Fernando Calderón_Figueroa

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!

Maybe start calling them AI-DLs?

"I recommend SUDS as the perfect opportunity to gain research experience, experience life in the #DataScience workforce, and possibly even get published!”–Elise Corbin
@uoftdsi.bsky.social

datasciences.utoronto.ca/data-science...

#Python
#geosky
#EconSky
#sociology

More on `piccard` coming soon. Meanwhile, here's a preview: piccard.readthedocs.io

Photo of the author with two students in formal dressing. They are posing in front of a research poster.

Poster of the project "piccard: A graph-based approach to census data analysis". The poster includes an overview, sample workflow, QR codes for further information, next steps, and acknowledgements. More info in the documentation: https://piccard.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

A highlight of this summer: supervising Elise Corbin (UofT) and Abdulmohseen Al Ali (KAUST) during their Summer Undergraduate Data Sciences program at @uoftdsi.bsky.social. They did amazing expanding `piccard`—a Python package we've been developing—and prepared a fantastic presentation and poster!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (FREDERICTON, August 18th, 2025) A group of 413 Canadian and Canadian-based scholars, athletes, sports journalists, and sports officials have signed a public letter calling on Tennis Canada to cancel the Davis Cup tournament with Israel this September in Halifax. Signatories include three United Nations Special Rapporteurs, four-time Olympian distance runner Mohammed Ahmed, two members of the Palestinian women’s soccer team who compete for York University, a former Canadian Olympic beach volleyball coach, sports journalists Shireen Ahmed and Ian Kennedy, public intellectuals and activists Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis and some of Canada’s most distinguished and internationally-recognized scholars. The letter is signed by prominent individuals from 46 different academic institutions in Canada, as well as by Canadians at prominent global institutions. One hundred and six of the signatories are based in Atlantic Canada, where the event is slated to occur. The call to cancel the Davis Cup event comes amidst rising condemnation of Israeli conduct in Gaza and the West Bank, which leading legal scholars, activists and human rights groups have described as a genocide. Given the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the letter says that allowing the competition to go ahead is “unconscionable” and calls on the Canadian government to prevent Canadian athletes from competing against Israeli athletes in all international sporting competitions. Despite Tennis Canada’s claims that the event isn’t political and is just about playing tennis, the letter states in part that Canada should follow the lead of other nations who “refuse to legitimize Israel’s crimes” by withdrawing from international sporting competition. “This includes Jordanian tennis player Abdellah Shelbayh, who recently withdrew from a tennis competition in Greece after being slated to play an Israeli athlete,” the letter says. The letter points to the use of sporting sanctions in South Africa as a meaningful …

“Given the ongoing genocide in Gaza…we call on Sport Canada and Tennis Canada to forbid Canadian athletes to compete against Israeli athletes at the Davis Cup and all other international events.”

- 413 🇨🇦 academics, athletes + sports journalists, inc 3 former UN special rapporteurs + an Olympic 🥈ist

💯 We need this kind of courage and initiative in Toronto as well. Right on red should be banned outright in any dense urban area. #topoli

Our department at the University of Toronto is hiring an assistant professor of sociology of race / ethnicity this fall.

I'm not on the hiring committee but am very happy to talk to you about the position if you are interested. You can email, DM, or find me at ASA.

jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-...

A screenshot of the Sociological Methods & Research website showing the special issue title

I’m delighted to share that the August 2025 special issue of Sociological Methods & Research on Generative AI is out now. Along with my co-editor, Daniel Karell, we put together this issue to build on the conference we organized last year.

Here's a thread on each of the ten papers:

my similar boomer opinion is that i think “home economics” or whatever the equivalent is ought to be mandatory for students in middle and high school.

What would Plato do? Plato met writing with invention, not despair or anger. We may need to do the same for the essay.

The idea that "thinking is writing and writing is thinking" would have probably appalled Socrates. I suppose he might have thought that "thinking is talking and talking is thinking." But probably better is: thinking is thinking and thinking is thinking.

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

A picture of the toronto skyline

🚨 Job alert: The Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto is hiring an Assistant Professor in the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity.
jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-...

I'll be at ASA and would be happy to chat with interested candidates. Please share widely! #Socsky

Draft description of my seminar on Artificial Social Intelligence What can sociology add to the creation of novel forms of intelligence? If intelligence is inherently social, the answer is: a lot.

A lot of how we think about AI comes from disciplines that study the individual mind. AIs are already social and plural, however, and only becoming increasingly so. Can sociology provide models for Artificial Social Intelligence ?
#sociology #ASI

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