Another summer (2024) has gone by
Another summer has gone by. This year my main summer activity was supervising summer internship project. The intern was rather capable, so the project itself was not very eventful and comparably effortless on my part. Also the final conclusion on the research hypothesis was negative (i.e., state interaction network doesn't seem to have any effect on stationary distribution), so there wasn't much to analyze.
From a technical side, once again, my institution's IT admins have irritated my a bit. In mid-June I have received a notification about outdated software on a server I supervise (which is not related to Physics of Risk in any way). I promptly connected to the server to immediately apply the update (as I was warned about severe security risks of not updating), just to find that no update is available for the Linux server. After quick search I have found that a newer version of the software in question is in fact directly available from its developers, but hasn't yet landed in the official repositories. It is not a good idea to update from outside the official repositories, so I felt somewhat annoyed due to being prodded and lectured for no real reason.
Summer experiences aside, what is coming for Physics of Risk? At the time of writing I do not know. I do have material for a rant about my summer experiences with open access publishing, but really not much else. I expect that the first-party content might become much rarer in the foreseeable future.