As 2021 draws to a close, it’s time to check back in on a previous post. As a recap, Garmin Connect offered four challenges to run 3 x 505 km and 1 x 505 km, one in each of the four quarters of 2021. Completing all four would mean running 2021 km in 2021 . I used an R script to check my progress throughout the year (available here). Each quarter gave a set of results, the final set for the whole of 2021 is shown here.

Nous vous proposons pour terminer cette année un nouveau bulletin de veille, dans lequel vous devriez repérer quelques indices concernant nos projets de publication pour 2022.

I've released a very crude GraphQL endpoint for WikiData. More precisely, the endpoint is for a subset of the entities that are of interest to WikiCite, such as scholarly articles, people, and journals. There is a crude demo at https://wikicite-graphql.herokuapp.com. The endpoint itself is at https://wikicite-graphql.herokuapp.com/gql.php.

We are thrilled to have been awarded new funding as part of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Open Science program’s education and capacity building strategy. This $400K grant will support a new project to enable more members of historically excluded groups to participate in, benefit from, and become leaders in the R, research software engineering, and open source and open science communities.

Here is a quick method for checking parity between two directories. Let’s say we have two directories dir1 and dir2. They are large and have thousands of files and subdirectories. How can we check that they have the same contents? I found myself in this situation recently during a server migration.

Can you think of an rOpenSci community member that you’d like to thank?A reviewer who helped you improve your package?Someone who answered your question?A community call speaker from whom you gained insight?Someone who encouraged you behind the scenes?

In August GitHub added enhanced support for citation-file-format (CFF) to all GitHub repositories. As you can see in the chart below (kindly provided by Stephan Druskat and based on GitHub queries for CFF files), this has led to a significant increase of repositories using CFF files and thus exposing software metadata that go beyond what GitHub provides via other means.

In early December, Spotify users received a list, known as Spotify Wrapped, of the tracks they listened to most in 2021. As a committed non-streamer, I was a bit envious of these lists; so I decided to assemble my own list using my Music database. This was possible by comparing two snapshots of my Music database in xml format* that were taken in 2020 and yesterday.

Every publication is assembling year-end lists of their selection of the best albums of the year. Well, quantixed did not want to miss out on the fun, so I came up with a list of my favourite 20 albums released in 2021.

Markus Strasser (@mkstra write a fascinating article entitled "The Business of Extracting Knowledge from Academic Publications". His TL;DR: After recounting the many problems of knowledge extraction - including a swipe at nanopubs which "are ... dead in my view (without admitting it)" - he concludes: Well worth a read, and much food for thought.