Asterisk article about taste: asteriskmag.com/issues/15/wh... My favourite little-known example of outstanding taste is cookbook editor Maria Guarnaschelli. Just while working at Norton her authors won 13 James Beard awards & at least 13 IACPs! Here are some of the books she edited:

Why We Like Things

What Silicon Valley gets wrong about taste.

asteriskmag.com

I’m late to this but the ninja creami is viral for good reason. It’s wild how good of a product you can get out of it, including vegan ice cream (almond milk + coconut cream).

The food court in the Mississauga flea market has incredible food. We got Malaysian but just in general it seems very strong. maps.app.goo.gl/KkoR12QxjZsN...

We are seeing similar at RP. It's not just AI. Also a huge increase in Chinese social science. Which is often very good. But AI slop is flooding the system. One author with 30 submissions in a month... now they "could" be super productive.... or it could be AI slop.

Ryan Briggs@ryancbriggs.net · 2mo ago

Spoke to an editor of a good social science journal who reported submission volume is now 400% higher than during Covid. He entirely blames AI.

Spoke to an editor of a good social science journal who reported submission volume is now 400% higher than during Covid. He entirely blames AI.

I think he deserved more than a dark corner in the Guinness museum

Homemade ice kacang. I probably made lots of moderate execution errors, but it was good enough that the kids happily crushed it.

I won’t get into the data or analysis here (yet), but I’m very confident that lower ranked journals do not publish more null results than higher ranked ones. I looked across 11 disciplines and all have this (lack of a) pattern.

This was a fun paper. We analyze results from a global survey of development studies (DS) profs and find that the income group of their country doesn't explain much about their views on DS. Instead, their discipline is huge.

Development Studies Association @devcomms.bsky.social · 3mo ago

In a new @eadi.bsky.social reflection paper, @ryancbriggs.net & @andypsumner.bsky.social, @kings-sga.bsky.social explore what drives deep disagreements in development studies—and point to the “disciplinary baggage” of PhD training. Read more: buff.ly/ASH1bL9

New blog post: Evaluating Dr. Cuddy’s Claim that the Debunking of Power Posing is a Myth. daniellakens.blogspot.com/2026/05/eval... On an AI generated description of a non-existent study, incorrectly citing findings from studies, and the importance of scientific criticism.

Evaluating Dr. Cuddy’s Claim that the Debunking of Power Posing is a Myth

In this blog post I will analyse the arguments that Dr. Amy Cuddy provided in a blog post “The "Power Posing Was Debunked" Myth: What the Re...

daniellakens.blogspot.com

You’ve got to be clafoutis maxxing

@prachisrivas.bsky.social you would love the number of people wearing Habs jerseys at this Toronto Blue Jays game

In the Fall I'll be teaching a new MA-level methods course entitled "Applied Statistical Evaluation of Development Projects". It will be 12 weeks, in R, and aimed around RCT evaluations. This is a draft outline. What am I missing? What seems redundant?

An interesting EA forum post that is an anonymized slack chat about GiveWell and EA-style CE analysis: "across EA cost-effectiveness analyses, much more typically goes toward estimating the effect than estimating the costs." forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ru3wyS...

Global Health Charity Founders on GiveWell, Evidence Action, and M+E — EA Forum

The following is a lightly edited and anonymized transcript of a discussion among charity founders, researchers, and funders in Ambitious Impact’s Sl…

forum.effectivealtruism.org

I'll be teaching a grad methods class focused on experiments in the fall for a development studies dept. I'm looking for published development RCTs. Ideally they would have: 1. replication packages in R, or 2. fairly simple code I could rewrite in R. Anyone have recommendations?

I'm hiring for In Development's first not-me hire. Help shape the future of development journalism; edit pieces that do serious cost-effectiveness analysis AND have jokes. Up to $90k USD, fully remote worldwide. indevelopmentmag.com/jobs/

We can estimate the resource cost of solving the Erdos problem. The calculations below seem reasonable, so using the best public estimates we have, it took 0.6–6.3 kWh of electricity & 3–31L of water Equivalent to < 3 almonds worth of water & the electricity equivalent of 2-20 miles of EV driving

Ryan Briggs@ryancbriggs.net · 4mo ago

Any idea how many cheeseburgers worth of water it took to solve this?

“Stochastic parrots”

Timothy Gowers@wtgowers.bsky.social · 4mo ago

OpenAI's claim that this is a central conjecture in discrete geometry is not an exaggeration. This will I think be looked back on as the first time that AI solved a major mathematics problem (defined as a problem that all experts in some subfield had thought about). openai.com/index/model-...

June 2024: The latest general-purpose LLMs could not count the r's in strawberry. July 2025: The latest general-purpose LLMs get gold in the International Math Olympiad. May 2026: The latest general-purpose LLM solve an 80 year old problem, one of the "best-known questions in combinatorial geometry"

OpenAI has used a "general purpose reasoning model" to disprove that the square grid type construction is the best solution to the planar unit distance problem. I am sure the "AI is completely useless" crowd will now change their ways, right?

An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

An OpenAI model solved the 80-year-old unit distance problem, disproving a major conjecture in discrete geometry and marking a milestone in AI-driven mathematics.

openai.com