We just finished an excellent spring conference season and I saw many interesting papers that I am excited to share.

I stopped posting for various reasons, both work and personal life was busy, and I had a small technical issue* that I didn’t have the wherewithal to overcome (because work and personal life = busy).

Before I start posting again, I thought I would write down what readers should expect from this blog:

• These are my notes from reading, attending seminars and conference presentations. They may not describe the papers as the authors would, and sometimes emphasize things that fit with my idiosyncratic interests. So, caveat emptor. That said, if you think I’ve gotten something fundamentally wrong about a paper (particularly if you are the author) please let me know.

• I never post notes on papers that the authors have not made public. If I can’t find a version of the paper on the internet, I hold back on posting until one appears. So, if you see me scribbling notes at a seminar where you are presenting something preliminary, don’t worry, I won’t share before you do.

• That said, sometimes my notes may be on an earlier version of a paper or presentation. The paper may have changed since the version I took notes on. If you are interested in the paper and especially if you plan on citing the paper, you should probably read it yourself instead of relying on my notes.

• The key figure/table I post is always from the public version of the paper. For the same reason I don’t post summaries of papers that aren’t available publicly, I don’t share pictures/screenshots of presentation slides.

• I try to always post links to the the public version of the paper and the authors’ webpages (when they have one).

• I don’t typically go back and edit information when the paper I saw as a working paper is actually published, so check the author’s webpage for updates, particularly on older reading notes.

• I tend to keep to the playground rule of “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”. I don’t typically include my critiques of a paper, unless I think I need those in my notes. My reading notes should not be seen as an endorsement of a paper, although if I really don’t like a paper, I probably won’t post my notes on it.

I make no promises on how often I’ll post. I find this substack very useful for my own organization of all of the papers/presentations I consume and hope others find it useful as well, but ultimately cannot always carve out time for it.

*I keep my notes in Zotero and used to use the “Report” feature to easily create something I could copy-paste with both my notes and the paper’s bibliographic details and abstract, but the copy-paste stopped working with an update. So, now I have a Python script that turns my Zotero notes into something I can copy-paste.