Carl Nordlund

How a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein was accused of sexually abusing dozens of underage girls. Prosecutors, including future Trump labor secretary Alexander Acosta, cut Epstein an extraordinary...

You can read all the retrospectives about Epstein running now. But to really understand the case, go right to the @jkbjournalist.bsky.social series in the @miamiherald.com that ran 7 years ago (and for completely inexplicable reasons, never won a Pulitzer).

www.miamiherald.com/news/local/a...

The Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research has a call for grant proposals for US-based researchers with Swedish citizenship or a degree from Sweden who want to move to a Swedish university. SEK 15 million over 5 years. Aimed at science and tech, so maybe a CSS researcher?

PhD student in Analytical Sociology

Interested in doing a PhD at the Institute for Analytical Sociology @iasliu.bsky.social? Look no further: 1-2 fully funded PhD positions now available!

I Built an Interactive Schedule for my Field's Largest Conference (and yours, too) How do you communicate the what and where of various events at large conferences? This seems to be still a relatively unsolved problem, at least in …

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I built an interactive schedule for my field's largest conference and, if you'd like to, yours, too!

www.hendrik-erz.de/post/i-built...

Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence? Maybe not as we’ve known them. But, in the ruins of the old curriculum, something vital is stirring.

Can't recommend this piece enough for those of us pondering about genAI's impact on the humanities

Ditching Dropbox in favor of a RPi5 running Nextcloud, all from home. Wired in an OLED and a bash-python-php chain to show suspicious (geoderived) IPs trying to access it through its domain name. I'll be an analytical sociologist tomorrow.

Asked GPT to (impossibly) "write a Bluesky post 100% guaranteed to go viral"

Its suggestion: "just saw a guy confidently order a "croissantini" at the coffee shop and the barista nodded like that was a normal word. i live in a simulation."

Then I said "Make it more viral" and things got weird... 🧵

Did this in a couple of classes as well: each one got the class roster and asked to indicate who in the class they know on an ordinal scale (never seen, met, knows etc) as well as asking for some attributes (major, gender, age). Subsequently used when introducing various network metrics etc

Trump’s new tariff math looks a lot like ChatGPT’s ChatGPT may be the White House’s latest economic advisor.

Strong indicators that this was the first AI-generated tariff policy

Who Goes Nazi?, by Dorothy Thompson

August 1941 issue

Funny! Though they do acknowledge that yeah, something went wrong with the labels, and that Putin indeed is the president of Russia and nothing else etc.

YouTube video by Senator Chris Murphy Murphy: Six Weeks In, This White House Is On Its Way To Being The Most Corrupt In U.S. History

2.9 percent in

Opinion | The perils of a screen-obsessed society incapable of patience A new book raises unsettling questions about the social implications of a smartphone-saturated world.

3 days left on my WaPo subscription and yay, managed to get this amazing piece: wapo.st/4hfZWGS

Evil Empire Rage Against The Machine · Album · 1996 · 11 songs

Tonight's album

open.spotify.com/album/24E6rD...

Is This What We Want? 1,000 UK Artists · Album · 2025 · 12 songs

Really good album, basically for anything
open.spotify.com/album/1yUbRS...

Mind you, the post has been originally written up in 2014. Little did I think back then how accidentally true it could've become in the future.

Thanking the World: Exploring gender-based differences in acknowledgment patterns and support systems in theses Research on acknowledgment sections of scientific papers has gained significant attention, but there remains a dearth of studies examining acknowledgm…

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Together with @manika.bsky.social, I looked at acknowledgement sections of theses. Turns out that there's gender inequality here, too, with women much more often acknowledging friends and family than men. Read more in our freshly baked OPEN ACCESS article!

Word

Excited to announce the agenda for the IAS Seminar Series this spring 2025! Don’t miss our stellar lineup of speakers—everyone’s welcome to join! 🌟 #AcademicSky #Sociology #CSS

Fascinating paper by Claudia Goldin on drivers of low fertility in advanced economies.

Countries where economic progress outstrips social progress (in particular, gender equality in household division of labour) see the most rapid falls in fertility..

www.nber.org/papers/w33311

Hey, hey, hey!
You just lit up the way,
So I know what to say!
I'll say: Bombay!

Yes indeed many potential ties between two actors. But they would all still be related to the same "ordered pair" (of actors), which might not make the notion suitable in a multiplex setting

...and as there could be many types of ties (e.g. friendship, admiration, kinship etc) between an "ordered pair" (of actors/nodes), that is missed when describing the potential/existing tie (i.e. the matrix cell) by its row/column. So I would say "potential tie".

"Ordered pairs" works, sure, but hm - that refers to the two actors on either side of the potential or existing tie, i.e. the corresponding row and column headers of said matrix, rather than the actual potential or existing tie itself, i.e. the corresponding cell in the matrix! :-)

The Millennial CAPTCHA Our 3rd most-read article of 2024. - - -

"CAPTCHAs help separate bots from humans. But what if you only want your content to be seen by humans in their 30s with passions for subway tile and posting JLaw reaction GIFs in Slack? For this purpose, we have created the Millennial CAPTCHA."
#McSweeneysTop24of24

2025 = (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9)²

and

2025 = 1³ + 2³ + 3³ + 4³ + 5³ + 6³ + 7³ + 8³ + 9³

How beautiful

Happy new year! Ad astra, ad astra!