iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 16h

Konečně jsem v Praze našel nějaký volební materiál, který slibuje oddělenou cykloinfrastrukturu. Škoda, že je z Pardubic.

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

This is it. All Poles look the same, lol.

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

Also other background information about Polish and Hungarian characters seems unlikely. Stay-at-home mom in a family of teachers in 1990s Hungary? Polish plumbers praising Budvar (of all the beers)?

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

Nothing gives me more confidence in the quality of writer's background research when creating Polish characters like f-ing up their last names (in a similar way US migration office scrambled Polish last names in the 19th century, I guess). (from John Lanchester's Capital)

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

ngl, 'Is Slovakia going the Greek way?' is such a 2010 idea for a debate. (obviously, someone from INESS takes part)

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 28/03/2026

Czech ultra-conservative Movement For Life is copying Hungarian family policies. I was wondering why those and not e.g. Polish family benefits. This is a nice explanation. (Association of using welfare benefits with the Roma minority in both HU and CZ is a complementary explanation, I guess).

Screenshot of a Czech-language petition addressed to legislators, calling for legislative measures to address taxation of families with children and declining birth rates. The letter proposes four specific policy demands directed at the Czech Government: appointing a government commissioner for demography; increasing child tax credits to at least 30% of minimum wage (6,240 CZK/month); adopting investment measures supporting homeownership including grants at birth and interest-free mortgages for families with three or more children; and providing investment support for car purchases for economically active families with three or more children. The letter cites a drop in births from 112,000 to an estimated 80,000 in 2024 and 15,000 induced terminations in 2023, attributing these trends to unjust taxation, unaffordable housing, and societal uncertainty.

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

reject geographic binaries, embrace tradition

Survey question asking "What are your ethnic origins or ancestry? Please select ALL the geographic areas from which your family's ancestors first originated." A checklist of 12 geographic regions is shown (Western Europe, Eastern Europe, North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, West Asia/Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, East and Central Asia, Pacific/Oceania, North America, Central America and Caribbean, South America, and Prefer not to disclose), all unchecked. At the bottom, a "Self describe" option is checked, with "Central Europe" entered in the accompanying text field.

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

Today I learned that the UK government has Metascience Unit, which sounds cool. After another round of re-organization/purges, the Czech government will, however, have fuck all. www.seznamzpravy.cz/clanek/domac...

how government re-organizations are made

Bike fall meme.
Panel 1: man rides bicycle smoothly — label reads "government is unable to design and implement a policy."
Panel 2: man sticks a stick into his own wheel — label reads "firing some bureaucrats will surely help."
Panel 3: man has crashed — label reads "fucking bureaucrats."

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

ICYMI, Macinka is defending his exchange with Sikorski by referring to his thesis on EU democratic deficit which got an A from prof. Novák, allegedly "the most cited francophone political scientist in the world". With respect to Novák, that is not even close. But you can just say (deranged) things!

Macinka's FB post:

Our excellent opposition is becoming increasingly hysterical. In its desperation, it's enough for itself. 💩
Therefore, I cannot deny myself one comment on yesterday's debate, where it drew a bit of interest between me and my Polish colleague Radek Sikorski.
Regarding the debate on the topic of the so-called democratic deficit of the EU, which was held in the past and according to my opinion should be held further, I must say that this was precisely the topic of my thesis, which I successfully defended many years ago. So I do know what I'm talking about...
For your information, below I'm attaching an evaluation of my work from Prof. Novák - the first Czech professor of political science from Charles University and the most cited francophone political scientist in the world.
The "excellent" grade was also proposed by the opponent of this work. There's no problem looking up even his assessment (it's on the internet). Funny thing is, my then opponent is one of today's opposition MPs for ODS. I'm not saying anything...😁
P.S.: Tomorrow I'm flying to a work visit to Poland, where I'll be meeting precisely with Radek Sikorski. In many important positions we undoubtedly agree with him, but there's also time now and then for continuing the debate on the democratic deficit of the EU. 🙂

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

ngl, my Gallic (Asterix & Obelix) name would be Appendix

screenshot that reads "Appendix F. Robustness checks"

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

After visiting National Gallery in London, I realised that my thoughts about the post-election situation in the Czech Republic can be summarised like this:

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 06/10/2025

fwiw in 2021, in every stage of Pirates' party primaries the share of women increased (a bit) and the Pirates achieved parity with 2 men and 2 women among their MPs (by accident by being outvoted by STAN on their joint list). Maybe it's time to reconsider quotas/zipper 🙃 (chart from my dissertation)

Gender representation in Pirate party primaries in 2021.

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

Motoristé sobě, welcome to the war on cars

Motoristé přichystali pro své voliče oříšek. V programu prosazují méně parkování u nových bytů

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

Stanové město je okolo 500 metrů od festivalu, cca v severní třetině letiště. Se špunty do uší jsem se vyspal (ale to může být dost individuální).

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

Also the spike around 0.04-0.05 is driven by 3 municipalities, excluding them makes the effect not statistically significant.

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

I looked at the replication materials and as far as I can tell they use number of homicides in absolute numbers (the number of homicides are all integers). That seems like a strange choice to me as population of municipalities vary. Quick and dirty standardization per voter attenuates the effect.

First two models are from the original study, the other two are the same models with homicides in a municipality standardized per 1000 voters

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

Dear Springer Nature, UTF-8 is a better way of character encoding than ASCII because letters such as š, ň and á exist in the real world. Also, 6 months ago is not recent.

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 13/06/2025

Czech ex-prime minister made an explicit comment about research I worked on.

Mirek Toplánek having a normal one, saying: "lick your ass with similar studies".

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

Did the party support for new parties decreased/increased in post-communist countries over the last 30 years? It depends. Partially new parties lost electoral support, genuinely new parties gained support with varying effects of economic crisis across countries. www.tandfonline.com/eprint/5UHPJ...

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

Já když vidím reklamy politických stran zmiňující jakýkoliv ekonomický indikátor:

scéna z druhé série seriálu Andor, ve které senátor říká senátorce: "We can all game the numbers, Mon"

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

Obvykle se mě o rekreačním potenciálu zemědělské půdy snaží přesvědčit můj otec, když potřebuje, abych zryl záhon. Teď to dělají pražští radní, když prohlašují pole mezi Chodovcem a Hostivaří za nezastavitelné. Jako vždy pochybuju o tom.

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

At-risk-of-poverty rate is not the only dubious statistics from Hungary based on the EU-SILC data. Overcrowding rate dropped from 41 to 24% in 2018. Data here: ec.europa.eu/eurostat/dat...

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

Tvrzení jako "Bernie Sanders a AOC [...] svým far-left přístupem demokratům ztratili opravdu hodně hlasů" vyžadují empirickou evidenci. Tenhle paper ukazuje, že taková evidence neexistuje. Radikálnější kandidáti v US neztrácejí hlasy oproti centristům. danmthompson.com/papers/hall_...

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

maybe it's just me, but inventing a fancy name and an acronym for a basic arithmetic operation seems ridiculous (sometimes I wonder if rewriting a paper into plain English would improve or decrease the probability of it being published and I am really not sure)

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

roses are red violets are blue relationships are messy EU-SILC data are messy too

A graph of incestuous relationships in one Norwegian household from 2018 EU-SILC data showing that either someone made a mistake when transcribing/checking data or someone should have called Barnevernet

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 03/02/2025

Peter Thiel meeting a former Slovak minister of interior Vladimír Palko to discuss Palko's book on Antichrist was not on my bingo card for 2025.

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

S identifikací všech mých pocitů během této emoční horské dráhy samozřejmě pomohla tato pomůcka z kanceláře @paqresearch.cz

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

The legacy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire lives on.

Škoda with a registration place saying: "Professor"

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

Sapkowski is more relevant now. Also because of mocking of the people trying to limit the access to abortions in his last book Rozdroże kruków.

Excerpt from Sapkowski’s most recent book in Polish saying that if men were pregnant, the abortions would be a sacred mystery

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 29/12/2024

I didn’t expect to see a plaque saying “This house and grounds are protected by a dog, a gun and god. Uninvited visitors with evil intentions and admirers of Andrej Babiš will meet all of them in turn” in my hometown, but here we are. Affective polarisation has arrived to semi-periphery then.

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

the pitfalls of collecting panel surveys:

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

Any reason for choosing open source software over proprietary is a good one. Do characters in Sally Rooney’s novels use SPSS for data analysis? No, of course not. They use R.

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Michael Škvrňák @skvrnami.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Říká se, že lokální politika nemá s celostátní nic společného. Ale kdeže. Můj paper mj. ukazuje, že se předvolební koalice z parlamentních voleb 2021 promítly i do koalic pro následující obecní volby (alespoň v případě Spolu a TSS). Paper k přečtení tady: www.tandfonline.com/eprint/VM2E2...

Jak předvolební koalice z roku 2021 proměnily komunální politiku? Strany ze Spolu a TSS vytvářely častěji koalice i do obecních voleb. PirSTAN ne.

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