naitian
@naitian.org
880 followers 730 following 160 posts
NLP / CSS PhD at Berkeley I School. I develop computational methods to study culture as a social language.
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chrisbail.bsky.social
Junior and senior faculty positions in computational social scientists at Bocconi, one of the world's best universiites: Assistant Prof: jobmarket.unibocconi.eu?id=841
Associate/Full Prof: jobmarket.unibocconi.eu?id=843
Job Market - Bocconi University
Recruiting, Faculty, Post-doc Grant, Collaboration Contracts
jobmarket.unibocconi.eu
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kmahowald.bsky.social
UT Austin Linguistics is hiring in computational linguistics!

Asst or Assoc.

We have a thriving group sites.utexas.edu/compling/ and a long proud history in the space. (For instance, fun fact, Jeff Elman was a UT Austin Linguistics Ph.D.)

faculty.utexas.edu/career/170793

🤘
UT Austin Computational Linguistics Research Group – Humans processing computers processing humans processing language
sites.utexas.edu
naitian.org
This is a great read that speaks to why I love the interdisciplinary work that I get to do at the I School. Every day I wake up and wonder, "what am I doing here?"
dsilver432.bsky.social
Cultural cartography in sociology, literary studies, and LLMs. Plus a bit of sociology of the sociology of culture. On coding , counting, and reading, and the possibility of something else.

open.substack.com/pub/thesilve...
Between Interpretation and the Machines
Cultural cartography across literary studies, sociology, and LLMs
open.substack.com
naitian.org
colm fomo colm fomo colm fomo
naitian.org
lol. lmao, even
sickoscommittee.org
UCLA WINS THEIR FIRST GAME OF THE YEAR OVER RANKED PENN STATE
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myra.bsky.social
AI always calling your ideas “fantastic” can feel inauthentic, but what are sycophancy’s deeper harms? We find that in the common use case of seeking AI advice on interpersonal situations—specifically conflicts—sycophancy makes people feel more right & less willing to apologize.
Screenshot of paper title: Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence
naitian.org
I've found the recent growth of other software built on atproto (leaflet, tangled, etc) really exciting -- in a "think of the possibilities" way that first got me into coding
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mellymeldubs.bsky.social
If you're looking for the last possible excuse to procrastinate, this v nerdy Wordle-spinoff is here for you! Featuring lots of good poems and some author birthdays that may surprise you.

(The social image got messed up, so sharing again 😄.)

Game here: melaniewalsh.github.io/versedle/
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berkeleyischool.bsky.social
Join us THIS FRIDAY for the first lecture in our Cultural Analytics Talk Series, co-sponsored w/ @ucbids.bsky.social!

Prof. Manvir Singh will talk about projects that investigate global patterns in music and storytelling.

📅 Oct. 3, 12:15 - 1:30 pm
📍 210 South Hall, Online

https://bit.ly/3VKQjb7
naitian.org
I've written really terrible paragraphs that have made me want to stop at 9AM in the morning.
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eytan.adar.prof
Fun paper from a recent project with UMich alumni Tenghao Ji. Can we pick better images for Wikipedia articles? Given all the choices in the Wikipedia Commons, which image is best as an "instructional aid?" (1/5)
An image of a male western bluebird. The chest is a brown color and the back and head are blue.
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dbamman.bsky.social
The UC Berkeley School of Information is hiring an assistant professor in the broad field of Information--including areas of info seeking/retrieval, digital humanities, cultural analytics, info viz, & philosophy of information (among others). Deadline Nov 1! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05014
Assistant Professor - Information - School of Information
University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!
aprecruit.berkeley.edu
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nsaphra.bsky.social
I’ve been doing a cultural competency paper and this is clearly the frontier task. One time a Persian gym buddy insisted so hard that they actually preferred sleeping on the floor that, rather than heading home post-workout, I took their bed. Every Persian I tell this to laughs at me.
We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof
Large language models (LLMs) struggle to navigate culturally specific communication norms, limiting their effectiveness in global contexts. We focus on Persian taarof, a social norm in Iranian interac...
arxiv.org
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neilcohn.bsky.social
New paper alert! Work by @cogirmak.bsky.social explores the motion events in 300+ comics from around the world, revealing subtle underlying features of different types of motion cues: "Whoosh! visual depictions of direction, speed, and temporality" www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...
Graph showing proportions of different motion cues found in 300+ global comics
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astro-cowboy.bsky.social
These people think they can trick us but we literally all just watched kpop demon hunters
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princetoncdh.bsky.social
Modeling Culture explores AI not only as a technology to critique, but as a new mode of inquiry for research and interpretation. Three interconnected components will unfold in 2025-26: a faculty and grad seminar, a public lecture series, and an open-access curriculum. Public talk details in thread👇
CDH Launches Modeling Culture: New Humanities Practices in the Age of AI
CDH Launches Modeling Culture: New Humanities Practices in the Age of AI
cdh.princeton.edu
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nick.writeforcal.com
Cal may be cursed to be 6-6 in perpetuity, but our rivals are cursed to be hopelessly embarrassing and you know what I’ll take it.
alexkirshner.com
New Mexico is currently 122 in SP+.

UCLA is currently 80.

My guess is UCLA will figure this out and win tonight, but maybe not, and I think these teams will wind up within about 20 spots per the computers by the end of the year. UCLA could get into the running for worst non-Stanford P4 team
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joachimbaumann.bsky.social
🚨 New paper alert 🚨 Using LLMs as data annotators, you can produce any scientific result you want. We call this **LLM Hacking**.

Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825
We present our new preprint titled "Large Language Model Hacking: Quantifying the Hidden Risks of Using LLMs for Text Annotation".
We quantify LLM hacking risk through systematic replication of 37 diverse computational social science annotation tasks.
For these tasks, we use a combined set of 2,361 realistic hypotheses that researchers might test using these annotations.
Then, we collect 13 million LLM annotations across plausible LLM configurations.
These annotations feed into 1.4 million regressions testing the hypotheses. 
For a hypothesis with no true effect (ground truth $p > 0.05$), different LLM configurations yield conflicting conclusions.
Checkmarks indicate correct statistical conclusions matching ground truth; crosses indicate LLM hacking -- incorrect conclusions due to annotation errors.
Across all experiments, LLM hacking occurs in 31-50\% of cases even with highly capable models.
Since minor configuration changes can flip scientific conclusions, from correct to incorrect, LLM hacking can be exploited to present anything as statistically significant.
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mellymeldubs.bsky.social
Job alert! 🌸🏔️ The UW iSchool is hiring for *two* TT faculty positions, with a focus on Artificial Intelligence, broadly defined. It's pretty here!

Applications due November 15th 2025 (priority deadline).

Link: apply.interfolio.com/171020
Aerial photo of UW campus with Mt. Rainier in the background
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mixedlinguist.bsky.social
Begging someone to do a linguistic landscape study of the differences in signs between suburbs and cities. In Pasadena it’s always like “Protect national parks from oligarchs and kleptocracy” and in DTLA it’s always like “Fuck ICE” 😆.

Happy Labor Day!
Photo of 3 signs “respect existence or expect resistance”, “our huddled masses will delete your fascist asses” and “for liberty and justice for all”
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alisabokulich.bsky.social
UC Berkeley Depart of History tenure-track asst prof job in Global History of Technology. History of technological artifacts & infrastructures through a global & transnational lens. All fields, areas, & periods of #HistTech considered
For more info:
aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05065
#HPS 🗃️
Assistant Professor – Global History of Technology - Department of History
University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!
aprecruit.berkeley.edu
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bothness.bsky.social
Have you never wondered what made up places you might find between #Iceland and #Ireland, or between #Northampton and #Southampton? Today, you can open up this new world of possibilities with #PlaceNameTweener, inspired by @terriblemapshq.bsky.social! bothness.github.io/placetweener/
naitian.org
naitian @naitian.org · Aug 28
Any time I have to do any kind of work on my bike I cannot fathom how I got an engineering degree.