Will 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🏳️‍🌈

It must be very hard to publish null results Publication practices in the social sciences act as a filter that favors statistically significant results over null findings. While the problem of selection on significance (SoS) is well-known in theory, it has been difficult to measure its scope empirically, and it has been challenging to determine how selection varies across contexts. In this article, we use large language models to extract granular and validated data on about 100,000 articles published in over 150 political science journals from 2010 to 2024. We show that fewer than 2% of articles that rely on statistical methods report null-only findings in their abstracts, while over 90% of papers highlight significant results. To put these findings in perspective, we develop and calibrate a simple model of publication bias. Across a range of plausible assumptions, we find that statistically significant results are estimated to be one to two orders of magnitude more likely to enter the published record than null results. Leveraging metadata extracted from individual articles, we show that the pattern of strong SoS holds across subfields, journals, methods, and time periods. However, a few factors such as pre-registration and randomized experiments correlate with greater acceptance of null results. We conclude by discussing implications for the field and the potential of our new dataset for investigating other questions about political science.

I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.

Macbeth: SHIT

A screenshot of the zombo.com domain as of yesterday, looking painfully vibe-coded; the "Zombo.com" text is now in a font that looks nigh-identical to Verdana and has an awful washed-out rainbow gradient, the loading circle animation has been replaced with a pinwheel, and apparently the voice has been replaced with some awful TTS equivalent. There is now a description underneath the page which is some of the most repulsive "quirky" corpo-speak an LLM could possibly muster, which I refuse to transcribe.

Apparently the zombocom domain expired yesterday and was presumably bought out by some other jackass who launched this vibe-coded IMPOSTOR

The new leader of Reform UK Wales lives in Bath, not Wales Martin Shipton The newly appointed leader of Reform UK in Wales hasn’t moved back to his home town in the Valleys, but has bought a £1m house near Bath, we can reveal. Dan Thomas, the former Conservat...

More geographical confusion. Nigel Farage said Reform's new leader in Wales had "come back to the Valleys", so his children could grow up Welsh. Nation Cymru report he had moved from London to Bath in the west of England, about 50-60 miles from Islwyn, across the border
nation.cymru/news/the-new...

ten years ago today no one clapped

The Revolt of the Young Men? Britain's second wokest cohort might surprise you

🚨🚨 NEW BLOGPOST 🚨🚨

The right wing should be worried about young men. Unlike Europe and the US, British young men are swinging wildly behind progressive parties. Some thoughts on why, and why most of the right are ignoring it.

open.substack.com/pub/joxleywr...

Cardiff and Essex post deficits after big spend on severance pay Financially troubled institutions pushed further into the red, with Aberdeen, Robert Gordon and Sheffield Hallam also losing money

Cardiff University posts £33.4m deficit for 2024-25 after spending £24.3m on voluntary severance and redundancies. University of Essex posts £22.1m loss after spending £10.8m on severance. Latest round-up from @patrickjack.bsky.social: www.timeshighereducation.com/news/cardiff...

I think we've found a worse "first date" movie than the time I went to a screening of "The End of Evangelion" and the couple (genuinely, I swear that I am not making this up) going in ahead of me said "Yeah, I think it's one of those films where the cat turns into a bus".

Ahead of #Senedd26 @jaclarner.bsky.social joined the BBC's Chris Mason in #Pontypridd to discuss the big shifts in Welsh politics that suggest a century of electoral dominance by the Labour Party is being challenged by Reform UK and Plaid Cymru, who are battling to top the polls in #Wales.

Avoid a basic election analysis error with this one neat trick… Don't build conclusions on voter movements from change in aggregate vote share

Written a short explainer on one of the most common and avoidable errors in election analysis at the moment: building conclusions on how voters are moving from vote change.

Share it with anyone who needs to see it, which includes an alarming number of people in Westminster.

Worth a listen.

The FM seems to be trying to use the electoral threat of Plaid (‘seperatists’) to generate leverage for the Welsh govt in dealing with the UK govt so as to ensure that it treats Wales ‘fairly’ in those areas in which it has *already* refused to act (rail, justice, crown estate) 1/

On Monday, Conservative MS James Evans did something a bit odd. Eagle eyed viewers of his Facebook page noticed that, at 1.16pm, he removed the words "Welsh Conservatives" from a post attacking Labour and Plaid Cymru.

NEW: @potus letter to @jonasgahrstore links @NobelPrize to Greenland, reiterates threats, and is forwarded by the NSC staff to multiple European ambassadors in Washington. I obtained the text from multiple officials: Dear Ambassador: President Trump has asked that the following message, shared with Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, be forwarded to your [named head of government/state] “Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”

mad king moment

from the PBS Newshour correspondent

So she had a pulse. That’s what the doctor on the scene wanted to check. She wasn’t breathing, but she had a pulse. He could have started CPR right away.

Instead ICE barred the doctor from attending her and waited 15 mins for EMT to get to her.

BREAKING: Explosive new poll for ITV Cymru Wales puts Plaid Cymru surging ahead of Reform UK in May’s Welsh elections.

Plaid 37%
Reform 23%
Greens 13%
Labour 10%
Tories 10%
Lib Dems 5%

Plaid could form majority with Greens on this basis, with Labour out of govt for first time since devolution.

My scheming vizier when I start to cough after taking a swig of wine from my goblet

Not only should the govt ban Twitter, it should ban all foreign owned and controlled social media. I'll see you all on OnlyFans!

politicians shouldn't swear it sets a bad example for the kids orphaned by ice agents

Allow me to translate: “it’s okay to kill these people because they’re queers”

Amazing record for the FIFA

As I told @kattenbarge.bsky.social (who has been doing absolutely incredible reporting on image-based abuse for years) last June, "X is going to continue to be one of the worst offenders and probably one of the pioneers of horrible ways to hurt women.” spitfirenews.com/p/grok-tribu...

‘They misjudged Caerphilly’: how the Reform juggernaut backfired in Welsh byelection It was assumed that Reform would sweep all before it – but locals rejected the party’s campaign of ‘lies and hate’

Caerffili - featuring our very own @jaclarner.bsky.social!

Blwyddyn newydd dda!

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Today is the last day that you can repost this image

LANCET: interacting with ragebait posters all day dramatically improves life and general outlook

Extremely funny to call the pope “holier-than-thou”

TV airtime will favour Reform UK in Senedd election, but Plaid has other routes to voters Martin Shipton The amount of time devoted to covering Reform UK by TV broadcasters would appear to give the party led by Nigel Farage a significant advantage over Plaid Cymru in terms of exposure in t...

The amount of time devoted to covering Reform UK by TV broadcasters would appear to give the party led by Nigel Farage a significant advantage over Plaid Cymru in terms of exposure in the run-up to next May’s Senedd election ✍️Martin Shipton

Hate incidents, already estimated to be massively under-reported due to lack of follow through from the police, will now have zero data collected on them. Awful for victims, awful for research, perfect for the far right this government thinks they can appeal to.

Always think: whose "common sense"?

CIA Realizes It’s Been Using Black Highlighters All These Year

CIA Realizes It’s Been Using Black Highlighters All These Year
theonion.com/cia-realizes...