All crime is true crime!

Does anyone know a German labour law expert?
I have a very specific question, and I'm struggling to get advice.

Another, more conservative option: asking for B2 only *after* selecting good candidates based on B1. CES Transformation Fund did it this way, which worked very well

Huge congratulations! Really happy for the Hungarian people

Sociology and Social Research Con il PhD in Sociologia e Ricerca Sociale studi le politiche sociali, le disuguaglianze, la demografia e le migrazioni. Con laboratori, borse e mobilità

The call for the PhD programme in Sociology and Social Research at Trento is out, with deadline 14 May.
Interested in a PhD in cultural evolution / social media / cultural analytics? Get in touch!
www.unitn.it/en/phd/socio...

cover of the book "Bayesian Workflow" by Gelman, Vehtari, et al. Coming out later this year, in the summer probably.

I would have preferred to have the "draw the rest of the owl" meme on the cover, but this will do. Seems like it is on schedule, and we'll leave some typos so you know we didn't write it with AI.

"One test, many tongues: Surveying language proficiency across the globe" out now in @pnasnexus.org

A practical challenge in online experiments with global participants is testing language proficiency. We automated the generation of language tests across nearly 2,000 languages.

I see, cool! I like Wordle, Connections, and Strands. Maybe I'll give this one a go too.

Title page for working paper: "The Varieties of Cultural Selection"

I've been thinking a lot about the foundations of cultural evolutionary theory. While there's been a lot of work on transmission mechanisms, there has been far less work on cultural *selection*. Here's a new working paper presenting a taxonomy of cultural selection processes.
osf.io/preprints/so...

Easter EP

As AI agents get smarter, are we entering a golden age of hypercreativity? Or are we entering an age of homogenised culture where we all just recycle the same AI-generated ideas?

@adigitaltanay.bsky.social & Jay explore this and much more with @babeheim.bsky.social

youtu.be/coQnyaEw50s

Our institute @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social starting a new Masters program with the University of Leipzig. If you are a bachelors student graduating soon, and would like to get involved with our research during you MSc, consider applying :) www.uni-leipzig.de/en/studying/...

Huh, is this Wordle's competitor?

(PDF) The Live Yurt Hypothesis PDF | For decades, scientists have been baffled by the unique pattern of human fur. Although we can find distant parallels in other primates and even... | Find, read and cite all the research you need...

I think nothing beats the Live Yurt Hypothesis by @turecek.bsky.social. Even though it was clearly made as a joke, it still comes with an actual study with almost 800 participants 😅

www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Russians, again 🤬 Destroying everything beautiful

Statistical Rethinking 2026 is done: 20 new lectures emphasizing logical and critical statistical workflow, from basics of probability theory to causal inference to reliable computation to sensitivity. It's all free, made just for you. Lecture list and links: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

The 347 cultures represented in our dataset. Tops are found all over the globe. The shapes of pins vary by traditional subsistence economy (based on HRAF data, where available). Coordinates are sourced from Glottolog. Cultures in blue (n = 83) are included in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS), a global sample of 186 relatively independent societies.

Play was historically quite neglected in anthropology and archaeology.

So much so that one of the most widespread games in human history has never received a systematic cross-cultural study.

To amend that, we systematically compiled a dataset of 1391 spinning tops from 347 societies.

Thank you. And happily!

Middlemen A revealing account of how agents have shaped book publishing and the literary canon from the 1950s to today

My book, MIDDLEMEN: LITERARY AGENTS AND THE MAKING OF AMERICAN FICTION, comes out in six weeks!It shows how literary agents went from "cankers" to "mere peripheral necessities" to "the center of the literary establishment" to "the biggest fish in publishing." press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

How God Got So Great What monotheism means is surprisingly hard to pin down, but there’s a reason it swept the world.

Monotheism has swept the world in just a few thousand years, making it one of the most important cultural innovations in human history.

In this week's New Yorker, I offer an explanation for what makes it so powerful. (It's not about belief in one god.)

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

You will be very welcome!

Thank you! ☺️

Basically, using empirical methods from the sciences to study how arts are perceived, performed, & evolved over time. I do the last bit, using large historical data, others study the former two using, say, neuroscience tools.

Thanks :)

Thank you Maria!

Hehe, true! Thank you Dania!

Happy me in front of the MPI for Empirical Aesthetics

Yay! This week I started working at the MPI for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt as a group leader. Lots of work ahead, but super exciting kind of work 🔥

The Engine of Scientific Discovery: How New Methods and Tools Spark Major Breakthroughs Abstract. How do we spark new scientific discoveries? Why do some breakthroughs seem even accidental? And most importantly, how can we accelerate them and

I'm intrigued by this new book. The claim that scientific discoveries are often preceded by major methodological innovations is not new. But looks like this book claims that this is *always* the case. Gotta read to find out, I guess... academic.oup.com/book/62274

Out in Evolutionary Human Sciences! With @mikekestemont.bsky.social, @jbcamps.bsky.social, @remcosleiderink.bsky.social & Anne Chao

New work on unseen species models for cult heritage to the question: how many stories were _shared_ between medieval French and Dutch literature?

lnkd.in/exyAWtir

Happy to see our second study testing the "drunk hypothesis" published in PNAS 🎉

After analyzing the role of alcohol in the rise of sociopolitical complexity on a global scale
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

we have now focused on the role of kava in Oceania
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Written English has barely changed in 300 years. If you can read Harry Potter, you can read Robinson Crusoe (1719).