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William Martindale (馬凱威)

@wijama.bsky.social
746 followers 875 following 1.4K posts

Taiwanese-American MCEPA graduate from UC San Diego. I research cross-strait relations, conspiracy theories and politics in the Chinese-speaking world. Follow me for bad jokes, stats nerd stuff, and updates on whatever I'm reading.

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William Martindale (馬凱威) @wijama.bsky.social · 8h
Some Chinese person surnamed Hong has accidentally given United Healthcare my phone number instead of their phone number and every week or so I get another call from their Chinese speaking call center from another confused worker trying to contact him about his insurance
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Jane Coaston @janecoaston.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
the funniest thing about the "we don't trust the media" people is that they will trust literally anyone else. like, if you have an image and text, they'll buy it. shaking keys at babies type logic.
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 01/10/2026
"they really believe it"/"they will try to do it"/"the promises are real" are things that most americans refuse to believe about politicians but if you take them seriously will help you predict political behavior more often than not
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William Martindale (馬凱威) @wijama.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I knew Victor Marx was a bad dude but I was not prepared for how sickening this whole thread was
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William Martindale (馬凱威) @wijama.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I know it's a lot to ask but I would really appreciate if the president had more lucidity than my sick 88-year-old grandfather
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Ariel Edwards-Levy @aedwardslevy.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
There is a lot of "oh dear" to go around in the results of this very thorough Pew study on the issues with synthetic samples, but this strikes me as particularly "oh dear" www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/20...
AI polling results can lean on racial or partisan stereotypes

In many cases, our AI poll took beliefs or attitudes that are reasonably common among a particular subgroup and portrayed them as nearly ubiquitous. For example, our AI poll would indicate that:

    97% of Hispanic adults are at least somewhat likely to follow the World Cup (while the actual share is 43%).
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
this really is impeachable for any president, but really grotesque coming from a regime that cut life-saving development aid because they said it was not efficient
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William Martindale (馬凱威) @wijama.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
It's a government version of the End Poem from Minecraft but for people who have never beat the game before (most people) it's a really creepy response to get from a chatbot lol
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jon ben-menachem @jbenmenachem.com · 29/09/2026
"Replication crisis" reforms like preregistration & pre-analysis plans were developed to control false positives in experimental research. Does that work in observational studies? Our new paper in Sociological Methods & Research argues for a different approach. 🧵 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
A Replication Framework for Observational Research: From Specification Restriction to Specification Expansion
Jonathan Ben-Menachem https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8092-0848 jbenmenachem@gmail.com, Ari Galper https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7909-8837, and Nic Fishman
Abstract
Sociology has remained relatively insulated from debates about the “replication crisis.” Heeding calls to consider replication more deeply, we introduce a distinction between two types of research reforms that have emerged in the wake of the crisis: specification-restricting and specification-expanding reforms. Specification restriction is often promoted as a way to increase the repeatability of research findings by controlling false positives. We argue that this statistical justification is less compelling in observational contexts—where the assumptions licensing false-positive control are harder to sustain and rigid ex ante analytical commitments can instead enshrine fragile specifications—than in experimental contexts. We further argue that apparently low replication rates do not necessarily imply a high prevalence of false positive findings. Instead, we propose a replication framework centered on specification-expanding reforms, stronger incentives for confirmatory research, and meta-analysis. This approach equips sociologists to assess the repeatability of findings and build a more cumulative discipline.
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Ben Raderstorf @raders.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
This poll from Cook is bonkers. A *huge* plurality of voters (43% overall, 61% of Ds) want Dems to focus on changing the political system overall vs. just opposing (21%, 36% of Ds) or working with Trump (35%, 3% of Ds).
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William Martindale (馬凱威) @wijama.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
is this the pivot to Asia we were promised
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derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
This is true. In 2016, I got into an argument with a gay man on a menswear forum. I've since made it my mission to make every man dress gay, thereby destroying his ability to tell who is actually gay and, ultimately, his chances of finding love. I built my social media following to achieve that goal
Someone on Twitter writes to me: "People should follow your advise if they want to look gay."
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Doro|河文 @faeydoro.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
White person shocks waiter with horrible mandarin, asked to eat with fork and knife, they could at least have given me a spoon
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Dan in Kansas City @daninkc.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Kansas Livestock Association comes out against the ICE Raids????!!!!
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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 25/09/2026
insisting my gender pronouns are alf/alf slow-burn revelation that I genuinely believe I was previously abducted by a psychic alien Sasquatch with stars in his eyes Enthusiastic hissing as I describe my life as a gender-expansive possum-kin
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Cat Hicks @grimalkina.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
hot take but nothing is more irritating to me when I'm working on actual work than thinking something is referencing actual empirical work on minds and then finding out it's philosophy and the basis is "some essay" jfc
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@GottaLaff @gottalaff.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
"Rep. Jamie Raskin ...said on social media that the ad could amount to “felony criminal theft and conversion of government property for political campaign purposes.” He also cited the Hatch Act, which prohibits govt employees from using positions or official resources for polit activities"
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Patrick Chovanec @prchovanec.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
I keep pointing this out, but MAGA fundraisers implying they control access to government checks on the condition you respond to them is pretty blatantly illegal.
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William Martindale (馬凱威) @wijama.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Me at Bafang Yunji
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William Martindale (馬凱威) @wijama.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
having fun webscraping and learning that, for some articles, the Taiwan Affairs Office uses html for its text styles and for other articles it uses css. Not sure at the moment why, it kind of appears random to me.
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Nathan Goldwag @goldwagnathan.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
you are all like little babies, to me (archiveofourown.org/users/Empero...)
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William Martindale (馬凱威) @wijama.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
to be honest I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with the idea that 6 out of 10 democrats would support a military coup against trump
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Tom Ellison @123tomellison.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Imagine the vibes in the student newspaper bullpen during these email exchanges. Delectable.
A screenshot of a Dartmouth student newspaper article that says:

In an email statement to The Dartmouth on Sept. 18, Schnell wrote that he uses artificial intelligence for “language refinement, copyediting, improving clarity and organization and making writing processes more efficient,” but “review[s] the final text and take[s] responsibility for its content.”

“I develop ideas and arguments, conduct the research, evaluate the evidence and sources, determine the structure, prepare drafts and decide what appears in the final text,” Schnell wrote. “I regard these technologies as assistive tools. They do not identify the problem, design the research project, guarantee the validity of research results, interpretations, citations, conclusions or substitute for my research, intellectual judgment or authorship.”

Schnell’s Sept. 18 email statement to The Dartmouth was itself “100% AI-written,” according to a Pangram test.

In a follow-up statement about the composition of the email, Schnell wrote that he “developed the substance and wrote a draft” of the email, then “used an Al tool to assist with language and clarity, taking on several suggestions (including reworded sentences), before reading it through, making minor changes and sending it to you with my signature.”
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Yen-han Chen 陳彥翰 🇹🇼🇺🇸🇺🇦 @chen-yenhan.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Just found out that the Kaohsiung Port Police get to operate the ROCS Cutie Patootie
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Tyler Morgan-Wall @tylermw.com · 20/09/2026
2019: "I don't want to learn Blender: I'm going to write my own renderer in R, so I never have to use a GUI and can write all my scenes as code!" 2026: "... and then you call raygui(), and you can explore and change your scene without writing any code at all!" 🤷‍♂️ #RStats #rayrender
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Charles Louis Richter @richterscale.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
the president has finally revealed his true form: a 1980s preppie villain determined to tear down the rec center
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Doro|河文 @faeydoro.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Having a bunch of sex cults is usually a sign of dynastic decline in imperial china
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William Martindale (馬凱威) @wijama.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Me: "wow, I wonder who could have written this DPP perspective on cross-strait issues in this NCAFP publication from 2009" look inside it's the future vice president of Taiwan
A DPP Perspective on Domestic and Cross-Strait Challenges for Taiwan

By Bi-khim Hsiao

ABSTRACT

This article examines the challenges that Taiwan faces in its relationship with China. The analysis concentrates on the following policy categories: trade and economics, security and defense, diplomacy and international relations, and domestic politics. It also identifies the three challenges facing the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) as it exercises its role as the opposition political party in Taiwan.
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Amanda Weiss @amandaweiss.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
🚨 New Working Paper! 🚨 Do voters *like* local prisons? Are prisons that good for the economy? After years of data collection (+ using a novel estimator?!), @nottone & I find new prisons: • Reduce Republican incumbent vote shares 1-3pp • Decrease per cap. incomes >$2,500 osf.io/dnwke 🧵👇
Abstract for the paper "The Electoral Effects of U.S. Prison Construction" by Ottone & Weiss: From 1980 to 2000, the United States opened over 400 prisons, a rapid expansion of carceral capacity mirroring the punitive turn in public policy and public opinion. Yet few studies have examined the impact of prison construction on nearby residents and their political behavior. We develop a theoretical model tracing how prison openings affect economic, attitudinal, and electoral outcomes in surrounding communities. Us- ing modern difference-in-difference methods and a novel county-level dataset covering forty years of prison openings, we find that prison construction decreases county-level vote share for Republican candidates, especially if Republicans represented the county during prison construction. Drawing on analyses of economic outcomes and prison bond measure support, we argue that voters sanction issue-owning Republican candi- dates for negative economic externalities and turn against funding for prisons. These findings challenge conventional wisdom about the political economy of prisons and have implications for how we understand contemporary expansions of carceral capacity.
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Dave Calder @ldsfn.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
I’m surprised to see the LDS church back a ban more stringent than its own guidance. The cruelty of the Idaho legislature has resulted in pregnant women being life-flighted to Utah for complications that would otherwise be treated in Idaho. idahocapitalsun.com/2026/08/13/i...
Idaho's criminal abortion ban allows abortion to prevent the death of the mother, to treat ectopic or molar pregnancies, and in cases of rape and incest in the first trimester, if there's been a police report filed.
Doctors who provide abortions that don't fall within those exceptions face two to five years in prison and revocation of their medical license.
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William Martindale (馬凱威) @wijama.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Of all the impacts AI has had on my life the worst one is probably the way it has significantly reduced the quality of former president Chen Shui-bian's Instagram posts. Like come on that's not even a Chinese character
A screenshot of Chen Shui-bian's latest Instagram post. It shows him and Puma Shen pulling a grotesque mutated version of the Chinese character 沈 out of the water in front of a city apparently meant to be Taipei. In the caption, Chen Shui-bian endorses Puma Shen for Taipei mayor.
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Amelia McNamara @amelia.mn · 17/09/2026
WOW this is a big story, don't know how I missed it til now. Not that MTurk was perfect (it was not!) but what are people going to do to get their training data now? Are we thinking we're done training models?! And as this article makes clear, many many workers are going to be affected.
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William Martindale (馬凱威) @wijama.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Every now and then I see one of these and I'm like "there's no way that's an accurate transcription" and then I look inside and
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Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
This is APPALLING. The Trump administration is detaining multiple random Somali immigrants with no criminal record at Guantanamo Bay, seemingly because the White House ordered ICE specifically to detain Somalis at Gitmo as part of its effort to punish an ethnic group Trump has attacked.
According to Mohamed, guards at Guantanamo have said they are being held there because that's what officials in Washington, DC, want. "There's no other nation, only Somali people in Guantanamo Bay, in the prison," he told me. "And when we ask them why we are here, they tell us... Washington...ordered to keep Somali people in the Guantanamo Bay."
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William Martindale (馬凱威) @wijama.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I tried the volcano style pizza at Taiwanese Pizza Hut and folks let me tell you this would absolutely go crazy in the states. Literally the most American pizza style I've ever had. When I get back to the US I'm making a call to the Pizza Hut CEO
An overhead picture of a volcano style seafood pizza. This style of pizza consists of  a pizza with a bowl of hot cheese in the center that you dip the pizza slices into.
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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 15/09/2026
Trump Jr’s wedding appears to have been paid for by Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch *linked to the theft and kidnapping of Ukrainian children*. This is both hideously evil and so utterly tawdry. newrepublic.com/post/215371/...
newrepublic.com
The Terrifying Person Who Bankrolled Trump Jr.’s Wedding
Donald Trump Jr.’s lavish wedding, which he described as attended by “just really close friends,” was thanks to an ally of Vladimir Putin.
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Tom Mock @themockup.blog · 14/09/2026
R-based virtual envs!
Screenshot of rig R project commands
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60 Minutes @60minutes.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
In a hidden-camera operation, pardon brokers Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl said that for $300,000, they could help a felon get a pardon from the president. They said their services included working with influencers to advocate for his case. cbsn.ws/4dj706z
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Brendan Cantwell @cantb.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
When Trump campaigned in 24, in the midst of overwhelming rhetoric about mass deportation, he also echoed Romney about giving a Green Card to STEM graduates. That was BS, clearly, and he’s taken a maximalist position against international academic exchange
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
A recurrent theme in this excellent story about China’s progress is that people there regard Trump as essential to their success, including his ability to drive scientific talent from the US www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
In Beijing, a think tank at Renmin University recently published an assessment titled
"Thank Trump," which wryly hailed his efforts to hasten the "twilight of an empire," by undermining America's alliances, civil service, scientific institutions, and democratic credibility. In the past two years, the international approval rating of the U.S. has dropped nearly forty points, according to a worldwide survey by the Alliance of Democracies; in multiple polls, China now rates higher than the U.S.
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Jacob T. Levy @jacobtlevy.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
It's bad that the central rule of US diplomacy is now "sometimes the president just says crap, and sometimes he justs post crap, and neither is the official position of the United States, except sometimes seriously but not literally, or sometimes literally, or sometimes it is. You'll find out."
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William Martindale (馬凱威) @wijama.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
they should invent a car back seat that fits three people
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William Martindale (馬凱威) @wijama.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
I'm afraid to read the new R F Kuang book because I suspect it will be too relatable lol
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Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈 @maxdubler.com · 11/09/2026
America’s broad consensus view on housing is that it should be cheap when people are buying it (affordability!) and expensive when people are selling it (Building Generational Wealth For Families!).
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
It's not easy to blaspheme monotheistic religion and the American civic religion at the same time, but by leading a pledge of allegiance to himself, Trump pulled it off.
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New Bloom @newbloommag.net · 11/09/2026
"What Does the Collapse of TPP-KMT Cooperation in Hsinchu Mean?" by @brianhioe.bsky.social
newbloommag.net
What Does the Collapse of TPP-KMT Cooperation in Hsinchu Mean? | New Bloom Magazine
Cooperation between the KMT and TPP has been quick to dissipate in Hsinchu. This follows a familiar pattern…
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Micah @rincewind.run · 11/09/2026
I know we say this about a lot these days but "ross ulbricht starts drug marketplace, tries to hire hitmen, goes to jail for life, is pardoned by trump and appears at his convention with a 'become ungovernable' background in support of the literal president" is a little on the nose
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James Ball @jamesrball.com · 11/09/2026
This is the founder of Silk Road – which enabled international drugs trafficking on an industrial scale, among other things – speaking at President Trump's midterm convention (after getting a pardon from him), because lol nothing matters.
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William Martindale (馬凱威) @wijama.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
They should make a Taiwanese language textbook that just teaches you how to understand your family at dinner
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