This recent paper uses the literary genre “choose your own adventure” to teach the reader about parking functions. I see this being usable much more generally. It is amazing that the idea has not (to my knowledge) been tried before.
Journal flipping: another domino falls
I received this today from a mailing list. Some much-needed good news. I urge everyone in the research community related to this journal to get behind the new incarnation and cast the old one into the darkness. Based on previous experience with other journals, the publisher will try to pretend nothing has happened, stack the editorial board with retired people not strongly connected to the research area, and keep extracting as much money as possible. Don’t let them – kill the old journal by a decisive switch to the new!
Dear member of the combinatorics community,
Please pardon this mass e-mailing, and my apologies if you receive multiple copies.
I am writing to inform you of an exciting development: a new journal, Combinatorial Theory, which is mathematician-owned, and fully open access, with no charges for authors or readers.
I hope that you will regard this new journal as the successor to the Elsevier-owned Journal of Combinatorial Theory Ser. A (JCT A). The majority of the JCT A editorial boards have recently notified Elsevier that they will not be renewing their contracts, and will resign after December 2020; this includes all of the Editors-in-Chief whose contract does not extend past that date. Daily operations for the new journal will be run by interim editors until 2021, so that editors can fulfill any contractual obligations to Elsevier before joining the new journal.
To aid the success of this venture, I encourage you to do the following.
1. Please do not submit any new papers to JCT A. Papers already in the pipeline at JCT A will be processed as before. Send new papers of the same scope and quality to Combinatorial Theory via email to combinatorial.theory@gmail.com.
2. If you are contacted by Elsevier to serve as an editor for JCT A, please do not accept, as this will hurt our efforts.
Sincerely,
Victor Reiner
Interim Editor, Combinatorial Theory
Swing models
Bernie Grofman and I have submitted a paper on what I feel is a fundamental methodological issue in the study of electoral systems, namely how to infer district-level vote changes given national-level vote changes. This has direct relevance to election forecasting and study of partisan gerrymandering, for example. We show that uniform swing and proportional swing, by far the most commonly used methods, fail various natural axioms, and we give an alternative method that does satisfy the axioms. Interestingly, we show that on real data there is very little difference between the predictions made by these methods.
Free Journal Network
The Free Journal Network (previously described here) has now admitted 52 journals from an increasing variety of scholarly fields (although about half are still from mathematics). In order to go to the next level and obtain funding, I have registered FJN as a nonprofit corporation in Massachusetts, and am the first president. This involved learning a lot of new things. The Board of Directors is impressive – check them out.
(don’t have) ACOW (man)
I gave an invited talk in this online Zoom-workshop originally supposed to be held at the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Stockholm. The talk can be found at the Youtube channel which has many (other!) good talks. This meeting was a lot better than I had expected, and it is interesting to speculate on the future of academic conferences even once Covid-19 is vanquished. Thanks to the organizers for all their hard work.
A new citation-based measure of researcher impact
Zhou Tang and I have submitted a paper, my first in the area of scientometrics, to Quantitative Science Studies. I may be biased, but I feel this idea has potential.
The most commonly used publication metrics for individual researchers are the the total number of publications, the total number of citations, and Hirsch’s 
-index. Each of these increases throughout a researcher’s career, making it less suitable for evaluation of junior researchers or assessing recent impact. We aim to study non-cumulative measures that answer the question “in terms of citation impact, what have you done lately?”
We single out six measures from the rather sparse literature, including Hirsch’s 
-index, a time-scaled version of the -index. We introduce new measures based on the idea of “citation acceleration”. After presenting several axioms for non-cumulative measures, we conclude that one of our new measures has much better theoretical justification. We present a small-scale study of its performance on real data and conclude that it shows substantial promise for future use.
Another PhD student finished – Neda Sakhaee
Neda Sakhaee has passed the final oral exam and submitted the final version of her thesis, entitled “Structure and Evolution of Legislation Networks”. It essentially comprises papers already published (see an early version of the most recent). Congratulatons to Neda and thanks to everyone who contributed to this outcome.
First paper in a physics journal
Sanjay Ramgoolam, Ali Zahabi and I have published in J. Physics A (an open access, no author fee journal). The title is Quiver asymptotics: 
free chiral ring. This is a completely new application area for me, and shows how useful the results of the ACSV project are.
Learned societies turn against science
Amherst
I have spent the last 3 months living in Amherst, Massachusetts, close to the university campus. Life in a small college town (and this certainly qualifies, having one university and an elite liberal arts college in town, with several other colleges close by) has a rhythm determined by the academic year. Today is the first snowstorm, and we shall see early tomorrow whether the campus is closed. It marks the end of a long autumn full of pumpkins, apple cider, Halloween, Thanksgiving and all the other traditions of this part of New England.
UMass has been voted Best Campus Food in the country by Princeton Review for the last four years, there is abundant music on campus, and life is pretty good here it seems. Of course the weather is not great in summer or winter and it is too far from a swimmable beach for my liking, but nowhere is perfect.
Apparently 40% of residents have a university degree. Conversations on the sideline at soccer matches seem to revolve around quite different ideas from those in Auckland! In the small street we are living in can be found the sister of Harley Flanders and the great-grandson of G.W. Snedecor. Again very different from our milieu in Auckland.
It has been a tiring but very rewarding visit overall and I hope to return soon.