Bay Area friends!
Check out some cool science on Tuesday, March 10th at 7:00 PM at HopMonk Tavern in Novato! You get to ask these up and coming science stars questions while you drink a Pliny and hang out with other science lovers.
wonderfest.org/pulsar-physi...
I classified 2,500 posts from Bluesky's 10 most-followed accounts using an LLM pipeline I built. Some things I learned:
→ 60% of top-account posts are news
→ AOC is super popular on here
→ Post on Fridays, not Sundays
christophersoria.com/posts/2026/03/catvader-bluesky-analysis/
#OpenSource
Excellent strategy. May you and them live to 1000 using it
Stop funding ICE?
#AAASmtg
FYI: Applications are open for the Charles E. Lindblom Memorial Fellowship, a $7,500 award for PhD candidates evaluating interventions to reduce inequality worldwide.
Apply here: apply.ssrc.org.
Hopefully forever!
In a new preprint with Dennis Feehan, we use county-level measures from 21 Billion Facebook friendships to show that social network structure rivals smoking and income in predicting U.S. mortality.
Network diversity is linked to lower mortality.
Preprint:
osf.io/preprints/so...
#AcademicSky
Thanks for sharing, Kevin!
I hope it's as useful for others as it's been for me.
No predefined coding scheme? CatLLM supports inductive category discovery from unstructured survey responses. Useful when exploring new data without an existing taxonomy. huggingface.co/spaces/CatLLM/survey-classifier
Three papers submitted this past couple of weeks. Fingers crossed at least 1 doesn't get rejected. #AcademicSky
Built a free web app for classifying survey data with LLMs. Upload CSV/PDF, define categories (or auto-extract), get classifications back.
Free models: GPT-4o-mini, Claude Haiku, Gemini Flash, Llama 70B, DeepSeek, Qwen3, Mistral, Grok
Looking for testers & collaborators.
https://huggingface.co/sp
CatLLM now integrates with Huggingface. Access thousands of open-source models for text classification without local GPU infrastructure.
https://christophersoria.com/posts/2025/12/cat-llm-huggingface/
New blog post. I built a Python package that makes LLMs better at web research by adding skeptical verification and ambiguity detection. No answer is better than a wrong answer.
https://christophersoria.com/posts/2025/12/llm-web-research/
The National Research Center on Hispanic Children and Families has been defunded after 12 years of critical work, Since 2013 the Center published 175 research products and trained over 50 scholars dedicated to Hispanic family wellbeing, This loss will be felt for generations
https://www.hispanicres
Honored to receive the Bashir Ahmed Graduate Fellowship from UC Berkeley Demography, This faculty-selected award supports my dissertation research on social networks and health
https://christophersoria.com/posts/2025/12/ahmed-fellowship/
We are on the cusp of turning the tide against dementia—which makes this an especially bad time to pull back on research. Recent cuts to the NIH and other government institutions threaten to stop progress in its tracks.
www.gatesnotes.com/work/cure-al...
Researchers need standardized methods and tools for using AI in research.
LLMs are increasingly used to annotate data for research, but a replication study shows they produce incorrect statistical conclusions in 31-50% of cases.
arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825
Morning hike
Too little group cohesion hurts performance, but so does too much. The sweet spot for team success lies in the middle, creating an inverted U-shaped relationship between how connected team members are and how well they perform together.
www-sciencedirect-com.libproxy.berkeley.edu/science/arti...
I built a series of python functions that categorizes and sorts large chunks of text or images at once and provides a structured output. It's been extremely helpful for my research so far, so I wanted to make it publicly available to all researchers.
Here it is: pypi.org/project/cat-...
#PAA2025
Boy’s world
kinda hard to focus when I know my academic and research journey could be halted at any moment thanks science funding being gutted.
The brothers sharing a bed
Been staring at the same plot for like an hour now not knowing how exactly I want to present things.
These are overwhelmingly times
