Neal Caren
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haphazardsoc.bsky.social
Neal Caren
@haphazardsoc.bsky.social
AOL Keyword: Carolina Sociology

[Coding Snippets](https://nealcaren.github.io/notes/)
[Website](http://nealcaren.org)
I've been testing the accuracy of LLMs in transcribing printed and handwritten historical texts stored as images. I put together a corpus of 400 pages from the Library of Congress.

Current leader is GPT4.1-mini, which at 11 cents per 1K pages, is also the cheapest option. github.com/nealcaren/In...
September 11, 2025 at 8:11 PM
It used to be much easier to get a faculty position.
September 4, 2025 at 1:34 PM
I just realized that AJS articles are sorted within each issue by the number of authors and then alphabetically by the first author.
August 7, 2025 at 11:17 AM
I ballparked estimates of a 15% cap on NIH indirects based on awards granted in 2024 (which is different from funded in 2024). My numbers are less than NIH's, but still pretty devastating, including $250 million loss for North Carolina institutions. nih-funding-direct.vercel.app
February 8, 2025 at 11:29 PM
Found one!

[The AI Overview is based on the plot of a pretty great episode of AP Bio.]
January 28, 2025 at 1:29 AM
Jo Freeman reached #1 on Hacker News today. Surprisingly, the non-relational database joke wasn't even the top comment.
January 22, 2025 at 6:01 PM
We switched from MailChimp to beehiiv.com for our quarterly Moby newsletter. Better design tools and painless setup. Slightly higher Open and Click through rates. Plus, it's free since we have < 2,500 subscribers.
January 17, 2025 at 8:11 PM
"Unless there is a bunch of Asians involved?"

Great @theassemblync.bsky.social article on UNC trustees texting our admissions officers about specific applicants.

www.theassemblync.com/education/hi...
December 19, 2024 at 1:18 PM
Three Harlem Renaissance classics from 1929 enter the public domain in a few weeks:

* Plum Bun by Jessie Fauset
* Passing by Nella Larsen
* Banjo by Claude McKay
December 8, 2024 at 8:34 PM
This is the first I've seen betting lines for regular season NCAAW games on ESPN.
December 5, 2024 at 7:36 PM
Playing around with llama3.2-vision to look at media protest photos. There are some random images, but the model still goes hard:

"Overall, the image effectively conveys the idea that WOWT-TV will be broadcasting live news coverage at 10:00 PM."
December 5, 2024 at 6:46 PM
Microft's 2FA texts look sketchy AF.
November 26, 2024 at 6:45 PM
Class activity/academic procrastination:

Find other references to colors and gender in the HathiTrust archive. Here's the oldest "pink for boys" (1890).
November 25, 2024 at 7:01 PM
Finally!
November 23, 2024 at 11:13 PM
Found this anti-Beckett gem in a 2012 right-wing proposal to revamp UNC's curriculum.
November 11, 2024 at 9:57 PM
Tried to extract text from an old NYT article PDF using Gemini Pro.

Instead of transcribing the text, it just went "Sorry, copyright!" and dropped a link to the Times website.
November 9, 2024 at 2:04 PM
I have an offer for 15%, but I'm willing to accept higher bids.
October 28, 2024 at 2:23 PM
Here's a transcript of a section of a podcast based on 12 oral histories of ACT UP members with prompt of "Focus on emotions. Audience is social movement scholars."
October 17, 2024 at 5:17 PM
Google's Notebooklm now let's you nudge the podcast hosts.

notebooklm.google
October 17, 2024 at 5:03 PM
I saw a thing about HDR on websites, so I recreated the first UNC sociology page with better colors. Warning: it produces nausea after about ten seconds.

claude.site/artifacts/63...
October 9, 2024 at 7:18 PM
Where do I put on my CV that when I asked an LLM for a list of sample citations, it hallucinated about *me*?
October 3, 2024 at 11:44 AM
Writing all letters of recommendation in .xlsx from now on.

Here's my Intefolio upload for Chesapeake Bay University.
October 1, 2024 at 8:30 PM
Jupyter notebook #lifehack. Use IPython.display.Markdown() instead of print() to avoid horizontal scrolling.
September 23, 2024 at 3:12 PM
This map of football rivalries posted at r/cfbmemes might be the greatest American network graph ever.
September 20, 2024 at 12:07 AM
Google's NotebookLM is great, but I don't need another folder with names like my Jupyter notebooks.
September 19, 2024 at 6:14 PM