@sociologian
Sociologist and Demographer at RAND. Research mostly on social connection, substance use (alcohol and cannabis), and migration, but with many tangents. Opinions = my own, RTs ≠ endorsements. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=iRep51wAAAAJ&hl=en
Radio playlists have shrunk, as has diversity in stations. Dedicated TV and video channels have fallen by the wayside. Streaming services like Spotify are not very appealing to me (though I discovered my favorite album of 2025 on it last year - Girl With No Face by Allie X, so I'll reconsider).
The article says peak musical influence for males is age 14. I listened to Iron Maiden at 14. Now, decades later, I'll see them play live two nights in a row, so that checks out. I still listen to new artists every year, but in some ways it's gotten harder to be exposed to new artists.
@genebaxter.bsky.social I just saw that my home province of British Columbia is moving to permanent Daylight Saving Time.
I got higher grades in math than I did in first year sociology, but the subject matter was so relevant to my everyday life that I switched majors. Very limited regrets. Is he thinking of something applied or academic in the long run?
"It’s not that low birth rates don’t present real challenges. It’s that the solution to those challenges isn’t to try to raise birth rates. We need to ... adapt [and] invest in the populations and institutions we have rather than chasing unattainable population targets."
This figure plots net migration and natural change rates (per 1,000 population) for the United States from 1960to 2050. Natural change trends steadily downwards from the early 2020s and turns negative at 2043. Net migration rates from about 2010 have generally been substantially higher than natural change rates, indicating they contribute more to population growth than births and deaths alone.
The UN World Population Prospects data help illustrate the importance of international migration for the US population. Natural Change is population change due solely to births and deaths. Without migration, current projections show natural change turns negative around 2043.
What a wild finish, though!
❤️
Check out the (possible) lingering impact "Freedom Fries" had on political preference for French Fries.
Fantastic. I'm surprised PAA hasn't already pounced on this. I mean PAA "the Potato Association of America," not the @popassocamerica.bsky.social I usually mean when I say PAA. www.potatoassociation.org/Pages/defaul...
“Friends, please – and we cannot emphasize this enough – stop hiding animals in weird places on your body and then trying to sneak them through airport security,” the TSA said..." www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
brown rice and green peppers!
Delighted to see Iron Maiden thriving 50 years in, getting news coverage and new fans. Also amused to see the footnote to this article that "An earlier version incorrectly said Iron Maiden had not released any greatest hits compilations." (they have at least 6). www.theguardian.com/music/2026/j...
"The cost of raising a child in China is more than 6.3x as high as its GDP per capita, compared with 4.11x in the US...China also removed condoms from the list of VAT-exempt items raising concerns that the gov't is trying to make it harder to avoid pregnancy."
www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...
It's been just over a year since many academics and sociology folks came over to Bluesky. Thought Id share for some more community building and the later arrivals. Feel free to add other sections and areas to the list and or request to be added to any packs!
“This is not a first for European countries,” said Le Minez, highlighting that 20 of the EU’s 27 countries had registered more deaths than births in 2024. “But this time, this is also the case for France.” www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...
Excited to see this research come out! First author Max Griswold was a RAND School fellow at the time! We provide evidence for the utility of LLMs to assess sentiment and stance in huge amounts of text data, with some recommendations for use.
Watched it and generally enjoyed it last night, other than a scene where it is nighttime in France and California at the same time. (Not a spoiler).
I hear they rely now on machine learning models on the text of letters to the North Pole to evaluate whether kids are naughty or nice. Calling it "Sentiment And Naughtiness Text Analysis" or SANTA for short
One data source we used was all available tweets from the 1% Twitter Firehose API between January 5, 2020 and August 15, 2022. Related: sadly, last night I accidentally updated my Twitter phone app for the first time since it became X (July 2023) and I lost the Twitter Bird icon.
More findings: 2) tuning leads to notable improvements over pretrained models, 3) cross-target tuning can provide a viable alternative to in-target tuning in some settings, and 4) complex prompting strategies lead to improvements over pretrained models but underperform tuning approaches. 2/2
New publication alert! In this study, we evaluate lexicon-based models, supervised models, and LLMs for stance detection using two corpuses of social media data. Our findings demonstrate that: 1) LLMs can distinguish stance on a specific target even when multiple subjects are mentioned...1/2
Sociologists! Were any of you involved with the nomination/development of the CIP Code: 45.0102 Social Science, Research Methodology and Quantitative Methods? Would love to get in touch. The nomination apparently included supporting materials from @asanews.bsky.social
nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cipcod...
Another daily reminder that other than the Baby Boom cohort, these other cohorts are all just loosely defined without real agreement. They didn't even get the Boomer age correct here.
I like that only the opossum is singled out for peculiar flavor here. Did any pages look like well-used recipes with spills/stains?
New from me: In the New Republic @newrepublic.com, I wrote that we should refuse to choose between the easy way and the hard way to boost birth rates.
This new commentary over at the Council on Foreign Relations, based on work with my colleagues at RAND, highlights a few ways women in China have been impacted by the legacy of the One Child Policy and China's hukou (household registration) system.
www.cfr.org/blog/gendere...
SMALLER BRAINS
