sociomental affiliate 🍉

A man significantly skinnier than me looking at a post with two retweets and three likes ans thinking "Oh man... this doin numbers"

You know those of us posting on the weekend are doing it purely for the love of the game

Public Science Engagement Using Social Media — Center for Wildlife Studies

Friends, it’s never been more important for scientists to break out of the ivory tower and engage with the public.

My course- which you can take for graduate school course credit, continuing professional education credit, or just to learn a new skill- can help.

Please share!

🧪🦑🌎🐠🦈 #SciComm

Welcome to Hotel Elsevier: you can check-out any time you like … not » Eiko Fried A journey by Robin Kok and Eiko Fried trying to understand what private data Elsevier collects; what private data Elsevier sells; and what to do about it.

I was reminded today of the heroic work done by @eikofried.bsky.social and
@robinnkok.bsky.social to see what information Elsevier collects on academics and was re-horrified. 🧵 (1/5)

eiko-fried.com/welcome-to-h...

#academicsky

A screenshot shows the first page of a journal article titled "Don't Go," by Andrew V. Papachristos. A pair of images from the Folded Map Project contrasts the homes at Chicago's 6330 N. Paulina and 6329 South Paulina.

An undated historical photograph hows KaMar's Greek Diner in Chicago, IL. Its sign advertises: KaMara's Coffee Shop. Pancakes. Fountain. Bar-B-Que Restaurant.

"Cities might speak different dialects, but they share the same grammar of exclusion," writes sociologist @avpapachristos.bsky.social on the everyday practices of urban segregation. Read "Don't Go"--and our entire spring issue--free through 8/11 at journals.sagepub.com/doi/epdf/10....
#sociology

blue sky is supreme because every time you post you get 100 school principals in the replies asking to see you in their office

‘A war of the truth’: Europe’s heatwaves are failing to spur support for climate action Voters may feel hotter summers are ‘too much’ but they appear to tolerate roll-back of policies to stop global heating

As climate shocks (like heatwaves and extreme/flash flooding) hit more frequently and with more severity, they should trigger more climate concern and action. There's a really important story to tell about why it isn't in some places/times! www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Historical price conversions are a core area of concern and interest in costume studies. For fashion historians, curators, or reenactors, the question is: how does one explain the equivalent price of something worn in the past to someone in the present? I suggest a more quantitative understanding of historical prices will help researchers, professors, writers, and others better interpret the garments they examine, both within the field of costume studies as well as other disciplines such as literature, art studies, and sociology. The ambition of this paper is to showcase an alternative tool for fashion researchers to translate and explain historical fashion prices to a contemporary audience beyond simple Consumer Price Index tracking. The instrument this paper proposes is called Measuring Worth, which offers the possibility of wage tracking over time as another way to interpret historical prices.

Image 1: Purple silk velvet and satin court gown made by Charles Frederick Worth for Frances Fairchild, wife of Wisconsin Governor Lucius Fairchild. Image 2: Black and white photographic portrait in front of painted backdrop of Frances (Bull) Fairchild (1845-1924), wife of Wisconsin Governor Lucius Fairchild, wearing a court gown designed by Charles Frederick Worth of Paris, France. Worn at the Spanish court of King Alfonso XII and Queen Teresa, Madrid, Spain, 1880.

My first academic article is live!!

Published with Fashion Studies, “What is a ‘Worth’ Worth? Developing a Methodology of Historical to Modern Day Price Conversions for Dress” asks how we can better explain clothing prices in the past to people in the present. The approach explored is wage data.

If you're interested in seeing what the conversation on X looked like on Saturday morning, as the information warriors there went to work framing the shootings of Democratic lawmakers for political gain, I made an interactive graph: faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/Spot...

Since it is Juneteenth, I will share a lil something...

My ancestors were slaves in Texas & were freed on June 19, 1865. They came together to meet with other ex-slaves & formed the Limestone County 19th of June Organization. They bought 30 acres of land on Lake Mexia.

Look what I found strolling around my yard! Hummingbird eggs are about the size of a jelly belly. Amazing treasure of the day!

You might also want to check out some of the scholars who’ve been tracking these developments for a decade! @melhogan.bsky.social, @tamigraph.bsky.social, @zgtcooper.bsky.social, @lifewinning.com, Alix Johnson…

Ah the good old meme marinade

Everytime I see a screengrab of this old tweet of mine, it is more blurry than before

Old newspaper clipping: "Americans Thick In The Head - Einstein Says We Are So Ignorant We Are Comic."

Part 2 of table. Source: Fine 1992, Manufacturing Tales: Sex and Money in Contemporary Legends.

A list of mercantile legends circulating in the 80s and their targets. Mercantile legends are urban legends that tie a corporation to some scary or harmful situation.

What do McDonald’s, P&G, and KISS have in common? They were part of an ‘80s urban legend about satanic cults

From Douglas et al 1980, “Introduction to the Sociologies of Everyday Life”

We love a good✨conceptual diagram✨😌

Types of deviant behavior: falsely accused (obedient but perceived as deviant), conforming (obedient behavior not perceived as deviant), pure deviant (rule breaking behavior perceived as deviant), secret deviant (rule breaking behavior not perceived as deviant)

Tag urself
I’m 20% “falsely accused”

#AI-based #LLM programmes suppress creativity and produce lower-quality essays.

"LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results...underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role in learning.

#AcademicSky

www.media.mit.edu/publications...

go to grad school

okay now that's how you write a dang abstract and some keywords

Sociology is mostly about choosing whether something is “structured”, “contingent”, or “performed”

Despite low U.S. fertility rates since the Great Recession, two-child norms remain pervasive, suggesting individuals are unable to achieve their goals. To understand what may be driving the apparent mismatch between goals and behavior, we focus on pregnancy avoidance, as individuals may be deciding against births in the short term rather than deciding not to have any, or any more, children. Further, we incorporate subjective evaluations of the future related to economic and relational factors as well as objective socioeconomic indicators, drawing from the Narratives of the Future framework and Easterlin’s theory about expected standard of living. We use data from the 2018–2020 wave of the Toledo Adolescent Relationships Study (N = 880), a population-based dataset, to examine short-term pregnancy avoidance among adults aged 29–36. We find that higher levels of personal economic pessimism and concerns about having a good relationship in the future are associated with greater importance of avoiding a pregnancy in the short term, even when controlling for objective characteristics such as economic hardship, relationship status, and other sociodemographic covariates. The results highlight the need to incorporate both subjective and objective statuses in research on fertility decision-making, and the implications of these findings point to short-term pregnancy avoidance and fertility postponement as a potential mechanism underlying contemporary low birth rates in the U.S.

Declining birth rates are likely driven by "pregnancy avoidance" decisions - people repeatedly deciding that it's not a good time to get pregnant *right now* rather than deciding not to have any (more) children at all, as my colleagues and I show in a new paper. 1/ doi.org/10.1007/s111...

ChatGPT is down but The Museum of English Rural Life still stands, proving once again that Silicon Valley cannot compete with the history of rural England and its people.

The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity Parshin Shojaee∗† Iman Mirzadeh∗ Keivan Alizadeh Maxwell Horton Samy Bengio Mehrdad Farajtabar Apple Abstract Recent generations of frontier language models have introduced Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that generate detailed thinking processes before providing answers. While these models demonstrate improved performance on reasoning benchmarks, their fundamental capabilities, scal- ing properties, and limitations remain insufficiently understood. Current evaluations primarily fo- cus on established mathematical and coding benchmarks, emphasizing final answer accuracy. How- ever, this evaluation paradigm often suffers from data contamination and does not provide insights into the reasoning traces’ structure and quality. In this work, we systematically investigate these gaps with the help of controllable puzzle environments that allow precise manipulation of composi- tional complexity while maintaining consistent logical structures. This setup enables the analysis of not only final answers but also the internal reasoning traces, offering insights into how LRMs “think”. Through extensive experimentation across diverse puzzles, we show that frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities. Moreover, they exhibit a counter- intuitive scaling limit: their reasoning effort increases with problem complexity up to a point, then declines despite having an adequate token budget. By comparing LRMs with their standard LLM counterparts under equivalent inference compute, we identify three performance regimes: (1) low- complexity tasks where standard models surprisingly outperform LRMs, (2) medium-complexity tasks where additional thinking in LRMs demonstrates advantage, and (3) high-complexity tasks where both models experience complete collapse. We found that LRMs have limitations in exact computation: they fail to use explicit …

If I have time I'll put together a more detailed thread tomorrow, but for now, I think this new paper about limitations of Chain-of-Thought models could be quite important. Worth a look if you're interested in these sorts of things.

ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-i...

Word of wisdom from @peterhotezmdphd.bsky.social are applicable to U.S. scientists of all disciplines!

➡️ “Too often, young scientists focus only on their next step (or next NIH grant) and do not take a long view.”
✅ He advises: think long-term, be strategic & flexible

#PsychSciSky
#AcademicSky

“I Have Lost Everything”: The Toll of Cities’ Homeless Sweeps Cities often take belongings — including important documents and irreplaceable mementos — when they conduct sweeps of homeless encampments. ProPublica gave notecards to people across the country so…

We asked people who lived in homeless encampments that were cleared out in city “sweeps” to write about what object was the hardest for them to lose.

“They took my baby pictures and my moms obituaries,” a 29-year-old in California wrote.