Jill Sheppard

Is this cultural appropriation (yes)

If Flavor Flav can yeet himself down the tube: every country should have a louche elderly musician hype man risking their physical wellbeing for their Olympic team.

Tex Perkins, put your skis on.

Part 1: How do LLMs work? YouTube video by Andrew Perfors

I just created a series of seven deep-dive videos about AI, which I've posted to youtube and now here. 😊

Targeted to laypeople, they explore how LLMs work, what they can do, and what impacts they have on learning, well-being, disinformation, the workplace, the economy, and the environment.

Image via ANU Reporter

#ICYMI #DemocracySausage🎙️ Political scientist @jillesheppard.bsky.social joins @marijataflaga.bsky.social @markgkenny.bsky.social to discuss the politicisation of a tragedy and the deep divisions within the federal coalition and conservative parties in Australia.

🎧 ausi.anu.edu.au/news/first-d....

Frame #19750 from S01 -E10 - Pork Belly-628395

Banning organisations has a sorry history – does Australia really want to go down this road again? | Anne Twomey As the government brings its new hate laws to parliament, it’s worth remembering past attempts suggest legislation used to outlaw political groups have been neither wise nor necessary Australia’s history of banning political groups gives pause for thought as to whether we really want to go down this route again. During the first world war, the Unlawful Associations Act 1916 was enacted and used to ban a group called Industrial Workers of the World. Membership was made a criminal offence. Members could also be deported if they were not British subjects born in Australia. Anne Twomey is a Professor emerita in constitutional law at the University of Sydney Continue reading...

Banning organisations has a sorry history – does Australia really want to go down this road again? | Anne Twomey

Interesting

Do WHAT

What the fuck are you talking about

He's in a Truman Show style experiment that allows him to live a normal life

Pat’s brother trying to wean Ray off Fireman Sam by making it look arthouse

The second most-read PQ journal article this year was:

'The Contradictions of the Albanese Labor Government in Australia: The Promise and Limits of Thin Labourism'

Well done, Rob Manwaring and Emily Foley!

Read it now for free: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Photo of Trinity College Dublin taken by Stefan Müller

Our neighbours at @tcdpoliticalsci.bsky.social are hiring 3 (!) tenure-track faculty members:

– Assistant Professor in Political Economy
– Assistant Professor in International Politics
– Assistant Professor in Political Science

Deadline: 15 Jan 2026
More details: jobs.tcd.ie
@tcddublin.bsky.social

🫶🏻🫶🏻🫶🏻🫶🏻🫶🏻

Title: "Electoral districts as samples from the national population" Abstract: The relationship between national and district-level electoral is a foundational topic in the study of elections. I argue that selected district-level electoral outcomes can be modelled as though they were the outcome of a process involving random sampling without replacement. For seat-level outcomes, district magnitude is analogous to sample size. For vote-level outcomes, I argue that the role of sample size is played by a pseudo-magnitude, or district magnitude plus a constant. My theory gives point predictions and variances for the effective and 'raw' numbers of seat-winning parties, and the effective number of vote-winning parties. I estimate linear and nonlinear Bayesian regressions to test this theory using CLEA data. The principal coefficients in these regressions are within one to three percent of their predicted values; predictions from this theory are between 2% and 45% more accurate than predictions from the leading account of district-level electoral outcomes.

NEW WORKING PAPER: I've been working on something called "Electoral districts as samples from the national population". You can find it here: www.chrishanretty.co.uk/20251217-dis... (1/n)

Guardian should get you!! You're good!!

How meaningful is the Labor 2PP in the teal seats? For the final blog post of 2025, I wanted to look at a question that has come up regularly in the comments, and on psephological websites: how meaningful is the two-party-preferred vote, particular…

Today's blog post is my last one for the year and it examines the question of whether the 2PP (Labor vs Liberal) is meaningful in seats where it is a Liberal vs Independent contests (mostly the teal seats) #auspol

As an organiser, I’ve been banging this drum for a decade now — but more and more the data backs my gut up.

The AES and Macquarie post-election studies for both 2022 and 2025 have shown just how stark a cleavage housing tenure is.

UK politics followers, these graphs are in a paper by @jamesdgriffiths.bsky.social and co (inc. me).

There's so much useful info in them.

The long-term context for the politics of our time, how the 'Brexit elections' differed, though note the Y axes may need to be bigger for the next election!!

Yes! Yes!!

This changes EVERYTHING

Men pools 😞

He takes Ray out one time and there's a bloody man pool??!?

Lol man pool what a dickhead

Omg shut up

Is that a third newsletter

Yeh the other one SUCKS

Having you in my DMs was the second plane

Do you have a second newsletter, what is going ON