Sociology's evolving discourse Me and Codex have entered the chat

Sociology's Evolving Discourse

A computational analysis of over a century of sociology journal articles

open.substack.com/pub/thesilve...

This is really quite good. Short and to the point.

Katharine Lake Berz: Canada’s birth rate has fallen to new lows. What’s the best way to encourage people to make babies? Researchers and advocates have long argued that governments should respond to falling fertility, though they do not agree on the best way to do so.

Family-friendly policies include: affordable housing and child care programs, after school care, funding for health care, k-12 and post-secondary education #ONPoli

www.thestar.com/opinion/cont...

From trackers to gummies and CCTV, society has been gripped by sleep hysteria | Alice Gregory We’re obsessing about sleep like never before. But much of the messaging is exaggerated, distorted and unhelpful, asks Royal Holloway Sleep Laboratory co-director Alice Gregory

From trackers to gummies and CCTV, society has been gripped by sleep hysteria | Alice Gregory

Map of Montreal and the surrounding region using a grid of dots to visualize the % of the population that can speak French and English via different colours. Size of dots indicate population density.

recently mapped knowledge of french and english in montreal --

(bit of a tri-variate viz experiment)

higher-res here: jamaps.github.io/maps/montrea...

#montreal #maps #languages #geography

First, assume a strait-opener

Very pleased to see the first article from my PhD thesis published in Planning Theory and Practice.

In the piece, I leverage the concurrent adoption of bicycle equity policies in Mexico City and Toronto to compare how intra-urban differences shape efforts to address infrastructural inequalities.

Govt’s Pride in Place targets areas with economic deprivation and weaker social infrastructure. Yet, our analysis reveals 2 challenges.

We find 430 doubly disadvantaged neighbourhoods in England (home to approx 3.5 million people) are unfunded, incl many ranked as facing the greatest challenges 1/3

I ran a simple model with new public data then used 1 prompt to make ChatGPT guess what the model would produce. With 10 seconds of "thinking," it was very close. The implications of this are catastrophic. The American Sociological Association should do something about this but it doesn't care to
/1

Fascinating that this counts as an unpopular opinion in North America. Turning right on red should be banned outright.

‘You’re killing her!’: Witnesses recount horrific Mission Bay crash where 2-year-old died Bystanders tried to lift an SUV after its driver pinned a mother and child in Mission Bay, say witnesses.

Unpopular opinion but turning right at a red light should not be legal in San Francisco (or anywhere else). Right on red makes horrors like this all too possible. sfstandard.com/2026/03/03/m...

U of T’s Maps and Data Library recently published a blog by Jeff Allen our Data Viz Lead, on a tool he built for viewing historial aerial imagery of Toronto collected from various sources. https://ow.ly/rqu150YfERX

Simulated null distribution for data with a sample size of 100, difference in group means of 5, and a p-value of 0.142

Simulated null distribution of a slope of 0.8 and p-value of 0.002

Finally, we have to decide if the p-value meets an evidentiary standard or threshold that would provide us with enough evidence that we aren’t in the null world (or, in more statsy terms, enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis). There are lots of possible thresholds. By convention, most people use a threshold (often shortened to α) of 0.05, or 5%. But that’s not required! You could have a lower standard with an α of 0.1 (10%), or a higher standard with an α of 0.01 (1%). Statistically significant The p-value is < 0.001 and our threshold for α is 0.05 In a world where there is no relationship between x and y, the probability of seeing a slope of at least 0.901 is < 0.1% Since < 0.001 is less than 0.05, we have enough evidence to say that the slope is statistically significant.

Evidentiary standards When thinking about p-values and thresholds, I like to imagine myself as a judge or a member of a jury. Many legal systems around the world have formal evidentiary thresholds or standards of proof. If prosecutors provide evidence that meets a threshold (i.e. goes beyond a reasonable doubt, or shows evidence on a balance of probabilities), the judge or jury can rule guilty. If there’s not enough evidence to clear the standard or threshold, the judge or jury has to rule not guilty. With p-values: If the probability of seeing an effect or difference (or δ) in a null world is less than 5% (or whatever the threshold is), we rule it statistically significant and say that the difference does not fit in that world. We’re pretty confident that it’s not zero. If the p-value is larger than the threshold, we do not have enough evidence to claim that δ doesn’t come from a world of where there’s no difference. We don’t know if it’s not zero. Importantly, if the difference is not significant, that does not mean that there is no difference. It just means that we can’t detect one if there is. If a prosecutor doesn’t provide sufficient evidence to clear a standard or threshold, it does not mean that the defendant didn’t do whatever they’re charged with†—it means that the judge or jury can’t detect guilt.

I just whipped up this little #QuartoPub site last week that demonstrates how I teach p-values/hyp-testing through simulation both with live OJS and with #rstats, and I think it's super neat! It has examples for diff-in-means, diff-in-props, and regression slopes nullworlds.andrewheiss.com #statsky

Poster showing speakers for the TPN seminar series

The Toronto Population Network @tpn-uoft.bsky.social Seminar Series is happening this semester, with a great line-up, including @lucampesando.bsky.social, Orsola Torrisi, @mdhayward.bsky.social, and @jnobles.bsky.social! Starts next Tuesday. If you're in Toronto please come along!

For social scientists interested in LLMs for text classification/coding, the process here is potentially very helpful (even if you don't use the product itself).

Their core technique: Contradictory Example Training
Their training method: Binocular Labeling

More details in the linked post below.

Announcing spopt-r: spatial optimization for regionalization, facility location, and market analysis in R.

My all-time favorite Python package is PySAL's spopt - and until now, it did not have an R equivalent.

Get started here: walker-data.com/spopt-r

Yo what the fuck short form videos are bad

Short-Form Videos Degrade Our Capacity to Retain Intentions

arxiv.org/pdf/2302.03714

Ht: HowTown

The Cities of Care conference aims to bring together academics, practitioners & decision-makers to deepen interdisciplinary research and foster a richer understanding of water, food and waste systems, thus enhancing pathways between evidence and practice https://ow.ly/R30V50XGAcf

Studying the long-run effects of a large public expansion of pre-primary education in Argentina, from Samuel Berlinski, Guillermo Cruces, Sebastian Galiani, Paul Gertler, and Fabian Gonzalez www.nber.org/papers/w34552

Logo of an image with some threads intersecting.

Today, I launch my Podcast, “Pluriversal Threads,” as a supplement to my book. If you want to know more about the Pluriverse and its relationship with language, communities and our place in the world, I invite you to join me and listen to.
open.spotify.com/show/5qeySLi...

You forgot to load the packages 734 times

Your most loaded package was tidyverse

You got "this package is not available for R version XXXX" 374 times

You hit "remind me later" for R updates 7492 times

Urban greenness in Metro Vancouver in 2025

Urban greenness in Metro Vancouver in 2025

Updated Urban Greenness data out from StatCan is out today, quantifying the "average greenness" on a 250m grid. Data is annual and goes back to 2000 and allows for some comparison (although some caution is advised).

🏛️ ¿Por qué seguimos obsesionados con resucitar ciudades que ya no existen? Lima necesita futuro, no nostalgia. No te pierdas la reflexión de Natalia Sobrevilla.

🧃Clic aquí: tinyurl.com/3vrbyyk4

A List of Things Said to Have Been Ruined by Women

🧵

You sure that's not @utsc.utoronto.ca campus? 😅

Inside the world of Kenya’s ‘shadow scholars’ paid to write essays for UK students Highly educated Kenyans working for essay mills ghostwrite academic work that students pass off as their own

Inside the world of Kenya’s ‘shadow scholars’ paid to write essays for UK students

The right sets the terms of our political discourse in so many ways, one of which is the idea that there isn't enough "debate" and "free speech" on campus.

We need to push back on this. The truth is (speaking for myself as a history prof), I don't really emphasize debate much in my classes/

The biggest sporting event in the world is happening in our backyard. But most New Yorkers will be priced out of watching it live.

Sign our petition calling on FIFA to put game over greed: zohranfornyc.com/gameovergreed

Assistant Professors - Sociology, Faculty of Arts in Calgary, AB, ... Assistant Professors - Sociology, Faculty of Arts in Calgary, AB, ...

JOB ALERT FOR #SOCIOLOGIST: Come work with me. We have FOUR Assistant Professor positions in the Sociology Department at the University of Calgary.

careers.ucalgary.ca/jobs/1672106...

Spherical photo of the interior of a university building. It shows three stories of the building connected through a mix-use wooden staircase and skylights at the top.

Amazing first time teaching @utsc-humangeo.bsky.social in the new Sam Ibrahim building @utsc.utoronto.ca Looking forward to this semester!