Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Daniela Scur

Roya Talibova @royatalibova.bsky.social · 19h

Joel Mokyr invited me to present my JMP at an econ workshop when I was still a grad student (the only grad student among presenters). I was terrified. Spotting me lost at dinner, he came over to discuss my work with genuine curiosity. That early encouragement meant a lot. Glad to see him honored.

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Reposted by Daniela Scur

Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 18h

www.canarymedia.com/articles/cle...
"Australia doesn’t just excel at big renewables and big batteries. Four million homes produce rooftop solar; a few weeks ago, those households temporarily supplied 55% of demand on the National Electricity Market, Westerman said."

As coal fades, Australia looks to realize dream of 100% renewable…

The country’s grid operator says shifting from coal to clean power is not only possible but inevitable. The work there could provide a road map for other…

www.canarymedia.com

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Centre for Economic Performance @cep-lse.bsky.social · 23h

Huge congratulations to Philippe Aghion, Peter Howitt and Joel Mokyr, on being awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences!

www.nobelprize.org

The official website of the Nobel Prize - NobelPrize.org

The Nobel Prize rewards science, humanism and peace efforts. This is one of the central concepts in the will of Alfred Nobel, and it also permeates the outreach activities that have been developed for...

www.nobelprize.org

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Go Green @ecowarriorss.bsky.social · 1d

Best news I have heard in a long time
The New South Wales government has unveiled plans for the Great Koala National Park, a 475,000-hectare reserve to protect 12,000 koalas
news.mongabay.com/2025/10/aust...

Australia to create a national park for 12,000 koalas

Few animals tug at Australian hearts like the koala. Yet the marsupial, once common along the eastern seaboard, was declared endangered in New South Wales (NSW) in 2022. Habitat loss, climate stress, ...

news.mongabay.com

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Reposted by Daniela Scur

John Holbein @johnholbein1.bsky.social · 1d

This is your periodic reminder that you can add coffee stains to your LaTeX documents.

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Reposted by Daniela Scur

UNSW Economics Dept @unswecon.bsky.social · 3d

Our PhD student Sydney Chauwa Phir on the welfare impact of misclassifying demand and supply shocks in a New Keynesian framework where monetary policy reacts more to demand-driven than supply-driven inflation.

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Abhijeet Singh @singhabhi.bsky.social · 4d

Come work with me!

Stockholm Sch of Econ (@handels_sse ) is hiring Assistant Professors this year, both in Economics (my dept) and in Finance.

By revealed preference, I think it’s a great place to work + a lovely city to live in.

Econ advert below:

jobs.hhs.se/en/job/stock...

Tenure Track, Assistant Professor Position at The Department of Economics

Description and QualificationThe Department of Economics at the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE) seeks candidates for one tenure-track assistant professor po...

jobs.hhs.se

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Reposted by Daniela Scur

The Washington Post @washingtonpost.com · 4d

Bumi the 1-year-old rockhopper penguin played during a bubble enrichment activity at the Saint Louis Zoo.

Southern rockhopper penguins, like Bumi, are listed as a vulnerable species by the World Wildlife Fund.

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Daniela Scur @danielascur.bsky.social · 4d

TIL!

Merriam-Webster @merriam-webster.com · 4d

lede = introductory section in journalism

bury the lede = hiding the most relevant pieces of a story within other distracting information

Allegedly, it’s spelled ‘lede’ to avoid confusion with ‘lead,’ which was the strip of metal that would separate lines of type.

Daniela Scur @danielascur.bsky.social · 5d

Super interesting work, important and expertly summarized by @marome1.bsky.social (but also go read the paper loads of great details there!)

Mauricio Romero @marome1.bsky.social · 5d

Officially forthcoming at @jlaborecon.bsky.social, our new paper with Melissa Adelman, Francisco Haimovich, and Emmanuel Vazquez on the results from a large experiment with 4,000 schools on how to reduce dropout between primary and secondary schools in Guatemala. Short 🧵below #EconSky

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Reposted by Daniela Scur

Paul Raschky @raschky.bsky.social · 7d

We have put together a template repository, the SoDa Replicator, to help you build reproducible and collaborative projects and have the content automatically reviewed against a custom replication checklist. Feedback welcome.

github.com/sodalabsio/s...

Video tuorials: youtube.com/@sodareplica...

This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn

lnkd.in

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Daniela Scur @danielascur.bsky.social · 7d

Again, the dictionary account FTW

Merriam-Webster @merriam-webster.com · 7d

Mars was the Roman god of war.
That’s why we say ‘martial arts,' ‘martial law,' and 'court martial.'

Marshall was the Roman god of designer fashion at discount prices.
That’s why we have Marshall’s.

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Reposted by Daniela Scur

WeRateDogs @weratedogs.com · 7d

This is Barrett. He keeps trying to howl along with his big sister Hazel. Personally finds the practice repulsive but refuses to be left out. 13/10 for both (TT: jennyrae23)

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Daniela Scur @danielascur.bsky.social · 10d

I feel seen

The Ass is the father of the legs @internethippo.bsky.social · 10d

"We're going to create superintelligence" How about making outlook search work first. How about that

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Daniela Scur @danielascur.bsky.social · 11d

Lol the JUDGEMENT in her eyes, right??? "Uhm........ Do I have to draw this for you? It happens every day. How do you not know this already?"

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Daniela Scur @danielascur.bsky.social · 11d

My doggo Arran SENSES 3pm. She decided that's ball time, and every day anyone is home at 3pm she will come and do her ball dance until you to outside and play ball with her.

Aussie Shephard dog sneaking her face around a chair, begging to go outside and play ball

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Reposted by Daniela Scur

Rafiuddin (Rafi) Najam @rnajam.bsky.social · 11d

Exciting news. We are hiring a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Public Policy. Focus areas: environmental policy, international development, or poverty.
Link:
unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307...

Submission Deadline: November 3, 2025.
Don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions.

Assistant Professor

This position is located in the Department of Public Policy within the College of Arts and Sciences. This tenure-track position includes 40% teaching, 40% research, and 20% service to the department. ...

unc.peopleadmin.com

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Daniela Scur @danielascur.bsky.social · 12d

Bestie sent me this today:

"I just saw a video where a woman said:

'I'm not being mean, I'm just not actively making you comfortable'

And henceforth I will be using that line until the day I die."

And oh sister, I love it.

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Reposted by Daniela Scur

Paul Bruno @paul-bruno.com · 13d

For grad students or postdocs out there: let me know if you'd like to present in my department's (Ed Policy, Org, & Leadership) Quantitative Working Group meeting Wednesday of next week (October 8) at 3pm Central time. Work at any stage is fine, it's very informal. I have a presenter gap this month.

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Rafe Meager (they/them) @economeager.bsky.social · 15d

Today let us read Baydin et al (2018) Automatic Differentiation in Machine Learning: A Survey

arxiv.org/pdf/1502.05767

I have screenshotted the first three paragraphs of the introduction. It reads:

Methods for the computation of derivatives in computer programs can be classified into four
categories: (1) manually working out derivatives and coding them; (2) numerical differentiation using finite difference approximations; (3) symbolic differentiation using expression
manipulation in computer algebra systems such as Mathematica, Maxima, and Maple; and
(4) automatic differentiation, also called algorithmic differentiation, which is the subject
matter of this paper.
Conventionally, many methods in machine learning have required the evaluation of
derivatives and most of the traditional learning algorithms have relied on the computation of gradients and Hessians of an objective function (Sra et al., 2011). When introducing
new models, machine learning researchers have spent considerable effort on the manual
derivation of analytical derivatives to subsequently plug these into standard optimization
procedures such as L-BFGS (Zhu et al., 1997) or stochastic gradient descent (Bottou, 1998).
Manual differentiation is time consuming and prone to error. Of the other alternatives, numerical differentiation is simple to implement but can be highly inaccurate due to round-off
and truncation errors (Jerrell, 1997); more importantly, it scales poorly for gradients, rendering it inappropriate for machine learning where gradients with respect to millions of
parameters are commonly needed. Symbolic differentiation addresses the weaknesses of
both the manual and numerical methods, but often results in complex and cryptic expressions plagued with the problem of “expression swell” (Corliss, 1988). Furthermore, manual
and symbolic methods require models to be defined as closed-form expressions, ruling out
or severely limiting algorithmic control flow and expressivity.
We are concerned with the powerful fourth technique, automatic differentiation (AD).
AD performs a non-standard interpretation of a given c…

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Daniela Scur @danielascur.bsky.social · 16d

Except now I have this song in my head

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Daniela Scur @danielascur.bsky.social · 16d

10/10. No notes.

McSweeney's @mcsweeneys.net · 16d

It's Avril Lavigne's birthday today, so we are contractually obligated to re-share this banger from our archives.

The Girl from Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8er Boi” Responds 18 Years Later

I’m the unnamed girl from Avril Lavigne’s 2002 hit, “Sk8er Boi” and I’m here to set the record straight after 18 years of silence. I’m finally read...

buff.ly

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Reposted by Daniela Scur

VoxDev @voxdev.bsky.social · Sep 10

🆕 Culture and economic development 📢

Today on VoxDevTalks, Natalie Bau (UCLA), @saralowes.bsky.social (@ucsandiego.bsky.social) & @eduardomontero.bsky.social (Harris School of Public Policy) discuss how culture shapes economic policy and, consequently, development: voxdev.org/topic/instit...

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Reposted by Daniela Scur

Peter Hull @instrumenthull.bsky.social · 18d

Come hear what Larry Katz, Xavier D'Haultfoeuille, Kei Hirano, Francesca Molinari, and Andres Santos think about publishing econometrics in general interest journals!

Tomorrow's Chamberlain Seminar: 12pm ET

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Daniela Scur @danielascur.bsky.social · 18d

RIGHT??? I'm obsessed with it. When I move it comes with me in my hand luggage!

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