Brian C. Keegan, Ph.D. at NICAR26

Opinion | America Cannot Withstand the Economic Shock That’s Coming

www.nytimes.com/2026/03/06/o...

Because that’s what the consultants who have a stranglehold over access to polling and data infrastructure want.

The future of higher education should be modular, and employers must be active partners in shaping what gets taught. The country needs to shift focus from long and expensive degrees that risk obsolescence before completion toward short, affordable job-linked credits that offer on-ramps from education to work. People should be encouraged to pursue credentials that can stand alone or be stacked over time into degrees, bringing people back to campus over the arc of their lives. A midcareer accountant displaced by A.I. doesn't need another master's degree. Instead, she may be better off with a four-month credential and temporary wage insurance that bridges any pay gap and incentivizes her to accept a new role sooner.

The funding model for higher education must change, too. Public investment should hold schools to measurable labor market results, not just enrollments. Texas offers a working example: Community colleges that award credentials in high-demand fields receive greater state funding. If we take this approach, we'll quickly see a survival of the fittest emerge: Innovative programs that meet labor market needs will be rewarded, while underperformers will shutter.

That’s a no from me, dawg.

“MAGA’s fundamental shared quality is a total lack of theory of mind for other people” is a theory that keeps getting validated by reality - look at almost every decision they’ve made in the war with Iran, and how they seem constantly surprised by the unanticipated actions of other parties.

Screenshot of an X post by Dan Scavino reading, “Happening Now in the Oval Office at the @WhiteHouse. God Bless the USA!” with prayer, heart, U.S. flag, and eagle emojis. Below is a photo inside the Oval Office showing Donald Trump seated at the Resolute Desk while a large group of men in suits stand around him in a circle with heads bowed and hands extended in prayer. American flags, gold drapes, and framed portraits are visible in the room.

“Iran is run by religious fanatics.”

aiglossary.news A glossary of AI terms for journalists

For our #NICAR26 panel we threw together this free, open-source glossary of AI terms and foundational concepts that journalists should know.

We will be adding to this! (Forked from prior work by @palewi.re @dwillis.bsky.social et al)

aiglossary.news

NICAR26 sessions | Created with Datawrapper UMAP projection of VoyageAI-4 embeddings for session titles and descriptions

I used VoyageAI to embed #NICAR26 session titles and descriptions and visualized it using UMAP.

Check out the results in @datawrapper.de: www.datawrapper.de/_/maVs5/

It wasn't "cancel culture" when women and people of color got used up, silenced, and dismissed before their careers even began. It only became "cancel culture" when powerful abusers started having established careers momentarily inconvenienced by revelations of what they'd done.

"How can we afford it?!"

Bald white Keegans unite at #NICAR26! Hi @jonkeegan.com 👋

Fun #NICAR26 fact, the schedule is stored as a JSON document: ire-nicar-conference-schedules.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/nicar-2026/n...

Nice pull and an important reminder that, no, things haven't always been like this.

Colorado folks, it's not just in your head, Colorado has experienced one of the largest increases in ICE arrests in Trump 2.0 around the country.

And almost all of this increase is from indiscriminate arrests of people on the street, at their workplaces, at their homes, etc

Interest in posts about the NICAR data journalism conference March 5-8? This Bluesky feed collects posts with either the #NICAR26 or #NICAR2026 hashtag - plus searching for "NICAR" without a hashtag
bsky.app/profile/smac...
(Created with @blueskyfeedcreator.com ) #DDJ

NICAR 2026 March 5-8, 2026 Join IRE & NICAR for our annual data journalism conference – March 5-8, 2026, in Indianapolis, Indiana. NICAR is our annual conferenced focused on all things data journalism. Attendees...

On my way to #NICAR26!

I’m looking forward to learning about leveraging emerging AI capabilities to support public interest values.

www.ire.org/training/con...

The Science Data Lake: A Unified Open Infrastructure Integrating 293 Million Papers Across Eight Scholarly Sources with Embedding-Based Ontology Alignment
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03126

1. A short thread on a Bluesky phenomenon that might be described as "They are a dead-eyed cultist who must be cast out lest the heresy take root!" OP has blocked me for mocking them - I'd usually obscure their name but since they themselves were quote-dunking to demand someone else be blocked ...

From dial-up days to now, travel through Wikipedia's history.

wikipedia25.org/en/which-wik...

We are making updates to the Social Contract for the U.S. to reflect new priorities, features, and enhancements to your experience.

We've highlighted some changes we encourage you to examine:

* We're clarifying details about the "rule of law" and expectations you may have as to your "rights",

lmao

We could spend time investing in infrastructures and institutions that create space for plural and nuanced ways of knowing that include critically evaluating AI-enabled research, but it looks like a lot of folks would rather re-run the 1990s science wars playbook of self-marginalization.

My contribution to today's "AI in Social Science" discourse is a there are whole lot of people on all sides of the issue telling on themselves.

Markets realizing they are going to have to price in risk of third Gulf War on global supply chains instead of just shoveling money to AI companies.

Terrible news, I'm so sorry.

How does AI interact with culture?

We’re thrilled to have Dr. Maria Antoniak (@mariaa.bsky.social) join us at FGVC! Her interdisciplinary work on AI in the humanities brings a new perspective to our workshop: the fine-grained categorization of the intangible parts of culture. See you at #CVPR2026!

Success of congestion pricing should be treated like other policies like taxing millionaires, universal basic income, investing in renewables, etc. etc. that have repeated and convergent evidence of profound success but are litigated into oblivious because of the threat they pose to the status quo.

whoa whoa whoa, the smol bean caucus of Senate Democrats better tell Tillis that senators have no power to do anything to stop the President's agenda unless they have 67 votes.

I am unapologetic about outsourcing administrative drek like annual reporting, IRB, travel justifications, etc. to AI.

Lots of people are suddenly convinced that Claude is going to fundamentally disrupt academic work, but I will believe that when Claude can spend four months going back and forth with the business department about whether expenses from a conference were properly labelled in Concur.