“Another way to look at this is that billionaires have joined a war on professional administrative class of public servants precisely because of their proximity to formal mechanisms of accountability.”
That part! Everything from documentation to compliance mechanisms to whistleblowing is a threat.
For a project I started nearly 17 years ago, today I submitted a revised manuscript, responding to a R&R decision from a journal. Pretty good feeling! 🥂 I'll add that the work genuinely improved for all the time it took to get here #slowwork
View over the canal in Nyhavn, Copenhagen
Thrilled to announce CS2Nordics: the First Nordic Conference on Computational Social Science. Copenhagen, September 21-22, 2026.
We invite all CSS researchers in the Nordics as well as in the international research community to submit 2-page abstracts by June 19: nosocss.org/conference.h....
Woohoo, here's my essay with my fav co-author on 30,000 fellowship wins across the Guggenheim, Stanford CASBS, NAEd, National Humanities Center, RSF visiting scholar, and Harvard Radcliffe.
Spoiler: it's the people working at prestigious universities
www.publicbooks.org/who-gets-gug...
Last day to submit abstracts to the International Conference on the Science of Science & Innovation! April 6, 11:59 PM AoE!
I might add: “not understanding what you’re doing” doesn’t require AI — plenty of academics behave that way already, and science manages anyway. I worry that AI makes it easier to fall into that trap individually, and as a system. Losing the production of experts would be worse than losing knowledge
Incredible footage from a United Airlines flight of the Artemis II launch.
Honeybee swarms do not come together and fall apart in the same way 🐝
In this new preprint led by Danielle Chase, we report how to trick swarms to repeatedly assemble and disassemble in front of our cameras, while tracking individual bees in 3D!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
If all goes according to plan, in a few hours, a crew of astronauts will begin a journey that will take them on a loop around the moon. Here's a video that NASA put together to help people visualize the journey through space, first orbiting the earth before looping around the moon and flying home 🔭
tl;dr: NIH is running at about 60% of pre-Trump levels and NSF is running at about 20% of pre-Trump levels of funding-outlays (some directorates far below even that). Utterly catastrophic. An unforced disaster for U.S. society, and the world
Now get out and vote in the midterms like your life depends on it, because it does. #NoKings
Others have said the same, but it's a weird realization about AI tools: on some dimensions and certain classes of tasks, the modern tools are crazy good (like woah), but it's also really easy to run smack into their profound limitations. I can't take seriously anyone who only says the former
One more week for abstract submissions to ICSSI 2026, the International Conference on the Science of Science & Innovation!
icssi.org/guidelines
Boulder, CO this June 29 to July 1!
Attention NYC undergrads: Applications are open for our 13th annual Data Science Summer school at Microsoft Research NYC! Apply here by April 14th: bit.ly/3pCQENh
👏
When the stakes are high for individual faculty, for some reason, universities never cease to succeed in disappointing. I'm reminded of the wise saying: "Work will never love you back." [send subtweet]
This interview with the great @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social was a "wow" moment for me. Thanks, New York Times and David Marchese.
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/m...
I couldn't help noticing the question that seemed the most Times-like to me.
A few people have asked for the syllabus from my grad seminar on Generative AI for social science -- just posted it here:
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/03/10/n...
Happy to share that we have a new paper out based on my PhD research: "Predicting missing links in food webs using stacked models and species traits" with @lauradee.bsky.social, Kate L. Wootton, François Massol, @aaronclauset.bsky.social: doi.org/10.1038/s414... 🧵/1
“A recurring theme across histories of the Red Scares period is that if the faculty had shown solidarity, with a meaningful share of faculty within an institution refusing to sign things like loyalty oaths, the damage to academic freedom could have been averted or greatly lessened.”
Figure 2: Fields vary widely in their consensus around top-5 venues and the general alignment of their prefer- ences. Whether one uses a field-level ranking constructed from the pairwise comparisons of all respondents in a field to predict an individual’s pairwise comparisons (horizontal axis) or assesses the degree to which individuals in a field agree on a top-5 (vertical axis), some fields (e.g. Economics) demonstrate a much more overlapping and organized set of preferences than others (e.g. Computer science).
Academic fields differ in their degree of consensus about what "better" publication venues are — here shown both for consensus about the "top 5" and for pairwise choices.
Hello #econsky :)
arxiv.org/abs/2603.00807
@jugander.bsky.social @danlarremore.bsky.social @aaronclauset.bsky.social
Serving as an editor taught me the limits of academic ideals for open, accessible scholarship, which tend to get smashed into the cliffs of institutional inertia, profit motives, and extractive norms. Some orgs are better than others, but their base tendencies are varying degrees of parasitism 🔥
Want to learn about computational social science *for free* and identify new research partners across academic fields? Apply to one of the 2026 Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science (described in yellow in the attached map) here: sicss.io/locations
FWIW, this is sec. 2(c) of the War Powers Resolution:
For people who still care about this sort of thing, here's James Madison writing from 1793 (6 years after the delegates in Philadelphia signed the Constitution) about why the power to make war was vested in the legislature.
press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/doc...
The Program Committee welcomes submissions on all topics in the science of science and innovation, broadly defined. We invite contributions from researchers and practitioners across all disciplines, sectors, and world regions, with a particular encouragement for early-career scholars. Major conference themes include, but are not limited to: AI, agentic science, and new epistemic practices in scientific discovery Global knowledge dynamics and the evolution of scientific fields Government-industry-academia partnerships and innovation systems Societal impacts and public value of science and innovation Science funding in an interconnected, multi-sectoral, and global environment Social stratification, bias, and ethical issues in scientific production and reward Open science, transparency, and reproducibility in research The scientific workforce, precarity, and the trajectory of research careers Theoretical, historical, and conceptual perspectives on science and innovation Causal inference and methodological advances in the science of science and innovation Science communication, public trust, and the governance of emerging technologies Intellectual property, patents, and the geography of technological change
📣 Call for abstracts at #ICSSI2026
⛰️ in Boulder, CO, USA - June 29 to July 1
📥 Submit here: www.icssi.org/guidelines
⏳ Deadline: March 30th
On any topic relevant to #SciSci #Innovation #ScienceofScience #Metascience #STS
Please repost and share!
An image of beautiful Boulder, CO, USA, with the iconic flatiron rock formations and red roofed campus.
The International Conference on the Science of Science & Innovation #ICSSI2026 will be in beautiful Boulder, CO, USA!
☀️ June 29 - July 1 ☀️
& Open Data Hackathon, June 28 🧑💻
We welcome submissions on all topics in the science of science and innovation, broadly defined.
Learn more at 👉 icssi.org 👈
Abstract submissions close on March 3rd!
We are also extending a ✨ call for mentored reviewers ✨ if you advise excellent graduate or postdoctoral researchers you are welcome to recommend them to review for IC2S2 2026. Email IC2S2@uvm.edu to nominate mentored reviewers (or faculty colleagues)
It was a lot of fun building this tool! Something that can help faculty with a small but tedious step in preparing an NSF grant proposal: the conflict of interests spreadsheet. Drag-and-drop simplicity ftw 🚤
This works! For those of us with . . . large . . . COA lists, game changer!
According to this, 372 co-authors and collaborators!
