Writing

Essays, data stories, tutorials, interviews

Writing

Opinions, essays

I occasionally write on the Substack Lookalikes and Meanders. See for example:

  • 29.01.2023: “Publish-or-perish” and ChatGPT: a dangerous mix Substack

Social media

A selection of my Twitter/X threads, mostly reporting on critical assessment of chatbots as tools for research work:

  • 05.12.2022: ChatGPT hallucinates scientific references Threadreader. This thread was one of the very first reports on this that has caught attention of the general public and has been mentioned in Wikipedia
  • 17.12.2022: ChatGPT, paper mills and fake journals Threadreader
  • 07.01.2023: Chatbots vs knowledge management Threadreader
  • 10.07.2023: Code Interpreter doesn’t see problems with racially-biased variables Threadreader
  • 01.08.2023: Scopus AI - a chatbot containing humanity’s knowledge? Threadreader

Data stories

A selection of data stories:

  • 12.2019: Mount Mid-Life Crisis Medium - uncovering insights from the Himalayan Database
  • 12.2019: A story told through a heatmap Kaggle - Winner of the Kaggle 2019 Data Science Survey
  • 10.2019: Ironman World Championship: Game of skill - game of luck Self-hosted - my experiment with clicky-scrolly form using a Makeover Monday dataset
  • 10.2019: Top 20 CO2 polluters visualized Medium - looking for patterns behind the emissions and revenues of companies identified by The Guardian as the biggest CO2 polluters
  • 04.2019: Beyond the bar plot: visualizing gender inequality in science Medium - a chart-makeover exercise. I have learned so much more about dataviz since then…

Scientific writing

I am increasingly engaging in research work within scientometrics:

  • 07.2023: How important are international collaborations for research in Switzerland and the UK? Blog post - a write-up of our article in “Qualität in der Wissenschaft” 01/2023 (contact me to get a copy of the original article in German)
  • 2023-…: every few months we publish a report about the project “Towards Open Bibliometric Indicators” (TOBI), which I’m a lead of. See on the TOBI Website

There is also a selection of my work in physics available online:

  • I am a first author of the article published in Science in 2014, which work was part of my PhD.
  • My PhD Thesis is available through the Research Collection of ETH Zurich. Besides physics, the appendix discusses some of the limitations of PCA applied on noisy data, and shows dashboards for data quality monitoring in 2D experimental scans.
  • In the ancient times (2003-2011) I used to be an author and editor of a leading Polish astronomy news platform, AstroNET

Tutorials

I host a blog with Python recipes and an awesome-matplotlib repository, where I collect useful snippets as well as longer-form tutorials.

Interviews

Music

I play guitar in a Swiss band ÉAN. If you like Irish folk with a jazzy twist, check our Soundcloud:

EAN Irish Folk · EAN EP 2019