Overall inflation seems to be cooling, but the costs of food and housing continue to soar across Canada. In October 2023, food inflation was still nearly double the overall inflation rate, and the federal governement began steps to stabilize prices through regulation of the major grocery chains. Exactly what items are behind the increased price at the register depends on where you live.

How many learned societies publish Diamond Open Access journals? To seek an answer to the question posed in the title, I sought out reliable data on open access journals.

As you may have seen in the news, the British Library has been affected by a significant cyberattack. Many of the digital services it provides have gone down and stayed down for many weeks now, whilst investigations take place. I have a lot of sympathy for the BL staff. As has been observed, public services can be a relatively easy target.

Yesterday I participated in the International workshop “Software, Pillar of Open Science”, organized by the French Committee for Open Science. In the course of the various presentations and discussions (both in public and during coffee breaks), I realized that something has been absent from such events all the time: the vast majority of scientists.

In April, The Economist proposed a new metric for measuring the climate impact of food. The motivating factor was that while most plant-based foods are "better" for the environment that most meat-based ones, they also contain fewer calories and less protein, and therefore more of them are needed to make up a full meal or diet.

I gave a talk earlier this week about how much I liked working with Fresh, but I ran a bit short on time and didn't talk about what brought me to Fresh in the first place. This seems like a good place to go into it, because the motivation for trying out Fresh was building this website! This website is in part an attempt to explore technology solutions for data-rich blogging and journalism on the web.

This is just a quick post of appreciation for PCI Registered Reports. I’ve recently joined the PCI RR community as a ‘recommender’. One thing that spurred me to join is a rather unsatisfactory experience I had as a peer-reviewer, reviewing a manuscript where the experimental design was deeply insufficient.

Regular visitors to my blog have probably noticed that it looks different now. However, the visual changes are only a side effect of a more profound change: I now use a different static site generator, coleslaw.

I love posts that allow me to merge some of my addictions.

It appears that in what is clearly a wonderful little PR stunt, a Polish rum company managed to do a Sophia and appoint an ‘AI-driven’ ‘robot’ as its ‘CEO’. The other guilty party to this pile of steaming bovine excrement is Hanson Robotics, famous for giving us Sophia, the “world’s first robot citizen”. Most of what I’m saying here goes just as well for Sophia.