Happy to see our most recent tutorial on RSelenium featured in RWeekly (2026-W16)!
The screencast below shows a minimal example of what can be done with automated browsers. Use responsibly!
Tutorial:
firsa.eu/posts/rselen...
Follow RWeekly
rweekly.org
#Rstats #OpenScience #DataVisualization
Want to an easy way to learn web scraping? 🤖
Check out this new tutorial on Selenium in R.
It covers how to automate web browsers to collect data from dynamic websites ➡️ firsa.eu/posts/rselen...
#RStats #RSelenium #WebScraping #DataScience
State of the world today:
I got an email notification “The Great Taco Party”,
Not immediately clear if it was from Uber Eats or @foreignaffairs.com …
3) Chatbots are not good for your brain, but the same can be said about smartphones. The solution will rest more on evolving cultural norms than panic-driven regulation or corporate (and academic) grandstanding.
2) Coding is mostly “solved” in the sense that grammar is “solved”. Anyone with a highschool education can write a (terrible) novel. That doesn’t make them novelists.
Some hot takes on AI:
1) LLMs are amazing editors but atrocious writers. They lack the creativity that comes from having an underlying model of the world.
#AI #LLMS #coding #writing
Trump will soon put his signature on the dollar. Why does this matter?
I discuss this in my new Substack post.
Link: alfredohs.substack.com/p/dollar-sig...
#DonaldTrump #USDollar #AmericanPolitics
What are the odds you own crypto assets? 📉
How is financial literacy related to ownership? 📖
Our new dashboard lets you simulate the probability of recent crypto-asset ownership based on a statistical model.
🔗 dashboard.firsa.eu
#bitcoin #rstats #shiny #crypto #fintech #OpenScience
📄 New FIRSA working paper.
Are crypto holders really more overconfident? Using recent EU-wide data, I find the answer depends a lot on how overconfidence is measured.
Pre-print version, comments welcome.
🔗 firsa.eu/posts/crypto...
#FinTech #OpenScience #EUData #RStats
The roadmap to your 2026 research goals starts here. 🗺️
Join the MethodsNET Summer School with CEU for advanced methodological training.
Designed for researchers and faculty.
Apply by April 20th.
🔗 docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
🚨 New Medium article on AI and expertise.
We talk a lot about what AI can do for researchers, but much less about the precarious human labor quietly training these systems in the background.
I wrote a short reflection on that tension here: medium.com/@alfredo-hs/...
#AI #Inequality #FutureOfWork
Now do the scam LIS jobs popping up on sites like Indeed that claim to be hiring for librarians but are just AI training.
✊For International Women's Day, I built an interactive map tracking attitudes like "a man earns, a woman stays home." The east-west divide is stark. And as an Italian… yeah, Italy is not doing great 🙁 Built with Claude Code 🤯 → gender-attitudes.netlify.app
#IWD2026 #GenderEquality #DataViz
Doing god's work 😅
https://alfredohs.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-costs-of-doing-social
🚨 New substack post
AI and the future of social science research
Will AI's speed "break" academia?
What if AI changes what counts as research output in the first place?
Link below:
🔗 substack.com/home/post/p-...
#AI #SocialScience #ResearchMethods #AcademicTwitter
🔴 Los objetivos atacados por Israel y Estados Unidos, la respuesta de Terherán y el resto de mapas del ataque lanzado este sábado contra Irán
💰 Is Bitcoin money or myth?
📢 Presenting this Saturday at the 6th Money View Symposium hosted by @ineteconomics.bsky.social
Register here:
🔗 fs8.formsite.com/CNZLjX/0acgs...
📍 Online event, free attendance
📅 Saturday, February 28
⏰ 12:30 New York
#PoliticalEconomy #Monetarytheory #Bitcoin
FinTech isn’t upending global finance as much as it’s being harnessed by central bankers to serve a controlled narrative. This paper presents a unified stance among regulators: innovation is welcomed but must be balanced against financial stability.
By @alfredo-hs.bsky.social
buff.ly/UJly81U
🙏 Thanks for the thoughtful read and for sharing my preprint.
Still very much work in progress, so comments and critique are genuinely welcome!
Thank you! For now there is only SES, but I am happy to brainstorm useful additions, please feel free to play around with the repo and if you have any thoughts let me know!
github.com/alfredo-hs/e...
Let me know what you think if you get around to trying it out! If you forget the name, don't worry, it is easy XD
🚨 I just released easytable 2.1.0.
It is a small R package I built because I was tired of spending more time fixing regression tables than actually writing.
Still in early stages, feedback is much appreciated!
Tutorial
alfredohs.com/posts/easyta...
#RStats #openscience #datascience
They are always seeking deep.
Who owns crypto in Europe?
Join the FIRSA Academic Roundtable (link below) to learn more about research on FinTech (CBDCs, Crypto, Regulatory Sandboxes) from top scholars.
📣 20 Jan · 10:00 CST (Chicago) / 18:00 EET (Vilnius)
zoom.us/j/9443773243...
Passcode: 995511
🚨 Academic roundtable on fintech regulation.
Join the conversation with Colin Chia (University of Victoria), Ghita Chraibi (University of Virginia), and Vytautas Kuokštis (Vilnius University).
📣 (TUE) 20 Jan · 10:00 CST (Chicago) / 18:00 EET (Vilnius)
🔗: zoom.us/j/9443773243...
#fintech #finance
A quick scan of UNGA speeches shows a huge gender gap.
From 1946 to 2024 almost all pronoun mentions are he/his. The only real bumps in she/her appear in the few years with a woman as UNGA President 👇
GitHub 🔗: github.com/alfredo-hs/u...
#DataViz #TextAnalysis #GenderGap #DataForGood #RStats
New tutorial out! 🚀 Learn how to chat with ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini inside R using the {ellmer} package.
Covers safe API setup, workflow integration, and structured outputs for text + images.
👉 alfredohs.com/posts/ellmer...
#RStats #LLMs #DataScience
Vibes capitalism ♈ 💰 didn’t start with Musk, it started in 1995. In my new Medium article I argue that the mid-90s shift lines up with shareholder-value culture and the rise of the celebrity CEOs.
🔗 medium.com/@alfredo-hs/...
#SP500 #Markets #ShareholderValue #DataVisualization
🇺🇸💔🇪🇺
Trump’s 2025 UN speech was the longest U.S. address on record and the most negative toward Europe.
This is the focus of my first Medium article, where I track how Europe appears in U.S. UNGA speeches from 1946–2025 and visualize the results.
📖 Read on Medium:
medium.com/@alfredo-hs/...
