Helping People with Research Design, Statistical Analysis and Evaluation Since 2003
Let’s talk about why and what game to play next. For a few days, I got to use Claude Fable 5, Anthropic’s new model that, for now, has been “export controlled” out of existence by the Trump administration. In those few days, I rewrote my grant (which needed several structural changes, the most significant of Continue reading "It’s game over for academia as we know it"
CEU left the Democracy Institute, a strictly research unit in Budapest, to remain a symbolic thorn in the side of the Orban regime. This begs the question, now what? One logical answer would be to pack up shop. The majority of the permanent researchers at the Democracy Institute (and, ditto, the other CEU Budapest units, Continue reading "Who wants CEU back in Budapest?"
OpenAI released its first open models. (#irony) And the whole AI space is going crazy. GPT-OSS models are off the charts in the benchmarks, matching or even beating some of the leading models out there, including leading OpenAI models (at least for a few more days when they release something big). And yes, we do Continue reading "OpenAI s GPT-OSS is Another Deepseek Moment (But Not the Way You…
Today, I was asked to submit a data processing plan for a project that uses anonymized survey data downloadable from the Internet by anyone (3%) and computer-simulated data (97%). Admittedly, the European Social Survey (and similar) was collected on humans, but it was released after careful anonymization, and the data collection was done with careful Continue reading "Something has gone terribly…
On April 7, 2025, I gave a keynote at the BAGSS Methods Institute on AI. For those who wish to see the slides again for reference, they are here. And here is the podcast Notebook LM produced about my grant application.
This morning, Shalini Randeria, CEU s president and rector, announced her early departure from her position. And while I certainly could not be called anything but a critic, I am left with very mixed feelings about this news. First, things are so bad I don t see how any alternative will be much better. But more importantly, Continue reading "The Issue of Inclusion and CEU s Leadership Transition"
Recently I needed to throw together an overview of the literature for a specific topic. The application was, surprisingly, non-scientific. People who work in the actual world of politics asked me what the literature says about a certain topic. This gave me another opportunity to test AI tools and their capabilities, especially since the topic Continue reading "More on AI Literature Reviews in the…
You can find the replication information HERE for the Public Opinion Quarterly Article It s Not Just Trump by Levente Littvay, Jennifer McCoy, and Gábor Simonovits. You will find two files here: one replicating the analysis with the Americas Barometer (AB_rep.zip) and one for the original data collection Orig_Data_rep.zip. In the latter, you will find two Continue reading "It s Not Just Trump"
(Updated October 17, 2023 still not yet.) I invested a decent amount of time over the past weeks trying to figure out if there s a good workflow to follow on AI-assisted article discovery, systematization, and literature review writing for social science academic work. TL;DR: Nope! I did this by writing a piece where I Continue reading "Can AI write literature reviews for social science articles?…
I recently had a conversation with a very prominent Hungarian political scientist. (And I mean VERY PROMINENT, someone who has achieved just about everything you can humanly accomplish in Hungarian political science.) We were talking about publishing and how a decade or two ago, he had no clue. He didn’t know what he was doing Continue reading "Hello Big Name Scholar, Can You Help Me Publish?"