iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Sagar Kumar

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences @pnas.org · 23/06/2026

One of the most-discussed PNAS articles on Reddit last month was “Cultural evolution of beauty standards.” Explore the article: ow.ly/i96h50ZfmoY

Intersectional minorities carry visible diversity. (A) Evolution of the proportion of non-White models. (B) Evolution of the proportion of plus-size models by ethnicity (White and non-White). (C) Odds ratio of being a plus-size model for non-White versus White models. (D) Difference between the proportion of plus-size models per ethnicity. Non-White models are almost always overrepresented among plus-size models (Materials and Methods).

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Reposted by Sagar Kumar

Complexity Science Hub @csh.ac.at · 01/06/2026

More inclusive campaigns, “plus-sized” models, body-positive language. The #fashion industry has grown more vocal about body diversity. But has the industry’s overall body ideal really changed? A new study of nearly 800,000 fashion images says: not really. 🧵👇 #fashionsky #healthdata #mentalhealth

Text on image with a portrait of Katharina Ledebur, researcher at the Complexity Science Hub. Quote from Katharina Ledebur: "Looking at the data, we see that the increase in more diverse body types is only driven by outliers and the industry, the standard, actually didn’t change.”

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Reposted by Sagar Kumar

Network Science Institute @nunetsi.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Fashion may look more diverse today, but the ideal body type hasn’t changed in 25 years. A new PNAS study co-authored by NetSI PhD student @diesagar.bsky.social analyzed 793K+ fashion images and found diversity often comes through already-marginalized models. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

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Sagar Kumar @diesagar.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Before you watch the Devil Wears Prada 2, take a look at our new paper in PNAS on the dangerous effects of Emily Blunt’s “cube of cheese” diet!!!

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Reposted by Sagar Kumar

Petter Törnberg @pettertornberg.com · 17/03/2026

AI systems are now making decisions about you — who gets hired, whose content gets removed, whose voice gets heard. My new paper finds something concerning: LLMs infer your ethnic identity from subtle textual cues… … and use it to discriminate against you. 🧵 1/

arxiv.org

Large Language Models Reproduce Racial Stereotypes When Used for Text Annotation

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for automated text annotation in tasks ranging from academic research to content moderation and hiring. Across 19 LLMs and two experiments totaling m...

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Reposted by Sagar Kumar

Milo Trujillo @backdrifting.net · 25/03/2026

Great new preprint by a student in my lab, demonstrating how many benchmarks and safeguards of LLMs are ill-conceived and unreliable. Excellent thread breaking down the core findings. arxiv.org/abs/2603.23485

arxiv.org

Failure of contextual invariance in gender inference with large language models

Standard evaluation practices assume that large language model (LLM) outputs are stable under contextually equivalent formulations of a task. Here, we test this assumption in the setting of gender inf...

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Sagar Kumar @diesagar.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

Are our evaluations actually measuring any stable properties of LLMs? 🧵

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Sagar Kumar @diesagar.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

Finally learning Montague Grammar and it has unironically brought me to tears because of how convoluted and ridiculous and well thought out and elegant it is #lingsky #semantics

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Reposted by Sagar Kumar

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 21/02/2026

"Not evil in some movie sense. Silent partners in a real world sense." well damn

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Sagar Kumar @diesagar.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

telling myself that if i actually learned what a sheaf is then i would be far too powerful and that’s why it continues to evade my understanding

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Sagar Kumar @diesagar.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

say what you want about the findings, i can’t get over the fact that they have an interpolated line connecting the dots in a categorical plot 😭

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Sagar Kumar @diesagar.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

Thrilled to see this out! Congrats to collaborators and please give it a read. Since we wrote this, it’s only become more pressing and timely.

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Sagar Kumar @diesagar.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

the state of media right now has me feeling like frankie muniz in big fat liar

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Sagar Kumar @diesagar.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

calling him a "conservative activist" is... a fascinating framing

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Reposted by Sagar Kumar

Fionna O’Leary @fascinatorfun.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

Northern Ireland man from Lisburn kidnapped by Trump’s Ice raids because he “looked like a Mexican”. He had the correct visa, all his documents. He’s never been in trouble with police. Held in terrible conditions. A fellow captive couldn’t get his medication and dropped dead of a heart attack

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Reposted by Sagar Kumar

Kathleen Bachynski @bachynski.bsky.social · 24/08/2025

“Jimenez Rosa, a legal permanent resident and mother of four U.S. citizens, was detained over what her lawyer believes was a decades-old, personal-use marijuana charge, which is no longer a crime in Massachusetts today… “I was just like, ‘Girls, we might never see your mother again in this country’”

masslive.com

ICE released this Mass. mom with no phone, 30 miles from home in the rain after detainment for a sealed marijuana conviction

Federal authorities refused to tell the Canton woman's husband or lawyer on what grounds she was being detained until shortly before her release.

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Sagar Kumar @diesagar.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

Boston’s Logan Airport clearly has a preference when it comes to fundamental particles because I haven’t seen a Fermion sign anywhere

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Sagar Kumar @diesagar.bsky.social · 11/08/2025

Just published my first little bit of science journalism on this great article by @kennysmithed.bsky.social and Jennifer Culbertson about whether communicative efficiencies in language (in this case, differential case marking) are learned or acquired through use. Please give it a look!!

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Reposted by Sagar Kumar

Daniela Stoltenberg @dstoltenberg.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

Second, with a large team of authors, led by @anniewald.bsky.social, we study which (personal, temporal, spatial, affordance-based) properties of incidences of extrajudicial police killings facilitate public attention on social media.

Screenshot reading: Waves of Attention to Racial Injustice on Social Media: Extrajudicial Police Killings in the United States as Focusing Events
Authors: Annie Waldherr, Nicola Righetti, Ryan J. Gallager, Kira Klinger, Daniela Stoltenberg, Sagar Kumar, Dominic Ridley, and Brooke Foucault Welles
Abstract: The deaths of Black victims of police brutality, such as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, and Philando Castile, have become focusing events and symbols for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, catalyzing wide-spread public attention to racial injustice. While prior studies on hashtag activism predominantly focus on single and widely known cases, less is understood about why some incidents draw massive public attention while others do not. Addressing this gap, our study investigates the factors influencing the likelihood and size of public attention on Twitter (now X) following extrajudicial police killings. We analyzed 1.5 million tweets in response to 795 police killings between January 1, 2015, and December 8, 2016, in the United States. By examining cases on all scales, from unnoticed to prominent, we provide large-scale empirical evidence on disparities in public attention to police killings and their victims. Results indicate two distinct processes in the emergence of focusing events: While victims’ attributes such as race, age, and gender increased likelihood of receiving any attention (thresholding), variables of context and social construction were related to overall wave size (focusing).

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Sagar Kumar @diesagar.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

Could be more proud to see this publication out!!! So grateful for the wonderful team. Please give it a look!!

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Reposted by Sagar Kumar

Katie Carmichael @drkatcarm.bsky.social · 31/07/2025

Absolutely beautiful obituary for Bill Labov, describing a life rich in insights and in humanity www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

cambridge.org

William (Bill) Labov (1927–2024) | Language in Society | Cambridge Core

William (Bill) Labov (1927–2024) - Volume 54 Issue 3

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Sagar Kumar @diesagar.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

LLM research for the last few years has been constantly saying "I can't put this in the paper--nobody would use a model that just predicts the next token to make decisions about [insert life-altering scenario here]" then seeing an article titled "Can AI help make decisions about nuclear warfare?"

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Sagar Kumar @diesagar.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

This is the closest thing i’ve come to a noumenal experience. i have literally no reference for it. it is only itself-in-itself. every part of it contradicts itself in so many ways that the only thing left is The Lacanian Real. The Truth.

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Sagar Kumar @diesagar.bsky.social · 12/07/2025

spending my weekend hate-reading Frege because I’ve realized it’s actually important for me to know if I’m ever to dispute it

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Sagar Kumar @diesagar.bsky.social · 11/07/2025

“jordan’s furniture is like the narnia of massachusetts”

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Reposted by Sagar Kumar

Sam Corbin @samcorbin.bsky.social · 10/07/2025

pragmatics is such a funny topic in linguistics because it’s like “what if everything you worried people were thinking about you was true”

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Reposted by Sagar Kumar

Max Berger @maxberger.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

I almost can't believe that Elon Musk's AI called for the extermination of the Jewish people yesterday, and today not a single Congressional Democrat announced they were leaving his media network. A party that often claims to act against antisemitism didn't do jack shit about straight up Nazism.

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Sagar Kumar @diesagar.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

funny how donnie is aligning himself with bolsanaro who quite literally calls himself a socialist

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Reposted by Sagar Kumar

Ryan J. Gallagher @ryanjgallag.com · 09/07/2025

I really cooked with this one

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Reposted by Sagar Kumar

Laurent Hébert-Dufresne @lhd.bsky.social · 07/07/2025

There's amazing work on group effects in higher-order networks, but not a lot of connections to social ontology, collective action, and group selection. Led by @jstonge.bsky.social with expert guidance of @rharp.bsky.social we reviewed and formalized these connections. arxiv.org/abs/2507.02758

arxiv.org

Defining and classifying models of groups: The social ontology of higher-order networks

In complex systems research, the study of higher-order interactions has exploded in recent years. Researchers have formalized various types of group interactions, such as public goods games, biologica...

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Reposted by Sagar Kumar

Peter Sagal @petersagal.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

This is really important to understand. Some of the people “bending the knee to Trump” are in fact doing what they feel they must to protect people and institutions they love from the vast (and increasingly unreviewable) power of the President of the United States.

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Sagar Kumar @diesagar.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

kinda want to write an essay about how the phrase “touch grass” feels rooted in the postmodern desire for the noumenal but i know if i write that, someone is gonna say that i need to touch grass lol

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Sagar Kumar @diesagar.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

“Powerpoints are like the cocomelon version of a paper” - my girlfriend

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Sagar Kumar @diesagar.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

TIL that Andre from Victorious voiced Tyrone on the Backyardigans

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Reposted by Sagar Kumar

Social Media Lab @socialmedialab.ca · 23/06/2025

"US embassy in Dublin wants 'every social media username of past five years' on new visa applications. The embassy also wants people to set their social media profiles to public." www.thejournal.ie/us-visa-chan...

thejournal.ie

US embassy wants 'every social media username of past five years' on new visa applications

The embassy also wants people to set their social media profiles to public.

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Sagar Kumar @diesagar.bsky.social · 23/06/2025

taking a mandatory HIPPA course right now and honestly wanna grab some popcorn because these videos are awesome. i wanna meet the real jersey-sounding dude narrating them

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Sagar Kumar @diesagar.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

my email notifications lately: —————————————— New York Times BREAKING NEWS: WW3 is Imminent —————————————— NYT Wirecutter 10 peanut butter stirrers that every kitchen should have ——————————————-

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Reposted by Sagar Kumar

Derek @dbkrause.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

#nokings #savannah And here’s a lady getting arrested for wearing a medical mask

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Sagar Kumar @diesagar.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

as a brentford fan, i request we all pour one out for the bees

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Sagar Kumar @diesagar.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

What if, because publishers don't want LLMs scraping their content anymore, we enter a new gold age of print media

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Sagar Kumar @diesagar.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

Drafting a paper on Adaptive Temporal Signed Weighted Directed Multilayer Hypergraphs

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Reposted by Sagar Kumar

Nicholas Landry @nwlandry.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

Bluesky dataset presented by @diesagar.bsky.social comprising starter packs and following relationships.

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Sagar Kumar @diesagar.bsky.social · 29/05/2025

I just gt a new laptop so I have to re-download a bunch of stuff (slack, conda, etc) and it is SHOCKING how many things have added "AI" to their taglines

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Zachary Neal @zpneal.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

Going to #NetSci2025 next week? Check out the satellite on "Software and Data for Supporting Network Science" Hear some great short talks & get involved: ▪️ Discussion on sharing data ▪️ Discussion on standards for describing data ▪️ Interactive software fair Complete details at netsci.nascol.net

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