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Reposted by Alexandre Afonso

Jan Overwijk @jloverwijk.bsky.social · 4d

The communism of capital strikes again!

JW Mason @jwmason.bsky.social · 4d

What makes LLMs work as a business is precisely that all this text is decommodified, free. As they themselves say, they'd have to shut down if they had to pay for their trainging data. Yet all that data is the product of human labor. This cutting edge of capitalism rests on a substrate of communism.

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Alexandre Afonso @alexandreafonso.bsky.social · 3d

Also interesting because he has exactly the same complexion as my dad and his side of my family, as well as many Portuguese people who aren't identified as black?

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Alexandre Afonso @alexandreafonso.bsky.social · 3d

The description of Nuno Espirito Santo as the only "black coach" in the Premier League shows how much race is a social construct. I wonder if anyone identified him as black when he was young and had hair? www.bbc.com/sport/footba...

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Reposted by Alexandre Afonso

Alexandre Afonso @alexandreafonso.bsky.social · 5d

As the Netherlands grapples with the "anglicisation" of its universities, it's worth looking to Flanders for a potential cautionary tale. This piece in De Tijd shows how a well-intentioned policy to protect Dutch in higher education can become absurd www.tijd.be/politiek-eco...

Is er ook Engelse master? Dan telt verplichte Nederlandstalige variant vaak geen enkele student

In het hoger onderwijs zitten meer studenten in de Engelstalige STEM-masteropleidingen dan in de Nederlandstalige. De Vlaamse regering wil die verengelsing tegengaan, maar dat leidt tot kafkaiaanse t...

www.tijd.be

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Reposted by Alexandre Afonso

Are Skeie Hermansen @aresherman.bsky.social · 5d

• Children of PhD-educated parents are 28 times more likely to become professors than those whose parents only completed compulsory school.
• Children of professors are 11 times more likely to join the faculty than everyone else.

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Alexandre Afonso @alexandreafonso.bsky.social · 5d

This is fascinating.

Are Skeie Hermansen @aresherman.bsky.social · 5d

Inequalities also vary by field.
⚖️ Law and 🩺 medicine stand out as the most selective by family background, with about 70% of faculty having university-educated parents.
These fields show especially limited representation from low-SES families.

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Reposted by Alexandre Afonso

Are Skeie Hermansen @aresherman.bsky.social · 5d

🚨 New paper: Who climbs the Ivory Tower? 🏛️ Together with Nicolai Borgen and Astrid Sandsør (@astridsandsor.bsky.social), we find that the chances of becoming a professor differ enormously by family background. Here’s what we find 👇

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

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Reposted by Alexandre Afonso

Philippe Marlière @phmarliere.bsky.social · 13d

A Majority of supporters in all German parties considers that Israel is committing a genocide in #Gaza.

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Alexandre Afonso @alexandreafonso.bsky.social · 5d

Of course, universities find it inefficient, and employers argues that the rules don't match the "economic reality" where English often dominates. But politicians claim that they know better what students and the field really want and need.

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Alexandre Afonso @alexandreafonso.bsky.social · 5d

Worse, students report being actively discouraged from enrolling in these Dutch versions. They are often underdeveloped, borrowing courses from other programs and lacking the coherence of the English-taught track. There is simply no competent Dutch-speaking staff to teach them.

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Alexandre Afonso @alexandreafonso.bsky.social · 5d

The result is the existence of "ghost programs." For example, the Dutch-language Master in Computer Science at Ghent University has had *zero* students for the last four years. Its English counterpart has 183. These Dutch tracks exist only on paper to meet the requirement.

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Alexandre Afonso @alexandreafonso.bsky.social · 5d

The policy in Flanders: every university master's program offered in English must also have a full Dutch-language equivalent. The goal is to preserve Dutch as a language of science.

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Alexandre Afonso @alexandreafonso.bsky.social · 5d

As the Netherlands grapples with the "anglicisation" of its universities, it's worth looking to Flanders for a potential cautionary tale. This piece in De Tijd shows how a well-intentioned policy to protect Dutch in higher education can become absurd www.tijd.be/politiek-eco...

Is er ook Engelse master? Dan telt verplichte Nederlandstalige variant vaak geen enkele student

In het hoger onderwijs zitten meer studenten in de Engelstalige STEM-masteropleidingen dan in de Nederlandstalige. De Vlaamse regering wil die verengelsing tegengaan, maar dat leidt tot kafkaiaanse t...

www.tijd.be

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Alexandre Afonso @alexandreafonso.bsky.social · 5d

just discovered this abomination. i mean what? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bologna...

Bologna cake - Wikipedia

Bologna cake, also known as baloney cake, is a dish popular in the Southern United States.[1][2]

en.wikipedia.org

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Reposted by Alexandre Afonso

Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung (MPIfG) @mpifg.bsky.social · 6d

📣 New call for postdoctoral researchers!

We are seeking candidates with a doctorate in the social sciences for our research areas Political Economy (Prof. Dr. Lucio Baccaro) and Economic Sociology (Prof. Dr. Jens Beckert).

Please share widely!

s.gwdg.de/ySJx5p

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Alexandre Afonso @alexandreafonso.bsky.social · 8d

Also important to say that the actual number of asylum seekers that the UK managed to report to Rwanda at a cost of 700 million is exactly *zero*.

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Reposted by Alexandre Afonso

Ben Ansell @benansell.bsky.social · 8d

Is there a reason I ask that the Times are using a picture of asylum seekers in a boat to describe rules for migrants who came on legal routes such as skilled worker visas for doctors?

The Times & Sunday Times @thetimes.com · 8d

Tough new conditions to be imposed on migrants who want to settle in the UK will not apply to more than a million people who arrived in the UK under the post-Brexit immigration surge

Labour’s tough new rules will not apply to migrants already in UK

www.thetimes.com

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Reposted by Alexandre Afonso

Anne Rasmussen @annerasmussen.bsky.social · 9d

🚨 New paper in @thejop.bsky.social

Why do politicians often misperceive what citizens' policy positions are?

@simonotjes.bsky.social and I study ~10,000 estimates of public opinion by politicians in Denmark & the Netherlands to uncover the sources of these (mis)perceptions

Thread 🧵1/10

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Reposted by Alexandre Afonso

Alex Bogdan @alexbgd.bsky.social · 9d

New VI from @ipsosintheuk.bsky.social comes with many historic lows for Labour this #LabourConference2025
1) 22% Labour vote share is the lowest we've recorded for them since June 2009, at the time when Britain was still grappling with the fallout from the financial crash.

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Reposted by Alexandre Afonso

tim frye @timfrye.bsky.social · 10d

So many echoes from this article for US politics....

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Reposted by Alexandre Afonso

Colin Yeo @colinyeo.bsky.social · 12d

FWIW I'm a convert to ID cards, largely because it removes discrimination against migrants and has the potential to make existing "papers, please" checks about *identity* and not *right to live here*. Subtle but important, to my mind. But...

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Alexandre Afonso @alexandreafonso.bsky.social · 10d

And the answer of the minister in charge is just "we'll just make sure we don't send lhgbti+ people there"

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Reposted by Alexandre Afonso

Eric Weinberger @ericweinberger.bsky.social · 11d

One of the remarks often made, over decades, by the Islamophobe Geert Wilders (whose 'government' it is) is that Dutch society can't tolerate immigrants because of anti-gay bigotry

Alexandre Afonso @alexandreafonso.bsky.social · 11d

Uganda has passed one of the harshest anti-gay laws in the world and is described as a living hell for lgbtq+ people. Meanwhile, the Netherlands strikes a deal with the Ugandan government to send rejected asylum seekers there.

Uganda passed one of the harshest anti-gay laws, lgbt people describe it as living hell

Netherlands strikes deal to send rejected asylum seekers to uganda

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Alexandre Afonso @alexandreafonso.bsky.social · 11d

These deals are possible because most people are not able to place Uganda (or Rwanda) on a map, let alone know anything about their political regime.

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Alexandre Afonso @alexandreafonso.bsky.social · 11d

Uganda has passed one of the harshest anti-gay laws in the world and is described as a living hell for lgbtq+ people. Meanwhile, the Netherlands strikes a deal with the Ugandan government to send rejected asylum seekers there.

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