New FIRSA policy brief! 🏛️ Regulatory sandboxes are spreading across Europe, but their lessons are hard to compare and reuse. We propose a common reporting framework and joint thematic calls to turn experimentation into shared regulatory learning. dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...

A great start to #ECPRGC26 in Kraków! Yesterday I co-chaired “The Political Economy of FinTech Disruptions” with Amy Verdun and presented a paper on central-bank narratives of fintech. Many thanks to Robert Csehi, the panellists and everyone who joined us!

Just published in JOSS: 'DocuScope Corpus Analysis & Concordancer: A Streamlit Application for Rhetorical and Linguistic Text Analysis' https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.10418

📄 Paper + LaTex Beamer → 👨‍🦳💾 I made a Quarto + RevealJS AI skill that transforms papers into pretty and modern slides effortlessly. Just copy the GitHub repo or paste the url to your AI agent of choice! alfredohs.com/blog/quarto_... #Quarto #RevealJS #RStats #AcademicSky

We're hiring a DevOps Engineer, Newcastle or fully remote. Deploying and maintaining Posit products for clients across AWS, Azure, GCP and on-prem, with Terraform and CI/CD behind it. 2+ years, full-time. Details and how to apply: jumping-rivers.welcomekit.co/jobs/devops-... #DevOps #Hiring

If you think you need to brush up on Homer before seeing The Odessey you are dead wrong! You also need to read Cline's "1177 B.C. The Year Civilization Collapsed"... #SeaPeoples

New FIRSA preprint 📄 Why do some European regulators adopt FinTech sandboxes while others choose different tools? Choosing Not to Experiment finds that non-adoption follows a clearer institutional logic than adoption. Early comments welcome. doi.org/10.33774/aps...

Choosing Not to Experiment: Regulatory Sandbox Adoption and Policy Instrument Choice in Europe

Regulatory sandboxes are widely read as signals of innovation-friendly financial regulation and as evidence of regulatory modernity. Yet only eleven of thirty EU and EEA jurisdictions operate one. Thi...

doi.org

🐵 💵 Monkeys can trade, bargain, remember favours, and learn what a token buys. Yet they never developed money. I wrote about the infamous Yale “monkey brothel” and what it reveals about a harder question. When does a token become money? alfredohs.substack.com/p/no-monkey-... #EconSky

No Monkey Business

What Yale's capuchin experiments reveal about where money actually comes from.

alfredohs.substack.com

For years, serious research presentations required an ugly LaTeX Beamer template. 🤮 Those days are over. 📊 I made a small AI skill for turning papers into Quarto and RevealJS presentations. Link to post below: alfredohs.com/blog/quarto_... #Quarto #RevealJS #AIAgents #AcademicTwitter

🚨 New Tutorial! A practical walkthrough for deploying an R Shiny app on Google Cloud Run, starting from a working app, a Dockerfile and a GitHub repository. 🔗 firsa.eu/posts/cloud_... #RStats #Shiny #GoogleCloud #OpenScience

📢 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

Building Research Dashboards with R and Shiny

YouTube video by FIRSA (MSCA-Horizon Project)

youtube.com

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

Building Research Dashboards with R and Shiny

Free online webinar Tuesday 12 May 2026, 18:30 CEST (Vilnius) A practical introduction to building research dashboards with R and Shiny for researchers, PhD students, analysts, and other R users inte...

forms.gle

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

Dollar Signs and Portents

In the Simpsons episode “Bart to the Future” (S11E17) a Native American shaman shows Bart a vision of his future as a warning for his misdeeds.

alfredohs.substack.com

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

What happens after AI is done farming our expertise?

I was left unsettled after reading The Verge’s recent feature on Mercor and the growing market for expert training data. The piece explains…

medium.com

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

Josh Dzieza@joshdzieza.bsky.social · 6mo ago

AI companies are paying screenwriters, lawyers, and other white-collar professionals to produce the training data needed to automate their jobs. I spoke with more than 30 workers about conditions inside this fast-growing and extremely secretive new gig economy.

✊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

www.nytimes.com/2026/03/08/b...

A Crypto Coin Is Gobbling Up U.S. Treasuries

nytimes.com

🚨 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

Los mapas del ataque de Israel y Estados Unidos y la respuesta de Irán | Especial

Tras los bombardeos en varias ciudades de la República Islámica, han sido golpeadas las bases norteamericanas en Kuwait, Qatar, Emiratos Árabes y Bahréin

social.elpais.com

💰 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

(PDF) Narratives of FinTech: The Political Economy of Disruptive Discourse

PDF | In policy discourse, financial technology (FinTech) is commonly framed as a challenge between fostering innovation and safeguarding financial... | Find, read and cite all the research you need…

researchgate.net