Month: September 2023

I am a lucky man: I can spend my time and energy on something I believe in, and I think that this is a fair definition of happiness, at least in professional life. I help organise a conference on carbon content measurement, my research topic, and I know that it can make a large difference.

Together with the IMF, the BIS, Eurostat, the Central Bank of Chile and the University of Oxford Blavatnik School of Government, the Bundesbank is organizing a workshop on “Carbon content measurement for products, organizations and aggregates: creating a sound basis for decision making.” Here is a link to the conference website.

The concept of this workshop is novel in two ways. First, the center stage will not be occupied by pre-prepared conference papers, but by a set of important questions that await solutions. And around sixty experts will try to come up with good answers. Second, the conference is hybrid in a special way. While the experts will interact personally, the results and the discussions will be broadcasted world-wide, allowing for online participation. Thus it is really two workshops: one is on-site and hands-on, the other is remote and with broad access.

Without feasible and exact carbon content measurement, the efforts to bring emissions down cannot be successful in the end. The workshop will take place on 21-23 February 2023 in Hamburg, in the conference area Deutsche Bundesbank Regional Office in Hamburg. I am looking forward to it, in a very literal sense!

The ISI World Statistics Conference in Ottawa on July 16 – 20, 2023 was a very important event for me: I was co-author of no less than four papers presented there and I myself had two presentations. The first one was on AI assisted search for new fintech companies, the second on a simulation laboratory for carbon content measurement. I am developing. Specifically the session on fintech was like a summary of the work of the last three years.

The side conditions of this trip were somewhat unfortunate: because of delays and cancellations, it took me almost two days to reach Ottawa, and when I arrived, my baggage had disappeared. I was absolutely exhausted. Below you can see my shirt drying at the hotel window in Ottawa. I had to handwash it the morning after arrival — literally my last shirt…!

I saw lots of homeless people in Ottawa. On two occasions, I felt the strong urge to intervene: a young woman lying on her stomach right on the sidewalk, after dusk, with the pedestrians stepping over her, and a young man lying in the glazing sun at noon, face up, without protection. It would have been easy to help, but I failed to do so, feeling inhibited and afraid. I learned something.

On my last day, I had the chance to see beautiful Gatineau Park on a splendid summer day. Below is the view from the boats house of a former prime minister, at Lac Kingsmere. It is just as peaceful as it looks, full of light.