In December last year, it was widely publicized e.g. in Science magazine [1], that Scopus has been instrumental in legitimizing publication scams whereby authors pay to bypass real scholarly peer review and have their work published on a website that looks like a real scholarly journal but is in fact not a proper journal, merely an impersonation of one.

Code clubs are initiatives where people meet to improve their coding skills and help each other out. I am a big fan of them as I believe that they can help improving the quality of research. Because as we all know: Better Software, Better Research.

Using Pydantic for encoding data models and FastAPI for implementing APIs on top of them has become a staple for many Python programmers.

A very common topic of questions on data visualization forums concerns responsive charts. In this post I will use an example of responsive chart design to illustrate the key issues when confronting this problem, outline the framework of a general solution, and show a bit of general-purpose code. The principles should be applicable to any frontend framework (React, Vue, Svelte). I'll use d3 throughout, but no prior d3 expertise is necessary.

The awesome thing about language is that, well, we all mostly speak it, to some extent or another. This gives us an immensely powerful tool to manipulate transformational tasks. For the purposes of this post, I consider a transformational task to be essentially anything that takes an input and is largel intended to return some version of the same thing. This is not a very precise definition, but it will have to do for now.

A new year always comes with the feeling of a new beginning. Let's look at what's to come this year. What are you up to? Do you have any resolutions? Ready to take the next step towards more open and collaborative research?

I finally got back into reading! Over winter break 2022, I started the Stormlight Archive then followed up in 2023 by reading the entirety of Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere , as well as a some other fantasy, science fiction, and literary fiction. Here’s the list.

The year is 1959. Eisenhower is on his second term, Castro just kicked Batista out of the country and Ray Charles’s Let the Good Times Roll is topping the charts.

Say you’re busing tables and you’re trying to pass someone in a wheelchair. What do you do? Do you say “excuse me” and wait for them to move? Do you say “excuse me” and then try to pass them? Do you just try to pass them? Do you say nothing and just try to pass them? All of these are, actually, pretty legitimate answers. Now, say you’re a robot.

It’s not every day that you find out you have climbed the exalted heights of another discipline. My work is pretty interdisciplinary, but it shocked me, too, that I’m apparently holding forth on neoliberalism and the epistemic question in African universities (archive link): This, of course, came at some surprise to me, as I have never written anything on the topic.