Josef Woldense

YouTube video by Forbrukerrådet - Norwegian Consumer Council A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator

A 4 minute comedy skit worth your time

www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Up...

Russia, Venezuela, Iran, China, the Sahel region, the United States ...

Want to know why state agents carry out brutal repression — or participate in illegal coups?

Our new book "Making a Career in Dictatorship" provides answers — it just got published by @academic.oup.com:

tinyurl.com/ystwm3tf

Congrats!!!

Academics, don't just critique. Show your displeasure by putting an axe through tables at your next seminar. You too will be featured in a music video. Eternal fame awaits you

I love that he has an axe readily at hand. He just carries it around all day in case the need arises

We are happy to release the Paths to Power Dashboard. It is the perfect tool for politics nerds!

You can find it here: ptp.isv.sv.uio.no/ptp/

It allows you to explore governments from 1966-2021 using the PtP and WhoGov datasets. See examples below.

The app has been programmed by Stuart Bramwell.

🚨Job alert! 🚨

I'm advertising a PhD position (66%) in Comparative Politics at HU Berlin. Ideal candidates combine a research interest in autocratic politics, conflict, and/or political violence with strong quantitative methods skills.

⏳ 4 (+2) years | 🗓 DL 16.01; Start March/April 26

More info:

The visual for the 11% car reduction was clever

the analogy I use with friends and family all the time is the jump from collegiate to professional sports. as soon as I explain it that way, it clicks in their brains what the academic job market is like.

I am hiring a post-doctoral fellow (2 years) to work on all things political finance in Africa. There are no teaching obligations, and lots of opportunities for fieldwork. A PhD in Political Science is a requirement. Please spread the word! Happy to answer questions - send them to my LSE email.

Will you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course in the future? No. Why won’t you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course? These tools are useful for coding (see this for my personal take on this). However, they’re only useful if you know what you’re doing first. If you skip the learning-the-process-of-writing-code step and just copy/paste output from ChatGPT, you will not learn. You cannot learn. You cannot improve. You will not understand the code.

In that post, it warns that you cannot use it as a beginner: …to use Databot effectively and safely, you still need the skills of a data scientist: background and domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability. There is no LLM-based shortcut to those skills. You cannot LLM your way into domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, or coding ability. The only way to gain domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability is to struggle. To get errors. To google those errors. To look over the documentation. To copy/paste your own code and adapt it for different purposes. To explore messy datasets. To struggle to clean those datasets. To spend an hour looking for a missing comma. This isn’t a form of programming hazing, like “I had to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow and now you must too.” It’s the actual process of learning and growing and developing and improving. You’ve gotta struggle.

This Tumblr post puts it well (it’s about art specifically, but it applies to coding and data analysis too): Contrary to popular belief the biggest beginner’s roadblock to art isn’t even technical skill it’s frustration tolerance, especially in the age of social media. It hurts and the frustration is endless but you must build the frustration tolerance equivalent to a roach’s capacity to survive a nuclear explosion. That’s how you build on the technical skill. Throw that “won’t even start because I’m afraid it won’t be perfect” shit out the window. Just do it. Just start. Good luck. (The original post has disappeared, but here’s a reblog.) It’s hard, but struggling is the only way to learn anything.

You might not enjoy code as much as Williams does (or I do), but there’s still value in maintaining codings skills as you improve and learn more. You don’t want your skills to atrophy. As I discuss here, when I do use LLMs for coding-related tasks, I purposely throw as much friction into the process as possible: To avoid falling into over-reliance on LLM-assisted code help, I add as much friction into my workflow as possible. I only use GitHub Copilot and Claude in the browser, not through the chat sidebar in Positron or Visual Studio Code. I treat the code it generates like random answers from StackOverflow or blog posts and generally rewrite it completely. I disable the inline LLM-based auto complete in text editors. For routine tasks like generating {roxygen2} documentation scaffolding for functions, I use the {chores} package, which requires a bunch of pointing and clicking to use. Even though I use Positron, I purposely do not use either Positron Assistant or Databot. I have them disabled. So in the end, for pedagogical reasons, I don’t foresee me incorporating LLMs into this class. I’m pedagogically opposed to it. I’m facing all sorts of external pressure to do it, but I’m resisting. You’ve got to learn first.

Some closing thoughts for my students this semester on LLMs and learning #rstats datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-12...

🚨Jobs!🚨

3-year PostDoc positions (aka Research Officers) at @lsegovernment.bsky.social to work with me on the local consequences of border change. Please reach out for questions and apply by Jan 4th to join the team and department: I’d love to hear from you!

Job ad: jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

For anyone interested in the visualisation workshop materials I mention in this thread, you can find them here:

github.com/ddekadt/MY58...

Satellite image of a commercial development along a stroad. On the left there's a big box store that says "Property taxes: $102,485, Parcel Size: 17,766 meter square. On the right there's two apartment buildings that read "Property taxes: $626,002, Parcel Size: 10,930 meter square"

Minimum parking requirements create financially insolvent land use patterns.

The two apartment buildings on the right generate six times more in property taxes than the big box store on the left, while occupying almost half the space!

#BlackFridayParking

YouTube video by TEDx Talks Why is knowledge getting so expensive? | Jeffrey Edmunds | TEDxPSU

Excellent presentation. Worth a watch even if you're not an academic

youtu.be/PygUK16aQgk?...

What Next: TBD Tech, power, and the future with Lizzie O’Leary.

Just listened to an episode about this:

What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future: How Meta Profits Off Fraud

Episode webpage: slate.com/podcasts/wha...

Aditya published a new article...🧐...let me see what new creative research design he's implementing... Never fails

Congrats!

Do architecture and urban planning affect political behavior? Happy to share a paper that @tesaliarizzo.bsky.social and I have coming out at the APSR which uses computer vision to investigate how the built environment shapes inequalities in civic participation in Mexico: osf.io/preprints/so.... 🧵1/5

Giving coaches these crazy contracts, but then complain about paying players....🤔

Has Tanzania Reached Its Breaking Point? | Journal of Democracy President Hassan promised Tanzanians freedom, transparency, and reform. Instead, she has delivered repression, violence, and arrests as she bars anyone who dares challenge her.

Great analysis of the situation in Tanzania by Dan Paget

Awesome! Makes me think how many other distributions could be represented in this way.

🤔...I guess the binomial could be with the Galton board by assuming balls on either side of the mean to be yes/no

You just got them another customer. Time to purchase that sweet board.

Do you use it when teaching?

An entire emotional arch captured in one moment. By far one of my favorite memes

Abstract for the article: How does right-wing terrorism affect electoral support for populist radical right parties (PRRPs)? Recent research has produced contrary answers to this question. We argue that only high-intensity attacks, whose motives and targets mirror PRRPs’ nativist agenda, are likely to generate a media backlash that dampens electoral support for PRRPs. We test this argument by combining high-frequency survey and social media data with a natural and survey experimental design. We find that right-wing terror reduced support for the radical right party Alternative für Deutschland after one of the most intense nativist attacks in recent German history. An analysis of all ninety-eight fatal right-wing attacks in Germany between 1990 and 2020 supports our argument. Our findings contribute to an understanding of how political violence triggers partisan detachment and have important implications for media responsibility in the aftermath of terrorist attacks.

🚨 New article out!

“Right-Wing Terror, Media Backlash, and Voting Preferences for the Far Right” in @bjpols.bsky.social

👉 doi.org/10.1017/S000...

We (Alex De Juan, @juvoss.bsky.social & I) examine how right-wing attacks shape support for the far-right in Germany.

Short summary thread below 👇

The Risk of a New Ethiopian-Eritrean War Is Growing Changing dynamics in Tigray could erode the current balance of uncertainty.

New essay in Foreign Policy with Abel Abate D. on Eritrea-Ethiopia tensions. It covers the sources of mutual restraint thus far; some of the factors that are eroding this delicate balance; and what can be done to avert another war the Horn of Africa cannot afford.

foreignpolicy.com/2025/10/21/e...

YouTube video by Welch Labs What the Books Get Wrong about AI [Double Descent]

Excellent video on bias-variance tradeoff in stats/AI

youtu.be/z64a7USuGX0?...

Paths to Power (PtP) is out in @bjpols.bsky.social! It is a database with data on cabinet members' social profile globally from 1966-2021.

This is a great team effort with @chknutsen.bsky.social, @peterla.bsky.social, @inalkristiansen.bsky.social. But many more helped us along the way 🙏

A short 🧵

Just out of curiosity, what problems do you see with strong towns?

Cool paper. I'm going to shamelessly plug my work here that also deals with LLMs for research

bsky.app/profile/wold...

Virtual PASS Course. The Research Presentation as Storytelling: A Two-Part Training. Part 1: October 9. Part 2: October 10. 11 AM to 3 PM (ET). Part 1 Cost: $35. Part 2 Cost: $35. ISA logo. Background: An open laptop with an open book sitting on the keyboard.

Preparing for your upcoming #ResearchTalk? Sign up for two courses, taught by @woldense.bsky.social, to enhance your #Communication and apply #Storytelling principles to your #Presenting, and #Teaching skills! Open to both ISA Members and non-members. Register: buff.ly/PUXowRN