Melissa Sands

Why covid-19 is “a vascular disease masquerading as a respiratory one” Covid-19 is not just a respiratory infection. Cardiovascular symptoms are seen in both acute and long covid. Katharine Lang reports on what we’ve learnt since the onset of the pandemic Cardiovascular...

covid is “a vascular disease masquerading as a respiratory one”

www.bmj.com/content/392/...

📢 Call for Hidden Papers & Data on Ingroup Favoritism in Dictator Games

We look for unpublished and hard-to-access experimental studies for our meta-analysis!

Inclusion criteria: no deception, adults, manipulation of group membership of dictator game recipients.

All tips and data very welcome!

Early career researchers (especially in Europe / UK, but all are welcome):

Apply to present your work on the urban/rural divide (very broadly defined!) @ LSE

@lseinequalities.bsky.social @lsegovernment.bsky.social

Read the paper here, open access.

We've also created an interactive dashboard where you can explore our data in detail.

You can look at specific street view images, and see the distributions of LMM and human ratings across all four measures, split by gender if desired.

GitHub - joehigton/GenAILocalBias Contribute to joehigton/GenAILocalBias development by creating an account on GitHub.

Of course, these models may (potentially) improve. But while the specific relationships may change, the broad patterns reflect hard-to-resolve biases.

To that end, the entire workflow is public and reproducible, so that future models can be tested with the same framework and data.

We then study these relationships by gender. LMMs easily perform worst in recovering the views of Detroit men.

Why? This difficult-to-reach population is likely poorly represented in training data/reinforcement feedback. It may be that this problem is hard to resolve even with better models.

We then asked the same questions of two human samples: a U.S. nationally representative sample and Detroit-representative sample (through DMACS at @umfordschool.bsky.social).

We then compare these responses, two ways. In general, LMMs better recover national evaluations than local ones.

We pulled tens of thousands of open-source street view images from Detroit. We processed the images, and then sampled 85 for closer analysis.

For each, we queried five LMMs (propietary and open-source) 30 times for ratings on wealth, safety (day and night), and disorder.

Can Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) extract features of urban neighborhoods from street-view images?

New with Paige Bollen (OSU) and @joehigton.bsky.social (NYU): Sometimes, but the models better recover national assessments that local ones, even w/additional prompting (which can make things worse!)

🚨Job News: Postdoc positions in LSE Government Department 🚨

Apply to work with the brilliant and wonderful Carl Muller-Crepon @carlmc.bsky.social on his BORDERS ERC project at LSE @lsegovernment.bsky.social

jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

I’m with you. I don’t even own a blow dryer 🫣.

#curlyhairproblems

LSE - Political Economy and Political Science Early Career Workshop We invite submissions for the LSE Political Economy and Political Science Early Career Workshop. This workshop is designed to support the development of early-career scholars’ research, including PhD,...

📢 Call for Submissions

UK-based early career researchers in political science, political economy & public policy: apply to our January Early Career Workshop at LSE.
🗓️ Deadline: 28 Dec 2025
🔗 forms.gle/HXU4DnBq9HmX...

the case for slower, better/more careful research papers in poli sci gets another data point in its favor

2. Popper tells us that we should be our own best skeptics. Unfortunately our professional incentives often make us the opposite.

As we conduct research, we should all be self-skeptical and self-questioning and self-doubting. We should expose our own thinking and decisions to close examination.

As I reflect on this, three thoughts:

1. This case is only symptomatic of a bigger problem; increasingly broken incentive structures in our disciplines and industry.

Our job is *not* to publish for the sake of publishing. It is to produce and advance *knowledge*. This process is hard and slow.

Certainly comports w/ my personal experience

🙌🏼 happy to chip in to buy a billboard

Biased as I am, this is a great paper on the limits of current generative AI models for learning about fundamentally subjective assessments (in this case, evaluating features of neighborhoods from photographs).

Logo of Political Analysis on a yellow and red background with the hashtag OpenAccess at the bottom.

#OpenAccess from @polanalysis.bsky.social -

Nationally Representative, Locally Misaligned: The Biases of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Neighborhood Perception - https://cup.org/3Kw6VkD

- Paige Bollen, @joehigton.bsky.social & @msands.bsky.social

#FirstView

"Benchmarking parallel trends violations in regression imputation difference-in-differences" https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/ngr3d_v1

New working paper! - zikai.li and I look at the problem of assessing pre-trends using one of the "new" DiD methods - fixed effects regression imputation. tl;dr - don't use the same regression you used to impute post-treatment to also impute pre-treatment. osf.io/preprints/so... (1/14)

Best consumed in it’s entirety in one sitting… like their 1998 album

Where we are at, or where we *think* we are at? or the fact that there’s no longer a meaningful distinction?

Excited to share this new project, coauthored w/ @brycejdietrich.bsky.social , a VR extension of our field experiment on racial avoidance on NYC sidewalks.

PSA: stay👏🏼 home👏🏼when👏🏼you’re👏🏼sick

If you can’t stay home, wear a mask. Lots of sickness, including covid, going around. Chances are you have a vulnerable friend, colleague, etc and may not even know it. Do it for them, if not for everyone around who doesn’t want your germs.

Martin Kulldorff & @MartinKu...•9/10/23 S.•• "One of the most disturbing images of the Covid-19 pandemic was when a teacher .. forced a mask on a crying toddler .. In some ways, the U.S. government.. treated all of us like toddlers, compelling us to endure draconian Covid measures" - @HRaleighspeaks

RFK Jr’s ACIP pick, Martin Kulldorff, said one of the most disturbing images from the pandemic was a toddler crying about having to wear a mask. I see toddlers cry about everything all the time, and I found it far more disturbing to see refrigerator trucks full of body bags outside of the hospitals…

American Political Science Review (2019) 113, 4, 1012-1028 doi: 10.1017/S0003055419000340 © American Political Science Association 2019 Can Violent Protest Change Local Policy Support? Evidence from the Aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles Riot RYAN D. ENOS Harvard University AARON R. KAUFMAN New York University, Abu Dhabi MELISSA L. SANDS University of California, Merced iolent protests are dramatic political events, yet we know little about the effect of these events on political behavior. While scholars typically treat violent protests as deliberate acts undertaken in pursuit of specific goals, due to a lack of appropriate data and difficulty in causal identification, there scant evidence of whether riots can actually increase support for these goals. Using geocoded data, we alyze measures of policy support before and after the 1992 Los Angeles riot - one of the mosthigh-profile events of political violence in recent American history — that occurred just prior to an election. Contrary to some expectations from the academic literature and the popular press, we find that the riot caused a marked liberal shift in policy support at the polls. Investigating the sources of this shift, we find that it was likely the result of increased mobilization of both African American and white voters. Remarkably, this mobilization endures over a decade later.

In the modern era, even “riots” generate support, not backlash

www.cambridge.org/core/service...

Info sheet about Bophelo. Check out https://bophelodaycare.co.za/.

Check out https://bophelodaycare.co.za/

A close friend of mine sits on the board of Bophelo Daycare in Johannesburg, a place for children with severe disabilities. They're extremely well run & high impact, but have financial difficulties due to low enrolment. We've just sponsored a child from 6 months. If you want to match, please DM.

The World Is Wooing U.S. Researchers Shunned by Trump

…Except for the UK, where Labour wants to discourage international students from coming here www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/b...