Maria Sobolewska and Rob Ford on Brexit
In the run-up to Christmas, I missed this excellent Radikaalpodcast episode with Maria Sobolewska & Rob Ford (not a 🍁) talking about their Brexitland book. Hosted by Cas Mudde, definitely worth a👂.
A small note from a not-so-great-anymore island
Well, what else did I expect? Coming back to the UK after six years was bound to be strange.
The seven least unread blogs in 2022
This year’s 7 most read blog-posts, ranked.
Get off my lawn! Are journal demands for “novelty” creating a culture of low-level academic dishonesty?
This article on the Duck by Dan Nexon, about rather unfortunate consequences of the publish/perish incentives,makes some very good points
Definitive version of article on measuring political secularism published (yay!)
Santa came early and brought me a volume, an issue & even some page numbers. In other word, my Politics & Religion article on the 𝗺𝗲𝗮𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝘀𝗲𝗰𝘂𝗹𝗮𝗿𝗶𝘀𝗺 is out in print (how very old school!). [bibtex file=ka.bib key=arzheimer-2022] But hey, it is still 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀 and digitally yours at https://doi.org/10.1017/S1755048322000104.
Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site
When I was a boy, the sea off Sellafield was supposed to be the most radioactive body of water in the world. No idea if this was true, but this article about the past, present, and unfortunately very, very long future of Britain’s nuclear fuel industry is excellent.
I talked to the CBC about the failed Reichsbürger plot
Thanks to the slightly bizarre plot to overthrow the government of Germany, I got an outing on The National, Canada’s main nightly news show. Of course, most of the 20 minutes or so that we talked got edited out, but hey, here (buried in the middle of the clip) are my 15 seconds of Canadian…
Top tip for academic recommendation letter writing: the machine can do it for you
Stop wasting your time. GPT 3.5 can write a plausible recommendation letter for your student.
I asked the AI chatbot to channel Ronald Inglehart, and the result is good enough to fool Google
In 2022,AI is good enough to write a paragraph in the style of Ronald Inglehart. This is disruptive, to say the least.
Bots now fully able to replace the remaining human users on Twitter
I’m putting this here for your consideration. In my humble opinion, it is indistinguishable from the original. Probably it is time for us to go back to doing actual science stuff and things.