Our new JCMC paper - led by Hsuen-Chi Chiu - looks at privacy attitudes when chatting with AI companions. Based on interviews with 15 chatbot users, we argue that there is a paradox - people trust their AI friends but distrust the corporations that run them! academic.oup.com/jcmc/article...

Chatting with confidants or corporations? Privacy management with AI companions

Abstract. AI companion chatbots feel like intimate confidants but exist as part of corporate data systems. Drawing on Communication Privacy Management (CPM

academic.oup.com

Cabo Verde just put in one of the best performances in WC history. What a game!

Looked like a foul for Cape Verde right at the end there

I wanted to get some ice cream, but for some reason just couldn't make it all the way into the store.

Really nice keynote at Sunbelt by @davidlazer.bsky.social He showed that peripherality of communities in the past predicts a lot about current trust in science, health outcomes, and political orientation.

a little over a year ago elon was dancing around having successfully cut off USAID, which caused ~600,000 people to die including ~400,000 children). now he is our first trillionaire. hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-s....

USAID shutdown has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

The Trump administration’s decision to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths from infectious diseases and malnutrition, accord...

hsph.harvard.edu

What a half of soccer!! #USMNT

"I switched all the labels on my wife's Spice Rack." "I'm not in trouble yet, but the thyme is cumin."

It’s truly astonishing to see how comprehensively the US government is tearing down every part of the system that has made it up until now a world-leading power in science, research, and technological development. The entire world will suffer from this wanton destruction.

Dan Vergano@danvergano.bsky.social · 2mo ago

White House proposes new rules giving political appointees final approval of research grants These proposed Office of Management and Budget regulations would render the federal research grant review process opaque www.scientificamerican.com/article/whit...

Is that butter? No it's ghee. Oh thanks for clarifying

One of the worst things about being a professor right now is not being able to fully celebrate great work by students without suspecting they used an LLM.

FWIW, I don’t think the major problem in my field, or related ones, is that people need to move faster & produce more. I read a lot of papers as part of the job, and I’m increasingly convinced we’d benefit from fewer papers and better ones, not more mediocre work produced ever more “efficiently.”

One thing that galls me about AI slop is the total reign of disingenuousness. A person "wrote" a detailed, impassioned appeal of their terrible AI slop paper's rejection. I explained why it was rejected. /1

📢 #PhD students & #HCI faculty — we want to hear from you! @mirandawei.bsky.social @samanthadalal.bsky.social @mariannealq.bsky.social and I are studying how GenAI use is impacting the #research advisor-advisee relationship. Sign-up link for a 45 min interview, virtual or in-person, in the thread 🧵

The NSF 2027 budget has noted that they will close out the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science Program (SBE). This is not a good thing. nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/FY-202...

Based a lot on @duncanjwatts.bsky.social, @msalganik.bsky.social, and collaborators' research

Jeremy Foote@jeremydfoote.com · 4mo ago

For my social networks course Claude Code and I vibecoded this app to teach about the unpredictability of virality in online social networks. can-s26.jeremydfoote.com/activities/v... It shows 4 Bluesky posts and has you predict which one was most popular. Give it a try!

For my social networks course Claude Code and I vibecoded this app to teach about the unpredictability of virality in online social networks. can-s26.jeremydfoote.com/activities/v... It shows 4 Bluesky posts and has you predict which one was most popular. Give it a try!

Statistical Rethinking 2026 is done: 20 new lectures emphasizing logical and critical statistical workflow, from basics of probability theory to causal inference to reliable computation to sensitivity. It's all free, made just for you. Lecture list and links: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

Just read this great piece - paulgp.com/2026/03/16/r... by @paulgp.com and it got me thinking. It feels like there is a lot of moral(?) ambiguity and ambivalence around the use of LLMs for academics. So far, I've avoided having LLMs do basically any of my research writing ...

New paper! Conversations with AI chatbots have been shown to be persuasive across a bunch of contexts. However, most of these studies are short-term and track only changes in attitudes or beliefs. ...

Yes absolutely. And in particular, we desperately need social scientists in the middle of testing and publishing on these methodological questions, for all the reasons Phil and Jeff outline. This is too consequential to leave to CS.

Last year, The Atlantic gave me $10,000 to gamble with. What started as a journalistic gimmick turned into something more... unnerving. My cover story on the online betting boom that's warping sports, culture, politics, and the psyches of millions of young men: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

Submit your work on causality and networks today!

Dean Eckles@eckles.bsky.social · 6mo ago

⚙️ Working at the intersection of causality and networks? We're organizing a satellite event at @netsciconf.bsky.social in Boston on June 1st. The focus is networks science and causal inference. Submit your work by March 10th! causnets.github.io

Super excited to see my first R package `imaginarycss' in CRAN (cran.r-project.org/web/packages...) #R #Network #SNA

imaginarycss: Tools for Studying Imaginary Cognitive Social Structure

Provides functions to measure and test imaginary cognitive social structure (CSS) motifs, which are patterns of perceived relationships among individuals in a social network. Includes tools for calcul...

cran.r-project.org

It’s actually FEWER Misérables

I'm begging my fellow politicians, Illinoisans, and Americans to realize that right now, we aren't fighting over policy or political party. We're fighting over whether we're going to be a country rooted in empathy and kindness — or one rooted in cruelty and rage.

Stop sharing the “our AI agent made up data” reddit story. It is as fake as the AI you think you are critiquing & the people sharing it have done zero due dilligence 🙄🙄🙄🙄

Dr Vanessa@hpsvanessa.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Update: 100% sure it’s fake. Quick google confirms this is a spam account that changes its story regularly and generates viral posts while locking down their reddit profile so you can’t track inconsistencies. Fake fake fake fake fake.

Cool/important job alert: Principal Research Scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation's Research team for the area of knowledge integrity Job posting: job-boards.greenhouse.io/wikimedia/jo...

Principal Research Scientist

Remote

job-boards.greenhouse.io