New Working Paper with Micah Baum and Joaquin Endara: Students tend to become more liberal during college. We study whether individual faculty make their students more liberal. We find no evidence that faculty affect student partisanship. Working Paper: edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1538 1/

Do Faculty Affect Student Partisanship?

We study whether Democratic college professors make their students more liberal. We link voter data to salary records from 33 state flagships and show that faculty skew Democratic, especially in the h...

edworkingpapers.com

I’m excited to share a new paper in Nature that shows how large language models launder the strategic rhetoric of authoritarian states. Paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... A thread.

New paper in Nature. The more a government controls its domestic media, the more it dominates AI training data, the more pro-regime outputs we get from AI. By scraping the open web, LLMs are unwittingly laundering state-coordinated narratives into seemingly objective answers.

And another Quarto announcement; I've alluded to it before, but we're making it "official". We've started work on Quarto 2. The blog post has an overview: quarto.org/docs/blog/po... We'll share more in future blog posts, but here's what you can expect from the Quarto 2 dev effort: (1/)

What’s next: Quarto 2 – Quarto

We’ve started working on quarto-dev/q2, a full rewrite of Quarto in Rust.

quarto.org

we have a new paper in the April issue of Political Psychology. in this (admittedly quite lovely) new paper, @stephenvaisey.com, @pablobellode.bsky.social and I make a simple point: using panel data to understand belief change is very hard. we highlight an empirical intractability in the process:

GitHub hits CTRL-Z, decides it will train its AI with user data after all

GitHub hits CTRL-Z, decides it will train its AI with user data after all

As of April 24 you'll be feeding the Octocat unless you opt out Microsoft's GitHub next month plans to begin using customer interaction data – "specifically inputs, outputs, code snippets, and associated context" – to train its AI models.…

go.theregister.com

I made an app. play.google.com/store/apps/d... Nearby Glasses is here to warn you when smart glasses are nearby. I hope it's useful for someone. Nearby Glasses's open source, free and rather simple github.com/yjeanrenaud/... It's also downloadable outside the Play Store. iOS port is in the making

Are our evaluations actually measuring any stable properties of LLMs? 🧵

We recently updated R Basics, our introductory workshop about research computing in R! 🎉 The reader (a mini-textbook) is here: ucdavisdatalab.github.io/workshop_r_b...

R Basics

Reader for UC Davis DataLab’s R Basics workshop series.

ucdavisdatalab.github.io

THE SWITHEROO Hey, I have a new WP out now on @socarxiv.bsky.social ! In the paper, I study the full network of partnerships in Norway since 1967 up to today. I examine the general structure of the partnerships network, and the existence of a specific type of network: the partner switcheroo. 1/x

Jacob Hibel and I have organized an upcoming conference on AI and Social Inequality, which will be held on 3/17 at the UC Student and Policy Center in Sacramento. This event is open to social scientists, computer scientists, and the policy community. poverty.ucdavis.edu/event/artifi...

Artificial Intelligence and Social Inequality Conference - Center for Poverty and Inequality Research

The UC Davis Center for Poverty & Inequality Research is pleased to announce our upcoming conference,  Artificial ...

poverty.ucdavis.edu

The Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association is hosting a pre-conference here at City College (in our FiDi division)! Our call for abstracts is open until April 1, 2026. asaskat.com/skattoday/

2026 Pre-Conference

Science, Knowledge and Technology Today: Meeting the Moment, Engendering Just Futures The Science, Knowledge & Technology (SKAT) section of the American Sociological Association (ASA) will host…

asaskat.com

Now out in the American Sociological Review We present the first large-scale assessment of the structure and evolution of temporalities expressed in U.S. climate change news coverage (2000 to 2021). For this, we analyzed more than 23,000 statements about climate change effects and actions. 🧵 1/

🧵on my new paper "Synthetic personas distort the structure of human belief systems" w Roberto Cerina I'm v excited about... 🚨 Do synthetic samples look like human samples? We compare 28 LLMs to the 2024 General Social Survey (GSS) to find out + develop host of diagnostics...

NEW: A hobbyist has created Nearby Glasses, an app that warns you if someone close by is wearing smart glasses. 404 Media spoke to the creator who said he was inspired by our coverage that uncovers how men are wearing Meta's Ray-Bans to covertly film massage parlor workers.

This App Warns You if Someone Is Wearing Smart Glasses Nearby

The creator of Nearby Glasses made the app after reading 404 Media's coverage of how people are using Meta's Ray-Bans smartglasses to film people without their knowledge or consent. “I consider it to ...

404media.co

If Odo converted to Judaism he would have to be liquid on Shabbat

Well this story blew up. Went to the front page of reddit, hacker news, Gizmodo. People donated thousands of dollars to the legal fund of Jeff Sovern, who dismantled 13 Flock surveillance cameras. The response was near-universal enthusiasm for the project of smashing invasive, exploitative tech.

Brian Merchant@bcmerchant.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Across the US, people fed up with Flock cameras surveilling their communities, and with local governments that are often unwilling to listen to concerns over privacy violations and ICE data sharing practices, are taking matters into their own hands—and tearing them down.

Oh amassing large enough datasets with provenance for language model training is totally doable. Just when you do that you feel lonely (and unpaid) as people don’t really care.

Emily M. Bender@emilymbender.bsky.social · 6mo ago

What we argued in Stochastic Parrots, however, was that you can get those benefits of the transformer architecture without ammassing datasets too large to collect with care (meaning consentfully, intentionally, and with the ability to document what's in the data). >>

LLM cloud inference dominates usage, but should it? Local models and accelerators have improved massively over recent years. Perfect routing to best local model "reduce energy consumption by 80.4%, compute by 77.3%, and cost by 73.8% versus cloud-only deployment" arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07885

Yesterday, those who teach Intro to Sociology at Florida colleges (as opposed to universities) received a ready-made curriculum from the state and were ordered to teach it. Yes, you read that correctly. The *state* is enforcing a curriculum on college profs, complete w/ the following restrictions:

Here's a little working paper with Marshall Taylor and Sanuj Kumar: Selecting Language Models for Social Science arxiv.org/abs/2601.10926 Thoughts welcome!

📢 In this Social Forces article, I introduce occupational elitism as a novel measure of social closure: the share of upper-class background workers within an occupation. Its consequences for earnings stratification can be examined using a social closure theory lens. 🔓 doi.org/10.1093/sf/s...

Why does a worse candidate win? Or an inferior song dominate? New article with @alexgelas.bsky.social, @pantelispa.bsky.social & Gaël Le Mens. We show that often once A becomes even slightly more popular than B, people choose A much more often. www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

I’m looking for three PhD students for my new ERC project, starting 1 September. The goal is to understand how firms shape inequality in workers’ careers—using population registers. Please spread the word! Deadline is March 8, more info here (see projects 4-6): ics-graduateschool.nl/vacancies/

Andrej Karpathy is at It again microgpt share.google/WZbks45IS2DV...

Here's a little working paper with Marshall Taylor and Sanuj Kumar: Selecting Language Models for Social Science arxiv.org/abs/2601.10926 Thoughts welcome!

📢WORK! At the Sociology department of @utrechtuniversity.bsky.social we are hiring a postdoc who will work on applications of AI in sociological research. Join our vibrant-yet-cohesive research community doing cutting-edge research. Please share or apply! www.uu.nl/en/organisat...

Postdoctoral researcher on applications of AI in sociological research

Are you able to lead sociological research into the AI age?

uu.nl

About 10 years ago, I set out to better understand the drivers of radicalization and deradicalization into white supremacy. Work from our endeavors is starting to come out, and I am no longer concerned about sharing it. I want to share the findings from one of these studies, published last March. 🧵