Bartosz Bartkowski

Some 4 years after I decided that I need my own agent-based model & more than 3 years after the first git commit (still in a diff language), my model, FAMUS v1.0.0, is up and running, and seemingly doing what it's supposed to🥳🤓🤖

Very cool paper and initiative by a group of colleagues: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

My papers have been rejected 82 times so far (52 desk rejections). This makes about 6.3 rejections per year since 2013. I've had 10 rejected project proposals vs. 5 successful ones. Rejections are normal (every one of them still sucks, of course).

Realized at 2 pm that, contrary to last two years, my courses start already at 12 this semester🙈

Mein geschätzter UFZ-Kollege Sepp Settele ist überraschend gestorben. www.ufz.de/index.php?de...

I love many aspects of my job &, for better or worse, identify with it quite strongly. But I hate the uncertainty, the nagging "am I good enough?", the disgusting need to engage in self-marketing. Heck, I've been quite successful & lucky so far, and still I'm on a non-perm contract. Clock's ticking.

At the same time, the world is going to shit, so I'm wondering how relevant my petty personal frustrations are. For fuck's sake...

I love many aspects of my job &, for better or worse, identify with it quite strongly. But I hate the uncertainty, the nagging "am I good enough?", the disgusting need to engage in self-marketing. Heck, I've been quite successful & lucky so far, and still I'm on a non-perm contract. Clock's ticking.

Academia is perverse: It can be extremely frustrating because of the permanent uncertainty, permanent feeling like an impostor – particularly if you identify strongly with your job. But the people who stay despite all this, it's the ones identifying strongly (why else not leave?). And so we suffer.

I know of at least one person in my group who has already used the template😃 (not sure whether it was the final version though)

Es geht nicht „nur“ um einen Parlamentspräsidenten: Die Abstimmung heute in Magdeburg ist die Vorbereitung für die Wahl von Siegmund zum Ministerpräsidenten Sachsen-Anhalts - also die Machtübernahme einer rechtsextremen Partei. Und ein weiterer Schritt zur bundesweiten Normalisierung der AfD.

Und das, nachdem ich vor ein paar Tagen von der ÖBB bezüglich der Hinfahrt-Verbindung erfahren habe, dass unser NightJet nicht mehr in Halle hält, sondern nur in Leipzig (bzw. erfahren habe ich zunächst nur, dass die gebuchte Verbindung nicht mehr fahrbar ist, alles andere musste ich recherchieren).

Dieses Unternehmen lässt mich noch verzweifeln

Ihr wollt wissen, wo es potenziell Flächen für neue Wind- oder Solarparks gibt? Wie hoch dort die möglichen Erträge für Betreiber, aber auch Standortgemeinden sind? Ob es dort Konflikte mit Anwohner- oder Naturschutz gibt? Dann probiert mal unser neues Tool aus. 👇

Annual reminder on German Unification Day that West and East differed already before 1945

New paper out, led by Samuel Fischer: Quantifying the importance of ecosystem services in the context of agricultural carbon dioxide removal and rewetting – A deliberative choice experiment www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

📣 New campaign! What are #LandscapeFeatures and why do they matter? 🌾 Learn how powerful together are the hedgerows, ditches, stone walls & flower strips woven through farmland: better soil, cleaner water, more wildlife. 👇 Stay tuned for more! 🕵️ laferia-project.eu/news/benefit...

Eine etwas verrückte Idee mit spannenden Ergebnissen⬇️

Poland, the odd one out www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Observation from an interdisciplinary conference: while economists follow the "one idea, one paper" credo, psychologists like to put multiple studies into one paper. And still the former publish much less (because they polish their papers to the extreme).

Wenn man schon einen Blog hat, sollte man dort wohl gelegentlich etwas veröffentlichen. Und wenn es nur die Reflexion über ein eigenes Langzeit-Projekt ist: bartoszbartk.com/2026/09/20/d...

It was a really good talk, so I decided to listen rather than live tweet😉 But here's a summary of the key points (what I posted about below was only the first):

Cool keynote by @moritzdrupp.bsky.social at CBC conference on using people's perceptions of substitutability between sustainability goals when constructing aggregate sustainability indices.

Wenn man schon einen Blog hat, sollte man dort wohl gelegentlich etwas veröffentlichen. Und wenn es nur die Reflexion über ein eigenes Langzeit-Projekt ist: bartoszbartk.com/2026/09/20/d...

Ein Blick auf den "Zwischenstand" der bisher gefallenen Niederschläge im Sep. '26 als prozentualer Anteil des vieljährigen Mittels. Auffällig: Der Norden war bisher sehr nass, im Südwesten gibt es dagegen Ecken, in denen bislang praktisch noch kein Regen gefallen ist. /V

Great to see this.

Heute feiern wir 25 Jahre #Gedenkstätte für #Zwangsarbeit Leipzig. 🎉 Mit vielen Freund*innen, Ehrenamtlichen, Kolleg*innen, Angehörigen ehemaliger Zwangsarbeiter*innen und einem Überraschungsgast. Mit Eröffnung 2001 war die GfZL die erste Einrichtung in Deutschland explizit zum Thema Zwangsarbeit.

Despite its agri-environment schemes, Europe’s farmland biodiversity is declining We suggest AES improvements - Spatial targeting - Co-designed, more flexible - Better advisory support - Payment by results - Larger budget - Better monitoring - New policy cycle www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Crap.

New paper out on rethinking agri-environmental schemes: www.cell.com/trends-open/...

Amartya Sen (just below Einstein in that figure), but I actually increasingly think that awarding this prize to individuals reflects a problematic cult of (supposed) lone genius.

My prediction is that we will never have enough CO₂ removal (CDR), so overshoot is not a thing. We will hit 1.5°C global warming by 2030, and every tonne of CO₂ we emit will make the world warmer. Where we stop is entirely up to us, but there’s no dialing down the temperature after that.

Bald wird’s ernst.

Great to see this paper by my former "mentee" Mansi finally being out😊 The approach is challenging to wrap one's hand around conceptually (I've had to work on that every time she presented it😁), but it's worth the effort. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Die FAZ druckt heute ein interessantes Interview mit dem engagierten Soziologen Matthias Quent @mquent.de aus Jena ab. Die letzte Antwort ist ein treffender Hinweis, was viele nicht wahrhaben wollen.

The youngest members of my group feel seen: hadley.github.io/genzplyr/

The only laureate to have been awarded two Nobel Prizes in two different scientific categories. The first Nobel Prize laureate to receive two prizes. The first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize. Her name was Marie Skłodowska Curie and she made history.

Effectiveness of biodiversity interventions increases with farmer attitude towards biodiversity for bees, but not for plants and spiders. Really nice paper by Jeroen Scheper and colleagues 😄. Significant output of EU H2020 Showcase project. doi.org/10.1016/j.bi...

Hilarious