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dustinstoltz.com
Dᴜsᴛɪɴ Sᴛᴏʟᴛᴢ
@dustinstoltz.com
140 followers 190 following 3 posts
Sociologist | Computational Social Science | Culture and Cognition

www.dustinstoltz.com

Mapping Texts: www.textmapping.com

Mastodon: fediscience.org/@dustinstoltz
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Reposted by Dᴜsᴛɪɴ Sᴛᴏʟᴛᴢ
hansonmark.bsky.social
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
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system76.bsky.social
Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS and COSMIC Epoch 1 will officially release on December 11th (UTC -7). We're getting close!!
October 29, 2025 at 4:56 PM
Reposted by Dᴜsᴛɪɴ Sᴛᴏʟᴛᴢ
vickiboykis.com
something I’ve been thinking about is that all our content retrieval systems are biased towards recency rather than quality which makes it extremely hard to discover old good books, movies, blog posts, etc
September 19, 2025 at 6:24 PM
Reposted by Dᴜsᴛɪɴ Sᴛᴏʟᴛᴢ
kjhealy.co
I gave the closing keynote at posit::conf in September and it's available to watch. When you find yourself giving a talk with a little tiny microphone stuck to the side of your head you have to ask yourself some hard questions, but the talk was partly about that.

youtu.be/ZamPCbvBAgE
Trustworthy Data Visualization (Kieran Healy, Duke University) | posit::conf(2025)
YouTube video by Posit PBC
youtu.be
November 7, 2025 at 9:20 PM
Reposted by Dᴜsᴛɪɴ Sᴛᴏʟᴛᴢ
tristanbridges.bsky.social
Thrilled to see Raewyn and my new book up at Polity. Easily the greatest experience and honor of my career to work on this book with my academic idol. We have done so many wonderful things in this edition. I hope others love it as much as we have loved writing it. www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?b...
Gender: In A World Perspective
Gender: In A World Perspective, How can we understand gender in the contemporary world? What psychological differences now exist between women and men? How are masculinities and femininities made? And...
www.politybooks.com
October 24, 2025 at 11:14 PM
Reposted by Dᴜsᴛɪɴ Sᴛᴏʟᴛᴢ
merriam-webster.com
We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.
October 1, 2025 at 2:38 PM
Reposted by Dᴜsᴛɪɴ Sᴛᴏʟᴛᴢ
michaelleewood.bsky.social
Here is the reminder to update your institutional isomorphism slides
alexhanna.bsky.social Alex Hanna @alexhanna.bsky.social · Sep 24
“When it comes to AI adoption, many companies aren’t guided by strategy but by ‘Fomo’,” said Haritha Khandabattu, senior director analyst at consultancy Gartner.

www.ft.com/content/e93e...
America’s top companies keep talking about AI — but can’t explain the upsides
FT analysis of hundreds of filings suggests the S&P 500 businesses are clearer about the risks than benefits
www.ft.com
September 24, 2025 at 3:07 PM
Reposted by Dᴜsᴛɪɴ Sᴛᴏʟᴛᴢ
ryanbeckwith.bsky.social
If you have an extra $10 a month to spare, here's a list of worker-owned cooperative news sites you might want to support:

• 404 Media
• Defector
• The Flytrap
• Flaming Hydra
• The Appeal
• Aftermath
• Racket
• Hell Gate
• The 51st
• The Colorado Sun
• Range Media
• Discourse Blog
• Pop Heist
September 19, 2025 at 2:00 PM
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owasow.bsky.social
“In 1946 amid persistent racial divisions, popular radio series Adventures of Superman launched Operation Intolerance, a sequence of new episodes promoting equality, rejecting racial discrimination and exposing the KKK’s bigotry. We find lasting impacts…” dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...
It's a Bird, it's a Plane, it's Superman! Using Mass Media to Fight Intolerance This paper investigates the role of mass media in shaping racial tolerance and advancing civil rights in the post-WWII United States. We study the first attempt in the history of mass media to use a radio broadcast targeted at children to promote an inclusive American society. In 1946, amid persistent racial divisions, the popular radio series The Adventures of Superman launched Operation Intolerance, a sequence of new episodes promoting equality, rejecting racial discrimination, and exposing the KKK's bigotry. Using digitized historical data on U.S. radio stations and state-of-the-art radio propagation models, we compute geographic exposure to the broadcasts. Exploiting exogenous exposure to the broadcasts, we employ a cohort study design to analyze individual-level data from 1964 to 1980–a crucial period for civil rights activism and legislation in the United States. We find lasting impacts on those exposed as children, including increased support for civil rights, improved interraci Figure 1 reveals that the proportion of words related to intolerance increased by 3.2 times in the 12 months following the start of Operation Intolerance, compared to the pre-intervention period. Panel A of Figure 5 plots the average of the index for different cohorts. We first observe that younger cohorts in 1946 are more supportive of civil rights compared to those born before 1946. This is in line with American society becoming more progressive over time. We find a difference of 0.29 standard deviations between the respondents in the age cohort -10 (i.e., those born in the years 1954–1958) and those in the age cohort 50
July 10, 2024 at 3:03 PM
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kbkarlson.bsky.social
Now appearing in the most recent volume of @sfjournal.bsky.social, my paper with the beyond outstanding @filippogch.bsky.social on how family background shapes exposure to income volatility across the life course in 🇺🇸, 🇩🇪, and 🇩🇰!

@erc.europa.eu #sociology

academic.oup.com/sf/article/1...
Family background and life cycle earnings volatility: evidence from brother correlations in Denmark, Germany, and the United States
Abstract. While stratification scholars have extensively examined intergenerational associations in lifetime income, they have mostly disregarded how famil
academic.oup.com
July 13, 2025 at 6:22 PM
Reposted by Dᴜsᴛɪɴ Sᴛᴏʟᴛᴢ
sashamtl.bsky.social
Does a ChatGPT query really use ten times more energy than a Google search? Does training any AI model emit as much CO2 as 5 cars? and can AI help us reduce global GHG emissions by 10%? 🤔

We tracked down the origins of these numbers 🕵‍♀️ and wrote a paper about it!

arxiv.org/abs/2506.15572
June 20, 2025 at 2:44 PM
Reposted by Dᴜsᴛɪɴ Sᴛᴏʟᴛᴢ
andrew.heiss.phd
*Another* blog post about @posit.co's Positron! Its Remote Explorer feature lets you connect to other computers via SSH, including locally-running Docker containers, which means you can write and run code in version-locked #rstats environments! www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2025/07...
Positron connected to a not-really-remote remote session inside a Docker container
July 5, 2025 at 5:20 PM
Reposted by Dᴜsᴛɪɴ Sᴛᴏʟᴛᴢ
lauraknelson.bsky.social
Update: www.lauraknelson.com/publication/...
June 23, 2025 at 8:09 PM
Reposted by Dᴜsᴛɪɴ Sᴛᴏʟᴛᴢ
willie-agnew.bsky.social
Now out in Nature: we analyzed 19,000 computer vision papers and the 20,000+ patents citing them and found that most CV papers are used in surveillance enabling CV patents. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
www.nature.com
June 26, 2025 at 11:45 AM
Reposted by Dᴜsᴛɪɴ Sᴛᴏʟᴛᴢ
hendrik-erz.de
+++ ANNOUNCEMENT +++

I'm currently on the job market, looking for Postdoc opportunities (end of 2025/early 2026).

If you are — or know someone who is — in need of a political sociologist/computational social scientist, please get in touch or share my CV!

More info: www.hendrik-erz.de
Hendrik Erz
PhD Student at the IAS, Linköping University (Sweden)
www.hendrik-erz.de
June 24, 2025 at 7:40 AM
Reposted by Dᴜsᴛɪɴ Sᴛᴏʟᴛᴢ
tkeskinturk.bsky.social
a new article in Political Psychology: osf.io/rhf4q

we argue that studies of belief change have an identifiability problem much like the APC problem: the composition of change (who changed or how much they changed) is observationally confounded.

with @pablobellode.bsky.social & @stephenvaisey.com:
June 24, 2025 at 9:07 AM
Reposted by Dᴜsᴛɪɴ Sᴛᴏʟᴛᴢ
selcanmutgan.bsky.social
🧵1/8
In our new #OA article, we studied the drivers of ethnic school segregation.
Research on segregation often points to parental preferences, but what if it's not just about what parents want, but also what options they actually have?

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcaf027
June 9, 2025 at 12:12 PM
Reposted by Dᴜsᴛɪɴ Sᴛᴏʟᴛᴢ
abeba.bsky.social
"frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities. Moreover, they exhibit a counter-intuitive scaling limit: their reasoning effort increases with problem complexity up to a point, then declines despite having an adequate token budge" ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-i...
Recent generations of frontier language models have introduced Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that generate detailed thinking processes before providing answers. While these models demonstrate improved performance on reasoning benchmarks, their fundamental capabilities, scal- ing properties, and limitations remain insufficiently understood. Current evaluations primarily fo- cus on established mathematical and coding benchmarks, emphasizing final answer accuracy. How- ever, this evaluation paradigm often suffers from data contamination and does not provide insights into the reasoning traces’ structure and quality. In this work, we systematically investigate these gaps with the help of controllable puzzle environments that allow precise manipulation of composi- tional complexity while maintaining consistent logical structures. This setup enables the analysis of not only final answers but also the internal reasoning traces, offering insights into how LRMs “think”. Through extensive experimentation across diverse puzzles, we show that frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities. Moreover, they exhibit a counter- intuitive scaling limit: their reasoning effort increases with problem complexity up to a point, then declines despite having an adequate token budget. By comparing LRMs with their standard LLM counterparts under equivalent inference compute, we identify three performance regimes: (1) low- complexity tasks where standard models surprisingly outperform LRMs, (2) medium-complexity tasks where additional thinking in LRMs demonstrates advantage, and (3) high-complexity tasks where both models experience complete collapse. We found that LRMs have limitations in exact computation: they fail to use explicit algorithms and reason inconsistently across puzzles.
June 8, 2025 at 12:33 PM
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iasliu.bsky.social
New OA article in ESR 📄✨
@selcanmutgan.bsky.social @phedstrom.bsky.social @martinarvidsson.bsky.social show how residential segregation 🏘️ constrains opportunities and limits the effects of preferences on school segregation 🎓.
Read more at: @europeansocreview.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcaf027
June 7, 2025 at 2:45 PM
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hwaight.bsky.social
1/ I am excited to share my new article with Adam Goldstein in the American Journal of Sociology. We harmonized a set of historical public opinion data from 1966-2013 to investigate the shifting bases of inequality perceptions in the United States. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
The Polarization of Inequality Perceptions in the New Gilded Age | American Journal of Sociology: Vol 0, No ja
www.journals.uchicago.edu
June 1, 2025 at 11:15 PM
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aminghaziani.bsky.social
Find the courage to be disliked. That was my advice to Jonathan Van Ness when they invited me on the Getting Curious podcast to talk about my book, Long Live Queer Nightlife. A year later, celebrating their book, JVN still remembers it. @princetonupress.bsky.social @arts.ubc.ca @asanews.bsky.social
May 31, 2025 at 5:52 PM
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iasliu.bsky.social
🚨We’re hiring postdocs in Computational Social Science!
📍The Swedish Excellence Centre for Computational Social Science (SweCSS)
📅 Apply by June 3
🔗 liu.se/en/work-at-l...
marckeuschnigg.bsky.social Marc Keuschnigg @marckeuschnigg.bsky.social · May 13
We are hiring postdocs in Computational Social Science
📍SweCSS, Norrköping, Sweden
⏰Deadline June 3
🔗https://liu.se/en/work-at-liu/vacancies/26854
Please apply // help us spread the word
Norrköping campus at sunset
May 13, 2025 at 5:46 PM
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sxz.bsky.social
Do you field online surveys and experiments? Ever get back text responses that look unusually diplomatic and polished?

In this paper, now out at Sociological Methods & Research, we study the emerging use of AI among online study participants.
May 7, 2025 at 3:32 PM
Reposted by Dᴜsᴛɪɴ Sᴛᴏʟᴛᴢ
markwittek.bsky.social
Thank you for participating in the Measuring Culture workshop funded by the Academy of Sciences in Heidelberg @hadw-bw.bsky.social. It was an incredible experience for me due to all the brilliant people attending. Special thanks to keynote speakers @nehagondal.bsky.social and @olizardo.bsky.social
May 10, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Dᴜsᴛɪɴ Sᴛᴏʟᴛᴢ
benjaminrohr.bsky.social
New paper out in Social Science History about elite networks in the American administrative state

doi.org/10.1017/ssh....
Elite cohesion in the American administrative state, 1898–1998 | Social Science History | Cambridge Core
Elite cohesion in the American administrative state, 1898–1998
doi.org
May 10, 2025 at 6:18 AM