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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