Mike Thompson-Brusstar
@mthompsonbrusstar.com
history and bureaucracy in the sinosphere | mthompsonbrusstar.com
I'm hiring an Associate Director for the Center for Qualitative & Multi-Method Inquiry: www.sujobopps.com/postings/114... Run IQMR, work on QDR, help run events around methods @maxwellsu.bsky.social - great for recent MA or PhD interested in alt-ac 1/2
Associate Director, Center for Qualitative and Multi-Method Inquiry (CQMI)
Work collaboratively with the Director of the Center for Qualitative and Multi-Method Inquiry (CQMI). Lead the planning and logistics for the annual Institute for Qualitative and Multi-method Research...
sujobopps.com
every single thing i learn about how the UN online archival materials are organized takes me a step closer to madness
do I know any fellow sickos who can find issues of the International Journal of Government Auditing from BEFORE the ProQuest ABI/INFORM Global coverage (which starts in 1988)?
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo... history, not sociology. apologies.
Poverty of the Imagination
Explores the history of the “science of development” during the Cold War and how experts across the social sciences tried to create the tools to address the problem of poverty across Latin America.In ...
press.uchicago.edu
Mike Thompson-Brusstar@mthompsonbrusstar.com · last wk.wasn't there a sociology (?) book about development and politics (?) in latin america (?) that was coming out soon or just came out (?) that used ford or carnegie archives (??) am i crazy?
wasn't there a sociology (?) book about development and politics (?) in latin america (?) that was coming out soon or just came out (?) that used ford or carnegie archives (??) am i crazy?
because i have no self control i have started studying the auditors and boy howdy. these guys are not ok.
anyway this was my slide about the turn away from networks, enjoy it
what methods are people using for studying agenda setting/taking in text data lately? vectors + cosine similarity seems … not right. topic prevalence seems fraught and also maybe conceptually distinct. bracketing llm-coded pairs for now. surely someone smarter than me has thought about this?
CCDI: OuYang Weimin is under disciplinary investigation. They held the position of Deputy Secretary of the Party Committee and President at the National Development Bank (NDK). 19 July 2026.
you learn so much about the kind of things you can and can’t do with a dataset during the wrangling. the pain is the pain of learning. it is productive friction. this might be the hill I die on.
Mike Thompson-Brusstar@mthompsonbrusstar.com · 3w agoi am so worried about datasets produced by people LLMing their way through the wrangling
I’m going to make this all about me: you NEED to be paying attention to state and local Republican officials and foreign policy because it does matter. Really! Here’s my very recent article on Republicans going after state higher ed links with China academic.oup.com/fpa/article/...
Degrees of Rivalry: U.S. Paradiplomacy and the Weaponization of Education Policy against Japan and China
Abstract. Both education and subnational governments have been stereotyped as promoting cooperation and soft power in international relations. In 2023, how
academic.oup.com
Matt Novak@paleofuture.bsky.social · 4w agoMarsha Blackburn's new ad is so racist that it makes me wonder if mainstream Republicans could have gotten away with something like this back in the 1980s or 90s.
Read the proposed justification and rebut it too, if you can. IANAL, but my read of the proposal is that they argue that altering/removing these programs would do is reduce “administrative burden,” which of course is an abuse of the term as they are talking about ED, not applicants.
Tim Longman 🏳️🌈@timlongman.bsky.social · 4w agoThe Department of Education has now officially submitted proposals to eliminate International Education and Fulbright Hays programs, which have funded thousands of students and scholars to study languages and conduct research abroad. I encourage you to make public comments and contact your reps.
Things get interesting when we ask about the likelihood of Japan coming to aid Taiwan in the event of a conflict. Here we see a somwhat more familiar patern of partisan breakdown, but it is not nearly as polarizing as you might think! KMT&TPP are largely split on the question!
New working paper With Torben Johansen and @ChristianVedel It's on a methodological issue that we think is crucial for the discipline of economic history: Whenever we use machine learning tools in our workflow, they can introduce structural bias. So, what should we do?
Is there a good, comparative-informed political science book on the American Revolution?
it was 80F (27C) when I left the house to walk the dog at ~7:30AM today, and >80% humidity. seems hot, to me, for Connecticut
today’s project turning (1) into (2) into (3) so eventually it can be (4)
My first post here! Happy to report my @universitypress.cambridge.org element Rethinking Political Meritocracy is out and FREE to download until July 6! www.cambridge.org/core/element...
big news. procuratorate-initiated public interest legislation is veeeeeery interesting (have been following for a while) but also procurement reform! administration sickos rejoice!
𝙉𝙋𝘾 𝙊𝙗𝙨𝙚𝙧𝙫𝙚𝙧@npcobserver.com · last mo.NEW POST – Chinese Legislature Seeks Public Comment on 8 Bills: Financial Regulation, Procuratorate-Initiated Public Interest Litigation, Procurement Reform & More https://npcobserver.com/2026/06/26/china-npc-consultation-procurement-bidding-finance-lawyer-pboc-law/
Resurfacing online to mention: my book on the history of Speech Rec, NLP, and data-driven AI is coming out in a couple of weeks! Just got my author's copy from @uchicagopress.bsky.social and it finally feels real! press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...
Divination Engines
A revealing and surprising origin story, showing how attempts to render human speech and language computable led from the era of big data to today’s AI. Since the advent of computers, society has fant...
press.uchicago.edu
My question here is: while many of us paying attention to ML (but, speaking for myself, not “of ML”), have been wrong directionally, investors have not. They pour more and more money into the research and development of these tools, it seems.
Ted Underwood@tedunderwood.com · last mo.Yeah, it's not that a small group of people were wrong. Most of us have been wrong -- repeatedly, in the same way. In that context, doubling down on 2020-era skepticism is ... definitely a choice.
In a new paper, “The Safety Tether” (Governance), Timothy Hildebrandt and I analyze all ~800k NGO registrations in China. We argue that control of civil society is like a safety tether: the center sets the tether’s length; localities decide how tautly to hold it. doi.org/10.1111/gove...
doi.org
Illiberal Law and Development by Susan H. Whiting Explains how China achieved transformative economic development without secure property rights and regime durability despite conflict. 📚 https://cup.org/4dZ4WSr
I've been offline more than usual because of paper and grant deadlines plus work travel, but I'm back with my first real newsletter today! Click for rambling about infrastructure, benchmarks, Babylonian tablets, and more.
Dispatch: Humanistic AI, OCR, and Hugging Face
In which I reflect on the a recent trip to Chicago, overview the state of OCR for humanities data, and fangirl over Hugging Face infrastructure.
field-notes.leaflet.pub
Are you a grad student working on politics around data centers? Get in touch with @johncluverius.bsky.social !!
John Cluverius@johncluverius.bsky.social · 2mo agoIf you are writing a dissertation prospectus already on this and would like some survey data or free survey time, lmk, especially if you're looking at the state and local politics angle