Glad to learn that Gollum survived the fall at Mount Doom and is now the editor of a prestigious biomedical journal. #LordOfTheRings #Sociology

New on the site S Ericson writes up recent research from Bart Bonikowski, Yuval Feinstein, & Sean Bock in Chicago Journals AJS showing that in 2016 both parties' supporters held nationalist beliefs, however, the nature of these beliefs was partisan bit.ly/PartisanNation…

In the 2021 GSS, religion appears to have declined dramatically. Did the COVID-19 pandemic precipitate rapid religious decline? In a new study, Sean Bock, Mike Hout, and I show mode effects and especially non-response bias explain the apparent decline: osf.io/preprints/soca…

9PM to 12PM? ULTIMATE KARAOKE might be an understatement.

This new app from Sean Bock is great fun. Computes the odds of any given handicap beating any other given handicap in an 18-hole match, with or without strokes.

Which season season of Stranger Things is the scariest? Based on a sentiment analysis of scripts, it looks like it's Season 4 (seems right to me!). I walk through how I made this graph in my latest blog post: seanbock.com/post/2022-10-3… #rstats #TidyTuesday #tidyverse #textmining

🤯Because of Excel, a THIRD of all genetics papers published in top journals have errors, as many genes have names like SEPT2 (the official name of Septin 2), which Excel automatically makes dates. The issue was found in 2016, but still hasn’t improved! journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/a…

Ah yes. Further justification for my regular Excel diatribes. Excellent tool for many tasks—but it absolutely blows my mind that it’s central to the workflows of many (most?) organizations and researchers!

My AJS article (link in thread below) on the partisan sorting of nationalist beliefs in the United States, co-authored with Yuval Feinstein and Sean Bock, was discussed in today’s The New York Times column by @Edsall. nytimes.com/2023/07/19/opi…

Wait, did they REALLY go with \mathbb{X} as their logo? They cannot possibly be THAT lazy?

New article on what happened to religion, and the measurement of religion, during the pandemic: academic.oup.com/socrel/advance… We (Sean Bock Mike Hout) show the apparent decline in the highest levels of religiosity in the 2021 GSS, which moved online, was due to non-response bias.