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Viral Polls Are Not Representative Polls
Political scientist Kevin Reuning scrapes 90 days of poll posts from a prolific Bluesky polling account, extracts each result with an LLM, and shows that the polls that get reposted most are the ones that look better for Democrats than the race average, so people who follow polls through their feeds see a skewed picture.
5 min · 1,131 words
How many stars does it take to find a cluster?A pre-registered search for co-moving stars in Gaia DR3, and an honest measure of what it can and cannot see.
Shaurya describes a pre-registered search for groups of co-moving stars within about 500 parsecs of the Sun using Gaia DR3. The pipeline recovers known clusters and its sensitivity is measured by injection tests (roughly 10 surviving members beyond 140 pc), but it produces too many false positives to trust a new detection, and a classifier did not fully fix that.
6 min · 1,475 words
The Economic Complexity of the Western Roman Empire
Michele Coscia explains how he and co-authors inferred the economic complexity of the Western Roman Empire from occupations recorded in Latin inscriptions (the LIST dataset), correcting for status and gender biases. Latium scored highest, and Roman-era complexity for modern-country territories correlates significantly with present-day Economic Complexity Index values.
4 min · 935 words
Positron October Release Highlights
Positron is Posit’s new, next-generation IDE for data science. Positron is designed to be an extensible, polyglot tool for exploring data and reproducible authoring in Python, R, and more.
6 min · 1,320 words
The new season of Survivor airs next week. My favorite thing about watching Survivor is arguing about the strategy of the show: who should have won the season? Is it better to play under the radar? Or does making big moves set you up to win? Who is the greatest player of all time: Cirie? Tony? Boston Rob? I thought it’d be fun to build a machine learning model to help answer these questions.
13 min · 3,012 words