Rense Corten 🟥
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rensec.bsky.social
Rense Corten 🟥
@rensec.bsky.social

Sociologist at Utrecht University, NL, studying cooperation, trust, social networks, social media, platform economy, using computational social science and experimental methods. I mostly follow academics.
Also: @[email protected] .. more

Business 20%
Physics 19%

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“I wish I had a garden,” said Toad.

“Here are some flower seeds. Plant them in the ground,” said Frog, “and soon you will have a garden.”

I get increasingly annoyed by the framing of "human vs. AI" (or in this case: "human-AI teaming"). AI is software built and operated by humans, trained on previous work by humans, running on hardware built and operated by humans. It is a human tool used by humans www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Accelerating science with AI
By successfully integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into research workflows, researchers could substantially increase scientific productivity. Last week’s announcement from the White House of the...
www.science.org

Is Cloudflare down again? The @science.org website is unreachable...

I keep getting political e-mail (American politicians begging for money and votes) for Richard Corten. I have even corresponded with with him but there seems very little we can do about it.

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We're hiring a Junior Researcher Data Management 🔎

Help improve metadata workflows, build tools for better data management, and support our training and outreach with researchers.

Know someone who fits? Please share! 🌟

www.eur.nl/en/working-a...
Junior researcher Data Management
Do you have a hands-on mentality and technical and community building skills? Please join our team to develop a strong profile in Research Data Management.
www.eur.nl

"let’s recognize everyone who continues to do the important work of great teaching, despite the discouraging climate" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
My not-so-favorite year
As 2025 comes to a close, it’s a good time to step back and assess one of the most tumultuous years in the history of American science. The second Trump administration has brought cuts to so many impo...
www.science.org

Attention #computationalsocialscience researchers! Data donation has become one of the few methods to independently collect digital platforms data. The proposed GDPR Omnibus amendment threatens to make such research impossible. Please sign the open letter: dsa40collaboratory.eu/open-letter-...
Open Letter: Omnibus – DSA 40 Collaboratory
dsa40collaboratory.eu

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No, YOU'RE crying on the train into work...
xkcd.com/3172/
Fifteen Years
xkcd.com
I wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture.

They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1
Baby names aren’t just personal choices; they reflect culture, geography, gender, identity, and as i've been investigating, politics too. I’ve been analyzing 50 years of U.S. baby naming to see how they map onto political polarization in the U.S.
Here’s what I found 🧵
Recently accepted by #QJE, “Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges,” by Chetty (@Oppinsights), Deming, and Friedman: doi.org/10.1093/qje/...
Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges*
Abstract. We use anonymized admissions data from several colleges linked to income tax records and SAT and ACT test scores to study the determinants and ca
doi.org

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Today the European Commission unveiled its Digital Omnibus Package, reopening and weakening core parts of the EU’s digital rulebook, including crucial safeguards in the AI Act. This is a seriously concerning shift for rights and accountability in Europe.

cdt.org/insights/cdt...
CDT Europe’s Statement on the Digital Omnibus Package
On 19 November, the European Commission published the Digital Omnibus Package; a twinset of proposals suggesting amendments to crucial laws underpinning the EU digital rulebook, including the General ...
cdt.org

Glad it was useful 😉
it is almost as if accommodating and conceding to far right ideas legitimizes them and signals to voters that the far right is a legitimate choice for governance
The Danish Social Democrats are currently on course for their worst election result since at least the Second World War, despite their brand of far-right accommodationism being touted as a blueprint for other centre-left parties.

This was right after I finished my dissertation, so a sudden decrease is more likely!
Correct link to the blog by Cox: tinyurl.com/28taeyet
The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss - The Survey Center on American Life
The May 2021 American Perspectives Survey finds that Americans report having fewer close friendships than they once did, talking to their friends less often, and relying less on their friends for pers...
tinyurl.com

7/7 In conclusion, although this is an elegant and theoretically interesting model, if the empirical premise of its explanation for polarization does not hold, I'm not sure what to make of it.

6/7 Finally, such a marked increase in connectivity cause by social media is not known in the (sociological) literature on personal networks, nor does it show up in other data sources (e.g., tinyurl.com/28taeyet)%3E Indeed, this would have been remarkable discovery, worthy of a paper in itself!
The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss - The Survey Center on American Life
The May 2021 American Perspectives Survey finds that Americans report having fewer close friendships than they once did, talking to their friends less often, and relying less on their friends for pers...
tinyurl.com

5/7 Most of the "transition" around 2008 seems driven by the fact that almost all data points before and after are based on different measurement instruments, respectively name generators ("with whom did you discuss...?") and asking for aggregated numbers ("how many close friends do you have?")

4/7 The data sources for some of the data points are rather unclear. For example, to my knowledge, core discussion networks were not measured in the GSS after 2010 but they are reported in the Figure. Also some other data points (e.g., for Norway and Germany) are attributed to the wrong data sources

3/7 The supposed "transition" in connectivity around 2008 is based on the data points of 4 countries, but then compared to polarization in only the US. If one would take only the US data points for connectivity too, the transition is much less clear

2/7 The selection of countries is strangely selective, focusing only on the US and North-West Europe

This is a very interesting paper but the empirical evidence presented for an increase in connectivity (in their Fig. 1E) is rather problematic. A little thread 👇(1/7):
Is it possible that social media, which promised to connect the world, instead increased polarization? A model of human social dynamics predicts a sharp transition into a polarized state above a certain threshold of social connectivity. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/Gym350XnNW8

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Kiesraad published a pre-release of the 2025 election results, but the data isn't analysis-friendly.

Our @odissei-soda.bsky.social team turned it into an easy-to-use database for researchers. It’s open data and ready to explore. Download & code 👉 github.com/sodascience/...

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Job Opportunity! We're looking for a post-doc or late doc to join our team at @gesis.org and @konsortswd.bsky.social (hi @nfdi.de)! You'll work on enhancing comparability of German survey data across projects & disciplines. Strong German skills & interest in social structure required. Check it out:
Details
GESIS Leibniz Institut für Sozialwissenschaften
www.gesis.org

Following up on this: should we start new journals (which creates huge coordination problems) or try to wrangle our beloved top journals out of the hands of the big publishers? Are there any good examples/strategies for the latter?

Thanks for rubbing it in...

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We are beyond excited to reveal the full line-up for our Environmental Signaling in Plants summer school 2026!

Registration is now open here eps.sites.uu.nl - we look forward to seeing you in Utrecht on 24th-26th August!