This week, I started a new job as a lecturer at the Institut Urban Landscape at ZHAW (Zürich University of Applied Sciences). I never would have thought that I'd be working in an architecture department one day. There are some surprising perks to that, I discovered on my first day:

A lot of media are covering Europe’s heatwave 🔥 but few are connecting it to the climate crisis. Tools like the Climate Shift Index show this heatwave is up to 5x 😱 more likely because of climate change. That context matters. csi.climatecentral.org/climate-shif...

The fact that this absolutely gorgeous book by Lori Emerson landed at my doorstep over here in Switzerland today is entirely due to the Fediverse, where I got to follow her musings while she was writing it a bit. So excited to dive in.

Yesterday, I had the privilege to lead through the general assembly of our bike messenger coop (where I serve as president of the board). It's international year of the #coop this year and yesterday was a good illustration for me why we need more coops in our economy.

Anyone with experience using R S7 OO system? At the moment, CRAN has only a few packages using it, so 1) is it too early to start using it, and 2) how well the compatibility with earlier versions work?

Got my copy 🤩♥️. @emilymbender.bsky.social @alexhanna.bsky.social

New article recommendation for the @peercommunityin.bsky.social PCI Network Science: "Measuring changes in polarisation using Singular Value Decomposition of network graphs." by Sage Anatasi and Giulio Dalla Riva. Recommendation/ article: networksci.peercommunityin.org/articles/rec...

The discussion and engagement was so good on this over the last few weeks that I went ahead and added 2 whole new sections to this blog post (worth checking out if you already read this!): I reflect on the discussions and fun that we had as well as provide more resources and a call to action.

Yesterday's highlight: Learned that my blog post/ rant about how f**** up scientific publishing is was picked up by a course on scientific writing 🤭. The PhD student in my project is doing the course and she spotted it as part of the reading list. How cool is that 😊. marioangst.com/en/blog/post...

This is interesting — a recent study of mode share (the % share of transportation trips by car, transit, walking, biking etc) relative to city size and income levels in almost 800 cities in 61 countries. Interesting results. HT @davidzipper.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Starting to feel like "don't look at the coefficients, just calculate whatever metric is relevant to your research question" is a highly underappreciated stats hack and also I may have to get myself a marginaleffects T-shirt.

1965 gab es ja schon einmal ein Sechseläuten mit Steckenpferden, eine Tradition, die man wiederbeleben könnte.

New article! Young people’s conceptions of political agency in relation to climate change, from Dora Rebelo, Tânia R. Santos, Ana Dias Garcia, Anabela Carvalho, Carla Malafa & Maria Fernandes-Jesus. doi.org/10.1080/0964...

„“one of the most cartoonishly evil plans that one could think of” Reddit-User mit KI-Bots getäuscht- das fragwürdige Experiment der Universität Zürich #dnip https://dnip.ch/2025/04/28/reddit-user-mit-ki-bots-getaeuscht-das-fragwuerdige-experiment-der-universitaet-zuerich/

New AI ethics scandal brewing... turns out a team at University of Zurich had dozens of undisclosed AI bot accounts debating with people on /r/ChangeMyView from November 2024 to March 2025 simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/26/...

Lugano will Kryptohauptstadt Europas werden. Im Mittelpunkt steht das Kryptounternehmen Tether – seine Währung wird gerne für Betrug und Geldwäsche benutzt. Daniel Stern von der @woz.ch über Risiken und Nebenwirkungen und fragwürdige Abhängigkeiten. hoerkombinat.podigee.io/s1e83-new-ep...

An alle, die an #OpenData in und aus der #Schweiz interessiert sind. Ich habe ein Starterpack erstellt. Alles tolle Leute. Folgt denen! Da ich nicht alle kenne, bitte gern unten reinschreiben, wen man noch ergänzen sollte 🙂 go.bsky.app/GRtmEja

Who really holds power in sustainability governance - those with strong ties or wide networks? This PSJ article draws on Swiss wetlands to show how social capital shapes inclusion. By @marioangst.bsky.social & Martin Nicola Huber Read more here: doi.org/10.1111/psj.... #PSJ #PolicyStudiesJournal

This is a fantastic list of papers on properly dealing with control variables (and other related methodological issues) in social science (and #polisky specifically)! I put it all in a public Zotero group library here www.zotero.org/groups/59433...

Nice read in the latest GAIA. Kaiser, M. (2025). Knowledge and action ‐ should scientists be responsible for both? Response to K. Kastenhofer in GAIA 33/4 (2024): From a normal and a post-normal science ethos towards a survival science ethos? Gaia, 34(1), 7–9. doi.org/10.14512/gai...

📜 We've got a new article out 📜 *Angst M, Müller NN, Walker V. Automated extraction of discourse networks from large volumes of media data. Network Science. 2025;13:e4. doi:10.1017/nws.2025.4* (open access) doi.org/10.1017/nws.... (1/4)

🇪🇺 Want to analyze text from the EU public consultations? 📦: I just published a first version of a Python package {eu-consultations} to scrape and extract text of public consultations: github.com/marioangst/e...

Here is the pre-print. I got it down from one gazillion words into a mere 20000 (plus references) Policymaking integration, policy coherence, and whole-of-government approaches: a qualitative systematic review of advice for policymakers open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/articles/5-7...

The scientific publishing system is fucked up. I believe one of the things you can do as a researcher is only to contribute to journals that don't suck. But what are journals that don't suck™? I've written down my criteria here: marioangst.com/en/blog/post... #academia #scientificpublishing

Today, I noticed that Bluesky has a feature serving you short video crack? You know those short videos/ reels/ tiktoks we all love? I guess today is also the day I will leave this platform again.

So many of my #RStats checks got cleaner when I learned that nrow() always returns a number if you scream it loud enough: ``` nrow(NULL) #> NULL NROW(NULL) #> [1] 0 ```

Ich versteh das ganze Ding mit "ich bleibe auf X, weil ich das Feld nicht den Nazis überlassen will" einfach nicht. Ich mein in deinem Dorf gibt's eine Nazi-Bar, der Betreiber ist ein Faschist, würdest du hingehen, um die Nazi-Bar nicht den Nazis zu überlassen? Warum?

1/🧵 @jaybadran.bsky.social: «Weshalb schreiben Journalisten lieber Schüleraufsätzchen über die vierte Staffel der Trump-Show, statt über dessen krasse Inkompetenz zu berichten?» www.tagesanzeiger.ch/jacqueline-b...

Markus Somm pro Trump gross und ohne Paywall, @jaybadran.bsky.social klein und hinter der Paywall. Klare Prioritäten bei der SonntagsZeitung bzw. beim Tages-Anzeiger: www.tagesanzeiger.ch/sonntagszeit...

New release of rix on CRAN! rix generates Nix expressions which are then used by the Nix package manager to build reproducible #RStats development environments. Many new features in this release: 1/3

"Second, there is the “gold open access” model, which generates revenue through article processing charges that microbes pay."

Ongoing experiment: - publish a paper on scientific publishing, MDPI being an outlier in *every* metric: ✅ - get invited to MDPI Special Issue on *antioxidants*: ✅ - send *that* paper: ✅ - "submission welcome": ✅ - add antioxidant to abstract & submit: ✅ Will it be sent to reviewers? Stay tuned!

📜 We've got a new preprint out on using "open-source" LLMs to identify stances of political actors in nitty-gritty local policy discourse. tl;dnr: Works well, but you *really* need good test sets and the complexity might often not be worth it. If in doubt, just annotate. osf.io/preprints/so...

Schon wieder ein neuer Podcast? Markus Kunz und ich fanden ja. Und haben einen Podcast gestartet über Zürcher Lokalpolitik und die nächsten Wahlen. Episode 1 ist jetzt verfügbar. Auf Spotify open.spotify.com/episode/6bo0... oder hier auf www.insidebullingerplatz.ch

This is an amazing resource and really makes you want to teach a course based on it.

Leben im Grundwasser deutlich geschädigt www.srf.ch/wissen/natur...

yep

All set up.

rix makes it easy to use Nix docs.ropensci.org/rix/

Interesting new issue of GAIA. Also probably the most dense intro to an issue I've read in a while 🫣. My simplified understanding after reading it is that the issue will be about how we deal with how we construct facts in sustainability science? Nice. www.ingentaconnect.com/content/oeko...

Danke @bluelle.bsky.social für diesen Text! Er ist so gut, ich will gar nichts dazu oder darüber schreiben. Bitte lest ihn einfach bis zum Schluss. www.republik.ch/2025/01/18/w...

Just reading "Policy implementation and policy instruments: The underdeveloped dimensions of the four “political” American policy process theories. A Western European perspective" by @gcapano.bsky.social and I'd absolutely recommend reading for policy researchers, especially in Europe.

Das herzigste, was ich den letzten Tagen gehört habe war mein Sohn (2), der aus dem Fenster schaut und sagt: "Es näblet" (🇨🇭düütsch). Guten Start in die Woche 🙂

If you are in Zürich, come to our exhibition on January 23rd! *Weaving Sustainable Digital Future Stories* The exhibition presents outcomes of a course I co-led with Irene Vögeli, Nicole Frei and Ludwig Lederer from ZHdK. Exhibition opens 11:00, Apero 19:00. Maison Shift, Zeughausstr. 56.

Happy to have this interview with Winter Wright about Saving Ourselves come out at Transform Magazine. For the full interview, go to: www.huawei.com/en/media-cen...

The currently viral Meta AI profiles are old and are already inactive because they were such a colossal failure and were indistinguishable from AI spam. This 'inevitable' future Zuckerberg is trying to shove down our throats is being completely rejected www.404media.co/metas-ai-pro...

Hey here is a reminder to submit your most horrible public policy analysis horror story 👻💀 to our panel at ECPR GC 2025! Deadline next Monday (6th of January). Please share, we need some more submissions. mishaps-panel.discourses.ch

Die Tage werden länger!

If I would be dictator for a day, I would mandate that you are only allowed to published graphs that show the full range of the y-axis.