Can LLMs flip coins in their heads?
When prompted to "Flip a fair coin" 100 times, the heads to tails ratio drifts far from 50:50. LLMs can understand what the target probability should be, but generating outputs that faithfully follow a given distribution is a separate problem.
pub.sakana.ai/ssot
Interesting paper by our @cwts.nl PhD candidate Soohong Eum about challenges around the availability of data about research funding in South Korea, focusing on Web of Science and OpenAlex data as well as data from South Korea's National Science & Technology Information Service (NTIS).
Guy I’m sponsoring very quietly releases #rstats package I’ve been wanting for the last couple of years.
pkg.yihui.org/gglite/doc/g...
Guess he shut up and took my money. 🤣🤣🤣
OpenAlex (openalex.org) is rapidly closing the gap in funding metadata coverage. Re-using a dataset of NWO-funded papers we find they're now on par with Scopus and just slightly behind Dimensions.
Full analysis with @hldejonge.bsky.social : 🔗 bmkramer.github.io/SesameOpenSc...
Finishing up conference reviews & here's my take:
sociology (the study of social human behavior) has never been more popular but it's mostly being done outside of Sociology departments and Sociology journals
sociology is thriving while Sociology is dying, and both fields are worse off for it
Apparently, collaborating with AI impairs unassisted performance because it optimises on short-term goals not long-term. The frame is the trick; you can't actually 'collaborate' with a synthetic token machine at all. Myth-making masquerading as critique ⚠️
arxiv.org/abs/2604.04721
Sociology's Evolving Discourse
A computational analysis of over a century of sociology journal articles
open.substack.com/pub/thesilve...
The Trump administration is seeking to cut more than half of the science foundation budget.
A NSF budget proposal “would dissolve the agency’s Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences directorate”
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Why are we still repeating the same rhetoric ("disturbing") after over a decade as if we haven't learned anything in the meantime? Metascience seems so enamored with its original anchors that it can't have enough of repeating them.
Středověk neskončil…
Glad it may still be of use!
The downfall of *Theory and Society* is a networked event. A nicely orchestrated campaign. Thread of some of the links. 1/
Closing classic Greek at Syracuse University is something else man
It’s not just that there is no requirement, but ASA prohibits any requirement. This is why I am no longer an ASA member and won’t serve on ASA journal editorial boards.
I have an Excel joke it's really good most people rate it Oct 10
“Always Has Been” meme: two astronauts floating above Earth. A surprised astronaut says, “Wait, so R is also for qualitative work?” while another astronaut behind them points a gun and says, “Always has been.”
Merci! Voilà le plan après RQDA
Wowow, cela ressemble exactement à ce que je cherche depuis que RQDA est down. Thanks @hlageek.bsky.social
Thanks! Any feedback will be much appreciated.
Hi Pierre, don't forget to give @requal.bsky.social a try... I also have plans for requal2, which should integrate with R more directly and provide a platform for plug-in extensions. That being said, Taguette and the LibreQDA fork are very cool projects, no doubt.
Matt Grawitch sketches what a peer review system which embraces AI would look like
mattgrawitch.substack.com/p/no-ai-was-used-in-the-...
"Why the academic obsession with human-only peer review protects bias, inconsistency, and anonymous reviewer soapboxes"
🗺️ Adrià Plazas, Nicandro Bovenzi, Nicolau Duran, Enric Fuster and Ismael Rafols offer a new way of visualising the global funding landscape by mapping 82,000 EU research and innovation grants using semantic analysis rather than publication citations.
👉 www.leidenmadtrics.nl/articles/the...
The Straits Times did a nice piece on our centre (@cssh-nus.bsky.social), which will be officially launched this coming Wednesday, with @mmvty.bsky.social as our keynote speaker. Looking forward!
www.straitstimes.com/singapore/pa...
1. Kevin Gross and I have a new paper out today PLOS Biology.
We used economic models based around screening games and the market for unpaid labor to highlight a meltdown cycle threatening peer review.
Dear Digital Humanists, you are all invited to the EADH 2026 Conference! We are meeting in September, in Kraków, Poland.
Mark the important dates in your calendars:
📆 8.02: submission deadline
📆 15-19.09: the conference
Read more: eadh2026.confer.uj.edu.pl
✈️ See you in Kraków?
My 11-year-old sitting with her pile of Halloween candy, sorting it into a bar graph
We have progressed from data collection to data analysis.
🔥🔥 New article in PlosOne 🔥🔥
Citation behaviour isn’t a meritocracy.
It’s shaped by social ties and topic overlap.
Let’s rethink how we evaluate research impact.
journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...
I'm an #RStats users, but I know some of the R 📦s I use have reticulate + Python under the hood. Thank you @python.org for standing up for everyone in your community. I've made a small donation, hopefully a lot of small $$ can help fund what's needed.
Very nice post about how the concept of innovation made it to the forefront of contemporary economics, even earning its proponents the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences.
