Rohan Alexander
LightNews LightNews
banner
rohanalexander.bsky.social
Rohan Alexander
@rohanalexander.bsky.social
2.5K followers 1.3K following 390 posts
I spend too much money on books. And too much time writing them. 🇦🇺🇨🇦.
https://rohanalexander.com
http://tellingstorieswithdata.com
Posts Replies Media Videos
rohanalexander.bsky.social
There are three Toronto Data Workshop online talks coming up 12, 19, and 26 November, noon EST. This first is this Wednesday at noon on Zoom: utoronto.zoom.us/j/4784708970. All welcome.
Wednesday 12 November 2025, noon (EST) Georgia Channing, Hugging Face "AI for Scientific Discovery is a Social Problem" Georgia Channing is the ML for Science Lead at Hugging Face and a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford. Her academic background is in machine learning, and her research has spanned neural architecture search, protein classification, deepfake audio detection, and hyperspectral imaging. She holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Tennessee and a Masters degree from the University of Oxford. She works now on building tools and methods to advance scientific achievement. Wednesday 19 November 2025, noon (EST) Mellissa Meisels, Yale "Strategic Campaign Attention to Abortion Before and After Dobbs" Mellissa Meisels is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Yale University, where she is also affiliated with the Institution for Social and Policy Studies and Center for the Study of American Politics. Her research centers on the U.S. Congress, money in politics, electoral campaigns, and political organizations. Much of this work investigates the strategic choices of candidates and financial contributors in congressional campaigns, with an emphasis on primary elections. To do so, she employs original data, natural language processing, causal inference tools, experiments, and structural estimation of formal models. Her research is forthcoming and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, and Political Science Research and Methods. Wednesday 26 November 2025, noon (EST) Christopher Barrie, New York University "Reasoning models and synthetic data generation" Christopher Barrie is an Assistant Professor of Sociology, at New York University as well as Core Faculty at CSMaP and a Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford.
November 11, 2025 at 2:15 PM
Reposted by Rohan Alexander
monjalexander.bsky.social
One of the recommendations: @rohanalexander.bsky.social ‘s book
Screenshot of blog text discussing intro stats textbooks
November 10, 2025 at 12:49 AM
rohanalexander.bsky.social
Happy new Helen DeWitt book day for those who celebrate (which in a just world would be everyone)!!!
A photo of the cover of the book "Your name here" by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff.
November 9, 2025 at 8:43 PM
rohanalexander.bsky.social
Teaching stream faculty searches are great because you get all sorts of ideas for your own teaching/assessment!
November 9, 2025 at 2:47 PM
Reposted by Rohan Alexander
dsi-uchicago.bsky.social
Job Opportunity Alert

Instructional Professor (open rank) in Data Science: apply.interfolio.com/176416

EOE/Vet/Disability
Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio
apply.interfolio.com
November 7, 2025 at 3:00 PM
rohanalexander.bsky.social
Amazing pol sci post doc.
tabouchadi.bsky.social Tarik Abou-Chadi @tabouchadi.bsky.social · 5d
We have just published the call for the Nuffield Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellowships in Politics. These are 3-year fully-funded postdocs that will allow you to focus on your research in a great academic environment. (And with excellent food)

www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/the-college/...
Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellowships in Politics - Nuffield College Oxford University
www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk
November 6, 2025 at 10:29 PM
rohanalexander.bsky.social
Vale Brian Cantwell Smith ischool.utoronto.ca/news/obituar...
Obituary: Brian Cantwell Smith (1950 to 2025) - Faculty of Information
Former dean wove philosophy and computation into a lifelong inquiry into the human dimensions of intelligence, judgment, and meaning Born into a prominent Canadian family known for both its intellectu...
ischool.utoronto.ca
November 5, 2025 at 12:17 PM
rohanalexander.bsky.social
Wake up babe, new Helen DeWitt profile just dropped!
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/b...
A Work of Genius or a Complete Mess? Even Its Author Can’t Decide.
www.nytimes.com
November 1, 2025 at 11:17 AM
Reposted by Rohan Alexander
inessadeangelis.bsky.social
Excited to see our Bluesky paper featured in @davidakin.bsky.social’s daily roundup newsletter.

Read more about our results here: doi.org/10.1017/S000...
Screenshot of David Akin’s daily Substack newsletter featuring our “What are Canadian Members of Parliament Doing on Bluesky?” article.
October 31, 2025 at 7:32 PM
rohanalexander.bsky.social
Enjoying these graphs.
Two scatterplots show daily Canadian federal procurement contracts awarded from 2004 to 2025. Both plots include vertical dashed lines marking federal elections and use logarithmic vertical axes. Panel (a), titled Number, plots the total daily number of awarded contracts against date. Most days cluster between 10 and 1,000 contracts, with periodic fluctuations but no clear long-term trend. Panel (b), titled Value, plots the total daily dollar value of awarded contracts over time. Most points fall between $100,000 and $1,000,000,000, with noticeable variability but no consistent upward or downward pattern. Overall, both panels show persistent daily activity across two decades, with no sharp discontinuities corresponding to election periods.
October 30, 2025 at 4:25 PM
rohanalexander.bsky.social
It's of course not great that Lily Allen had horrid marriage, but wow what an album and so great to have her back in our lives.
October 29, 2025 at 3:58 PM
rohanalexander.bsky.social
Got my own office coffee set-up (staff at L'Espresso were rude one too many times!)
October 28, 2025 at 3:14 PM
rohanalexander.bsky.social
Number of unique speakers in the Australian parliament, by gender, 1998-2025. By Lindsay Katz and @inessadeangelis.bsky.social.
A graph from 1998 to 2025 with date on the x axis and number of unique speakers on the y axis. There are a lot of dots, but it broadly shows the number of women rising over time, to around 40 in 2025.
October 28, 2025 at 12:00 AM
rohanalexander.bsky.social
GitHub Actions is my passion.
October 25, 2025 at 5:56 PM
rohanalexander.bsky.social
IDK why but the second espresso just always pours better.
October 25, 2025 at 11:15 AM
rohanalexander.bsky.social
Looks great @vincentab.bsky.social !
October 25, 2025 at 12:54 AM
rohanalexander.bsky.social
Setting up a MCQ mid-term and reminded of the time one of my professors made every answer d, apart from one question, "to see who has confidence in their answers".
October 23, 2025 at 6:26 PM
rohanalexander.bsky.social
Absolutely wonderful from @vickiboykis.com - newsletter.vickiboykis.com/archive/i-wa...
I want to see the claw
I respect quality software and the people who write it. And, I’ve invested years of my life in working on becoming one of these people (even if the journey...
newsletter.vickiboykis.com
October 22, 2025 at 11:19 AM
rohanalexander.bsky.social
Today I got to do Fisher's tea tasting experiment in class and both student groups got the grouping completely right!
October 20, 2025 at 11:43 PM
rohanalexander.bsky.social
Funny that Dan Wang's book came out the same year Mokyr got the Nobel; while the one phrase review of Wang is engineers vs lawyers, the similarities between what he ways about US manufacturing and Mokyr on the industrial revolution is striking.
(Mokyr in the 4th image is from Anton Howes).
October 20, 2025 at 12:09 PM
rohanalexander.bsky.social
Submitted with an hour and 3 minutes to spare.
rohanalexander.bsky.social Rohan Alexander @rohanalexander.bsky.social · 23d
Sunday morning trifecta: espresso, croissant, and NSERC.
Photo of a croissant, an espresso and a computer with an NSERC page.
October 20, 2025 at 11:58 AM
rohanalexander.bsky.social
Remarkable: historyofparliament.com/2025/10/15/m...
Michael Rush and the Database - The History of Parliament
We were sad to hear recently of the death of Professor Michael Rush of the University of Exeter. Michael was a pioneering and indefatigable scholar of
historyofparliament.com
October 19, 2025 at 6:11 PM
rohanalexander.bsky.social
Sunday morning trifecta: espresso, croissant, and NSERC.
Photo of a croissant, an espresso and a computer with an NSERC page.
October 19, 2025 at 12:27 PM
rohanalexander.bsky.social
Nothing better than a new Nick Crocker issue "What's seldom is wonderful":
open.substack.com/pub/nickcroc...
What's seldom, is wonderful.
Nature perfected.
open.substack.com
October 17, 2025 at 8:06 PM
rohanalexander.bsky.social
Amen
An actor in the dark lit by maybe a campfire, talking to a little girl and the caption reads "I'm 39. That's not middle-aged. I am a very young adult.". IDK what movie it's from but it's a still from Amazon Prime.
October 17, 2025 at 1:22 PM