TL;DR: Over the past decade, I’ve worked to build the per­fect fam­ily dash­board sys­tem for our home, called Timeframe. Combining cal­en­dar, weather, and smart home data, it’s be­come an im­por­tant part of our daily lives.

When Caitlin and I got mar­ried a decade ago, we set an in­ten­tion to have a healthy re­la­tion­ship with tech­nol­ogy in our home. We kept our bed­room free of any screens, charg­ing our de­vices else­where overnight. But we missed our cal­en­dar and weather apps.

So I set out to build a so­lu­tion to our prob­lem. First, I con­structed a Magic Mirror us­ing an off-the-shelf med­i­cine cab­i­net and LCD dis­play with its frame re­moved. It showed the cal­en­dar and weather data we needed:

But it was hard to read the text, es­pe­cially dur­ing the day as we get sig­nif­i­cant nat­ural light in Colorado. At night, it glowed like any back­lit dis­play, stick­ing out sorely in our liv­ing space.

I then spent about a year ex­per­i­ment­ing with var­i­ous jail­bro­ken Kindle de­vices, even­tu­ally land­ing on de­sign with cal­en­dar and weather data on a pair of screens. The Kindles took a few sec­onds to re­fresh and flash the screen to re­set the ink pix­els, so they only up­dated every half hour. I de­signed wood en­clo­sures and laser-cut them at the lo­cal li­brary mak­er­space:

Software-wise, I built a Ruby on Rails app for fetch­ing the nec­es­sary data from Google Calendar and Dark Sky. The Kindles woke up on a sched­ule, load­ing a URL in the app that ren­dered a PNG us­ing IMGKit. The pro­to­type proved e-pa­per was the right so­lu­tion: it was un­ob­tru­sive re­gard­less of light­ing:

The Kindles were a hack, re­quir­ing con­stant tin­ker­ing to keep them work­ing. It was time for a more re­li­able so­lu­tion. I tried an OLED screen to see if the lack of a global back­light would be less dis­tract­ing, but it was­n’t much bet­ter than the Magic Mirror:

So it was back to e-pa­per. I found a sys­tem of dis­plays from Visionect, which came in 6”/10”/13”/32” sizes and could up­date every ten min­utes for 2-3 months on a sin­gle charge:

The 32” screen used an out­dated lower-con­trast panel and its res­o­lu­tion was too low to ren­der text smoothly. The smaller sizes used a con­trasty, high-PPI panel. I ended up us­ing a com­bi­na­tion of them around the house: a 6” in the mud­room for the weather, a 13” (with its built-in mag­netic back­ing) in the kitchen at­tached to the side of the fridge, and a 10” in the bed­room.

The Visionect dis­plays re­quired run­ning cus­tom closed-source soft­ware, ei­ther as a SaaS or lo­cally with Docker. I opted for a lo­cal in­stal­la­tion on the Raspberry Pi al­ready run­ning the Rails back­end. I had my best re­sults push­ing im­ages to the Visionect dis­plays every five min­utes in a re­cur­ring back­ground job. It used IMGKit to gen­er­ate a PNG and send it to the Visionect API, logic I ex­tracted into vi­sionect-ruby. This setup proved to be in­cred­i­bly re­li­able, with­out a sin­gle fail­ure for months at a time.

Visiting friends of­ten asked how they could have a sim­i­lar sys­tem in their home. Three years af­ter the ini­tial pro­to­type, I did my first mar­ket test with a po­ten­tial cus­tomer. At their re­quest, I ex­per­i­mented with dif­fer­ent for­mats, in­clud­ing a month view on the 13” screen:

Unfortunately, the cus­tomer did­n’t see enough value to jus­tify the $1000 price tag (in 2019!) for the 13” de­vice, let alone any­thing I’d charge for a sub­scrip­tion ser­vice. At around the same time, Visionect started charg­ing a $7/mo per-de­vice fee to run their back­end soft­ware on premises with Docker, af­ter years of it be­ing free to use. I’d have needed to charge $10/month, if not more, for a sin­gle screen!

In late 2021, the Marshall Fire de­stroyed our home along with ~1,000 oth­ers. Our home­own­er’s in­sur­ance gave us two years to re­build, so we set off to re­design our home from the ground up.

Around the same time, Boox re­leased the 25.3” Mira Pro, the first high-res­o­lu­tion op­tion for large e-pa­per screens. Best of all, it could up­date in re­al­time! Unlike the Visionect de­vices, it was just a dis­play with an HDMI port and needed to be plugged into power. A quick pro­to­type pow­ered by an old Mac Mini made it im­me­di­ately ob­vi­ous that it was a huge step for­ward in ca­pa­bil­ity. The larger screen al­lowed for sig­nif­i­cantly more in­for­ma­tion to be dis­played:

But the most com­pelling in­no­va­tion was hav­ing the screen up­date in re­al­time. I added a clock, the cur­rent song play­ing on our Sonos sys­tem (using jishi/​node-sonos-http-api) and the next-hour pre­cip­i­ta­tion fore­cast from Dark Sky:

The work­ing pro­to­type was enough to con­vince me to build a place for it in the new house. We de­signed a “phone nook” on our main floor with an art light for the dis­play:

We also ran power to two more lo­ca­tions for 13” Visionect dis­plays, one in our bed­room and one by the door to our garage:

The real-time re­quire­ments of the Mira Pro im­me­di­ately sur­faced per­for­mance and com­plex­ity is­sues in the back­end, prompt­ing an al­most com­plete rewrite.

While the Visionect sys­tem worked just fine with mul­ti­ple-sec­ond re­sponse times, switch­ing to long-polling every two sec­onds put a ceil­ing on how slow re­sponse times could be. To start, I moved away from gen­er­at­ing im­ages. The Visionect folks added the abil­ity to ren­der a URL di­rectly in the back­end, free­ing up re­sources to serve the long-polling re­quests.

Most sig­nif­i­cantly, I started mi­grat­ing to­wards Home Assistant (HA) as the pri­mary data source. HA al­ready had in­te­gra­tions for Google Calendar, Dark Sky (now Apple Weather), and Sonos, en­abling me to re­move over half of the code in the Timeframe code­base! I ended up land­ing a PR to Home Assistant to al­low for the cal­en­dar be­hav­ior I needed, and will prob­a­bly need to write a cou­ple more be­fore HA can be the sole data source.

With less data-fetch­ing logic, I was able to re­move both the data­base and Redis from the Rails ap­pli­ca­tion, a mas­sive re­duc­tion in com­plex­ity. I now run the back­ground tasks with Rufus Scheduler and save data fetch­ing re­sults with the Rails file store cache back­end.

In ad­di­tion to data re­trieval, I’ve also worked to move as much of the ap­pli­ca­tion logic into Home Assistant. I now au­to­mat­i­cally dis­play the sta­tus of any sen­sor that be­gins with sen­sor.time­frame, us­ing a sim­ple ICON,Label CSV for­mat.

For ex­am­ple, the other day I wanted to have a re­minder to start or sched­ule our dish­washer af­ter 8pm if it was­n’t set to run. It took me about a minute to write a tem­plate sen­sor us­ing the power level from the out­let:

{% if states(‘sen­sor.kitchen_dish­wash­er_switched_out­let_pow­er’)|float < 2 and now().hour > 19 %}

uten­sils,Run the dish­washer!

{% en­dif %}

In the month since adding the helper, it re­minded me twice when I’d have oth­er­wise for­got­ten. And I did­n’t have to com­mit or de­ploy any code!

Since mov­ing into our new home, we’ve come to rely on the real-time func­tion­al­ity much more sig­nif­i­cantly. Effectively, we’ve turned the top-left cor­ner of the dis­plays into a sta­tus in­di­ca­tor for the house. For ex­am­ple, it shows what doors are open/​un­locked:

Or whether the laun­dry is done:

It has a pow­er­ful func­tion: if the sta­tus on the dis­play is blank, the house is in a “healthy” state and does not need any at­ten­tion. This ap­proach of only show­ing what in­for­ma­tion is rel­e­vant in a given mo­ment flies right in the face of how most smart homes ap­proach com­mu­ni­cat­ing their sta­tus:

The sin­gle sta­tus in­di­ca­tor re­moves the need to scan an en­tire screen. This change in ap­proach is pos­si­ble be­cause of one key dif­fer­ence: we have sep­a­rated the con­trol of our de­vices from the dis­play of their sta­tus.

I con­tinue to re­ceive sig­nif­i­cant in­ter­est in the pro­ject and re­main fo­cused on bring­ing it to mar­ket. A few key is­sues re­main:

While I have made sig­nif­i­cant progress in han­dling run­time er­rors grace­fully, I have plenty to learn about cre­at­ing em­bed­ded sys­tems that do not need main­te­nance.

There are still sev­eral data sources I fetch di­rectly out­side of Home Assistant. Once HA is the sole source of data, I’ll be able to have Timeframe be a Home Assistant App, mak­ing it sig­nif­i­cantly eas­ier to dis­trib­ute.

The cur­rent hard­ware setup is not ready for adop­tion by the av­er­age con­sumer. The 25” Boox dis­play is ex­cel­lent but costs about $2000! It also does­n’t in­clude the hard­ware needed to drive the dis­play. There are a cou­ple of po­ten­tial op­tions to con­sider, such as Android-powered de­vices from Boox and Philips or low-cost op­tions from TRMNL.

Building Timeframe con­tin­ues to be a pas­sion of mine. While my day job has me build­ing soft­ware for over a hun­dred mil­lion peo­ple, it’s re­fresh­ing to work on a pro­ject that im­proves my fam­i­ly’s daily life.

I’m seek­ing as­sis­tance re­gard­ing a sud­den re­stric­tion on my Google AI Ultra ac­count that has per­sisted for three days. I re­ceived no prior warn­ings or no­ti­fi­ca­tions re­gard­ing a po­ten­tial vi­o­la­tion.

The only re­cent change in my work­flow was con­nect­ing Gemini mod­els via OpenClaw OAuth. If third-party in­te­gra­tions are the is­sue, I would ex­pect the plat­form to block the in­te­gra­tion rather than re­strict a paid ac­count ($249/mo) with­out com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

I have al­ready emailed sup­port but haven’t re­ceived a re­sponse. Additionally, I found that ac­cess­ing GCC sup­port re­quires an ad­di­tional fee, which seems un­rea­son­able given the ex­ist­ing sub­scrip­tion cost. I WOULD LOVE TO GET THIS RESOLVED!!

Thank you for bring­ing this to our at­ten­tion. We have shared the is­sue to our in­ter­nal teams for a thor­ough in­ves­ti­ga­tion.

To en­sure our en­gi­neer­ing team can in­ves­ti­gate and re­solve these is­sues ef­fec­tively, we highly rec­om­mend fil­ing bug re­ports di­rectly through the Antigravity in-app feed­back tool. You can do this by nav­i­gat­ing to the top-right cor­ner of the in­ter­face, click­ing the Feedback icon, and se­lect­ing Report Issue.

Sir, I am logged out of my ac­count and I can’t even get into the app!! This is so frus­trat­ing..

[UPDATE] Day 4, and still to­tal si­lence from sup­port. I’ve re­ceived zero ac­knowl­edge­ment through of­fi­cial chan­nels or the feed­back cen­ter. I am now in the process of mov­ing all my data and sub­scrip­tions off Google. It’s stag­ger­ing that an or­ga­ni­za­tion of this scale can be this un­re­spon­sive to a wide­spread is­sue.

I con­tacted the Google Cloud Support via “GCP Account Suspension Inquiry”. They told me to con­tact Google One Support, be­cause the er­ror is tied to the per­sonal sub­scrip­tion, not to a “Google Cloud pro­ject billing ac­count”. Google One sup­port told me to con­tact Google Cloud sup­port

From emails “gemini-code-assist-user-feedback” or “antigravity-support” still no an­swer.

And it hap­pens af­ter some days af­ter I bought the sub­scrip­tion for an year…

any up­date? please tell us how did u solved it!

Nope, still re­stricted, tried to es­ca­late by Google One, But they can’t help with the prob­lem ei­ther…

Same is­sue and same sen­ti­ment and I can­celled and re­moved billing for all Google prod­ucts. Absolutely shame­ful treat­ment of pay­ing cus­tomers. I emailed each of the con­tact emails for Antigravity and gem­ini-code-as­sist with­out re­ply. Unfortunately I pre­paid for a year so it looks like I’ll have to sue a tril­lion-dol­lar com­pany just to get the measly fee?

I have tried to con­tact every­one I could. And you all know how dis­gust­ing their sup­ports are. I am to­tally dis­ap­pointed with their cus­tomer ser­vice. After 3 weeks wait­ing, the re­sult is that they can­not re­store my ac­count. I guess it is time to move on to Codex or Claude Code. Below is their re­ply af­ter “full in­ves­ti­ga­tion by the in­ter­nal team“:

”Thank you for your con­tin­ued pa­tience as we have thor­oughly in­ves­ti­gated your ac­count ac­cess is­sue. Please be as­sured that we con­ducted a com­pre­hen­sive in­ves­ti­ga­tion, ex­plor­ing every pos­si­ble av­enue to re­store your ac­cess.

Our prod­uct en­gi­neer­ing team has con­firmed that your ac­count was sus­pended from us­ing our Antigravity ser­vice. This sus­pen­sion af­fects your ac­cess to the Gemini CLI and any other ser­vice that uses the Cloud Code Private API.

Our in­ves­ti­ga­tion specif­i­cally con­firmed that the use of your cre­den­tials within the third-party tool “open claw” for test­ing pur­poses con­sti­tutes a vi­o­la­tion of the Google Terms of Service [1]. This is due to the use of Antigravity servers to power a non-Anti­grav­ity prod­uct.

I must be trans­par­ent and in­form you that, in ac­cor­dance with Google’s pol­icy, this sit­u­a­tion falls un­der a zero tol­er­ance pol­icy, and we are un­able to re­verse the sus­pen­sion. I am truly sorry to share this dif­fi­cult news with you.”

Ok so ba­si­caly, there’s no way we can re­store our ac­counts to use Antigravity any­more yeah? this is un­ex­pected, but un­til we can fig­ure out how to re­solve this is­sue, I’ll just sub­scribed us­ing dif­fer­ent ac­count

I’m in the same sit­u­a­tion…

Hi @Abhijit_Pramanik , could you please pro­vide some help? This si­lence is un­bear­able.

Gemini Disabled on Antigravity IDE, How to Restore Access?

I’m in con­tact with Google One but their ac­tions are no help at all, for al­most a week they haven’t done any­thing, they only asked for screen­shots/​record­ings of the lo­gin at­tempt.

Why is there si­lence from Google? What is the user sup­posed to do? Create a new ac­count and buy a new PRO/ULTRA, or what? Any in­for­ma­tion at all?!

I’ve got ban and the only dif­fer­ence from vanilla IDE ex­pe­ri­ence was anti­grav­ity-cock­pit ex­ten­sion. No re­ply to my ap­peal email last 12 hours.

ost. I WOULD LOVE TO GET THIS RESOLVED!!

I’m sub­scrib­ing the AI Pro and just in­te­grated Gemini to OpenCode yes­ter­day. After a just day use, my ac­count is sus­pended with­out any warn­ings. Simply the API re­turns 403 er­ror to my OpenCode and Gemini CLI like this:

Failed to lo­gin. Message: This ser­vice has been dis­abled in this ac­count for vi­o­la­tion of Terms of Service. If you be­lieve this is an er­ror, con­tact gem­ini-code-as­sist-user-feed­back@google.com.

I emailed to the con­tact this morn­ing but did­n’t get any re­sponse yet.

If this is in­deed the case, I find it ut­terly ab­surd. It seems Google’s re­sponse is woe­fully in­ad­e­quate; I should ex­plore Claude or other al­ter­na­tives.

Quick up­date for every­one stuck in this 403 loop: I just spent the last 8 days fight­ing through Tier 1 sup­port. Google One sup­port fi­nally ad­mit­ted on record it’s a ‘known WAF bug’, but then lit­er­ally routed me to Android App Developer sup­port be­cause they have no back­end ac­cess to fix it.

The en­tire sup­port flow­chart is com­pletely bro­ken, and they are still billing us $250/mo for bricked ac­counts. I just doc­u­mented the en­tire Kafkaesque sup­port loop over on the google_anti­grav­ity sub­red­dit. If you are stuck in this same Catch-22, go search for that post over there and share your Trajectory IDs in the com­ments so we can get some ac­tual en­gi­neer­ing eyes on this mass ban wave.

Hi @K8L, just wanted to share some con­text re­gard­ing this sit­u­a­tion as I see you are wait­ing for a re­sponse.

Yesterday, Abhijit ac­tu­ally posted a brief state­ment ac­knowl­edg­ing these 403 ToS is­sues, not­ing that the in­ter­nal team was ‘prioritizing a res­o­lu­tion.’ However, the mes­sage was deleted just a few min­utes later.

Hoping for some trans­parency, I left a sin­gle, po­lite com­ment ask­ing for clar­i­fi­ca­tion on why the up­date was re­moved. Surprisingly, my fo­rum ac­count was banned shortly af­ter post­ing that ques­tion.

Currently, there seems to be no of­fi­cial com­mu­ni­ca­tion re­gard­ing these 403 er­rors, al­though we can see ac­tive replies be­ing made to other un­re­lated threads on the fo­rum.

This sit­u­a­tion is quite con­cern­ing for us as de­vel­op­ers. The au­to­mated sys­tem is still trig­ger­ing these mass bans daily dur­ing fixed time win­dows, with­out any warn­ing and seem­ingly with­out a re­view of the cur­rent process.

Fingers crossed this mes­sage does­n’t get taken down and my ac­count sur­vives long enough for you guys to read it, haha.

Facing this is­sue too, I wrote an email to gem­ini-code-as­sist-user-feed­back@google.com “eight days ago”, and still got no re­sponse to­day. So dis­ap­pointed

My ac­count (pro) was also bricked for call­ing Gemini model from pi har­ness two times. No re­sponse from sup­port and it’s been four days.

All the fun of short-form video, none of the cor­po­rate con­trol.

Loops is fed­er­ated, open-source, and de­signed to give power back to cre­ators and com­mu­ni­ties across the so­cial web. Build your com­mu­nity on a plat­form that can’t lock you in.

We’ve been search­ing for a mem­ory-safe pro­gram­ming lan­guage to re­place C++ in Ladybird for a while now. We pre­vi­ously ex­plored Swift, but the C++ in­terop never quite got there, and plat­form sup­port out­side the Apple ecosys­tem was lim­ited. Rust is a dif­fer­ent story. The ecosys­tem is far more ma­ture for sys­tems pro­gram­ming, and many of our con­trib­u­tors al­ready know the lan­guage. Going for­ward, we are rewrit­ing parts of Ladybird in Rust.

When we orig­i­nally eval­u­ated Rust back in 2024, we re­jected it be­cause it’s not great at C++ style OOP. The web plat­form ob­ject model in­her­its a lot of 1990s OOP fla­vor, with garbage col­lec­tion, deep in­her­i­tance hi­er­ar­chies, and so on. Rust’s own­er­ship model is not a nat­ural fit for that.

But af­ter an­other year of tread­ing wa­ter, it’s time to make the prag­matic choice. Rust has the ecosys­tem and the safety guar­an­tees we need. Both Firefox and Chromium have al­ready be­gun in­tro­duc­ing Rust into their code­bases, and we think it’s the right choice for Ladybird too.

Our first tar­get was LibJS , Ladybird’s JavaScript en­gine. The lexer, parser, AST, and byte­code gen­er­a­tor are rel­a­tively self-con­tained and have ex­ten­sive test cov­er­age through test262, which made them a nat­ural start­ing point.

I used Claude Code and Codex for the trans­la­tion. This was hu­man-di­rected, not au­tonomous code gen­er­a­tion. I de­cided what to port, in what or­der, and what the Rust code should look like. It was hun­dreds of small prompts, steer­ing the agents where things needed to go. After the ini­tial trans­la­tion, I ran mul­ti­ple passes of ad­ver­sar­ial re­view, ask­ing dif­fer­ent mod­els to an­a­lyze the code for mis­takes and bad pat­terns.

The re­quire­ment from the start was byte-for-byte iden­ti­cal out­put from both pipelines. The re­sult was about 25,000 lines of Rust, and the en­tire port took about two weeks. The same work would have taken me mul­ti­ple months to do by hand. We’ve ver­i­fied that every AST pro­duced by the Rust parser is iden­ti­cal to the C++ one, and all byte­code gen­er­ated by the Rust com­piler is iden­ti­cal to the C++ com­pil­er’s out­put. Zero re­gres­sions across the board:

No per­for­mance re­gres­sions on any of the JS bench­marks we track ei­ther.

Beyond the test suites, I’ve done ex­ten­sive test­ing by brows­ing the web in a lock­step mode where both the C++ and Rust pipelines run si­mul­ta­ne­ously, ver­i­fy­ing that out­put is iden­ti­cal for every piece of JavaScript that flows through them.

If you look at the code, you’ll no­tice it has a strong “translated from C++” vibe. That’s be­cause it is trans­lated from C++. The top pri­or­ity for this first pass is com­pat­i­bil­ity with our C++ pipeline. The Rust code in­ten­tion­ally mim­ics things like the C++ reg­is­ter al­lo­ca­tion pat­terns so that the two com­pil­ers pro­duce iden­ti­cal byte­code. Correctness is a close sec­ond. We know the re­sult is­n’t id­iomatic Rust, and there’s a lot that can be sim­pli­fied once we’re com­fort­able re­tir­ing the C++ pipeline. That cleanup will come in time.

This is not be­com­ing the main fo­cus of the pro­ject. We will con­tinue de­vel­op­ing the en­gine in C++, and port­ing sub­sys­tems to Rust will be a side­track that runs for a long time. New Rust code will co­ex­ist with ex­ist­ing C++ through well-de­fined in­terop bound­aries.

We want to be de­lib­er­ate about which parts get ported and in what or­der, so the port­ing ef­fort is man­aged by the core team. Please co­or­di­nate with us be­fore start­ing any port­ing work so no­body wastes their time on some­thing we can’t merge.

I know this will be a con­tro­ver­sial move, but I be­lieve it’s the right de­ci­sion for Ladybird’s fu­ture. :^)

On Christmas Eve, 9 “peer-reviewed” eco­nom­ics pa­pers were qui­etly re­tracted by Elsevier, the world’s largest aca­d­e­mic pub­lisher.

This in­cludes 7 pa­pers in the International Review of Financial Analysis (a good jour­nal—it has an 18% ac­cep­tance rate):

Plus two more re­trac­tions in Finance Research Letters (29% ac­cep­tance rate):

Two days later, three more pa­pers were re­tracted at the International Review of Economics & Finance (30% ac­cep­tance rate):

All 12 pa­pers had one thing in com­mon: Brian M Lucey, Professor of International Finance and Commodities, Trinity College Dublin — the #1 ranked eco­nom­ics and busi­ness school in Ireland — as a co-au­thor.

Lucey pub­lished 56 pa­pers in 2025, one pa­per every 6.5 days. Lmao.

Lucey has pub­lished 44 pa­pers in Finance Research Letters alone, an Elsevier jour­nal he edited.

I emailed Lucey for com­ment, but he did not re­spond.

Brian Lucey… where have I heard that name be­fore?

Oh yeah, he bul­lied me on Twitter in 2023.

The stated rea­son for the re­trac­tions was that: “review of this sub­mis­sion was over­seen, and the fi­nal de­ci­sion was made, by the Editor Brian Lucey, de­spite his role as a co-au­thor of the man­u­script. This com­pro­mised the ed­i­to­r­ial process and breached the jour­nal’s poli­cies.”

In plain terms, Lucey was serv­ing as ed­i­tor while ap­prov­ing his own pa­pers. The re­sult was a com­plete by­pass of peer re­view—an abuse of ed­i­to­r­ial au­thor­ity that func­tioned as a ci­ta­tion-car­tel scheme.

Apparently this was an open se­cret in the pro­fes­sion for many years, with EJMR com­ments go­ing back 5+ years ex­plic­itly call­ing him out as a cheater:

Along with the 12 re­trac­tions, Lucey was re­moved as an ed­i­tor at 5 jour­nals: International Review of Financial Analysis, the International Review of Economics & Finance, Finance Research Letters, Financial Management, & Energy Finance.

Lucey re­mains as ed­i­tor-in-chief at Wiley’s Journal of Economic Surveys.

I emailed Wiley, and they pro­vided me with this state­ment:

We are aware of these con­cerns and have in­ves­ti­gated Prof. Lucey’s ac­tiv­ity on Journal of Economic Surveys. Our re­search in­tegrity team did not find any con­cerns re­gard­ing con­flict of in­ter­est or mis­han­dling of pa­pers, nor has Prof. Lucey pub­lished any pa­pers in the jour­nal since he joined the ed­i­to­r­ial team as a co-ed­i­tor in 2024. We ex­pect full com­mit­ment and ad­her­ence to our ed­i­to­r­ial prac­tices and stan­dards, and we will be mon­i­tor­ing the sit­u­a­tion to en­sure that there is no im­proper han­dling of pa­pers at the jour­nal.

In re­sponse to Wiley’s state­ment, one EMJR user wrote: “I am baf­fled how they could pos­si­bly still have con­fi­dence in him, given his se­ri­ous and sys­tem­atic eth­i­cal lapses in ed­i­to­r­ial po­si­tions. Sounds some­what naive to ex­pect ‘full ad­her­ence to our ed­i­to­r­ial prac­tices and stan­dards’!”

Until be­ing purged from the lead­er­ship of these 5 jour­nals, Lucey played a cen­tral role in co­or­di­nat­ing Elsevier’s Finance Journals Ecosystem, which al­lows “participating jour­nals to sug­gest trans­fer­ring a re­jected man­u­script to an­other jour­nal in the sys­tem with­out the need for re­sub­mis­sion and the as­so­ci­ated cost.”

That sys­tem, and the ed­i­tors in­volved, “came un­der fire last year when a preprint sug­gested it might fa­cil­i­tate ci­ta­tion stack­ing as a way to boost jour­nal im­pact fac­tors. The analy­sis in the preprint also sug­gested a ci­ta­tion ring in­volv­ing Elsevier ed­i­tors could be at work.”

I emailed the anony­mous “Theophilos Nomos” who wrote this pa­per, but they did not re­spond to my email.

That pre-print names Samuel Vigne, a fi­nance pro­fes­sor at Luiss Business School, for­mer PhD stu­dent of Lucey, and pro­lific Lucey co-au­thor (they have pub­lished at least 33 pa­pers to­gether) as a core node of Lucey’s ci­ta­tion car­tel.

Multiple pub­li­ca­tions by Vigne and Lucey are flagged on PubPeer.

This ex­am­ple neatly il­lus­trates how their co-au­thor­ship trad­ing scheme op­er­ated:

It de­scribes a draft up­loaded to SSRN with three au­thors:

After sub­mit­ting that draft to the Elsevier fi­nance ecosys­tem, that draft was scrubbed from SSRN, and in the fi­nal pub­lished ver­sion, an ad­di­tional au­thor (Samuel Vigne) was added as a new au­thor, with an “equal con­tri­bu­tion” state­ment. The two ver­sions are oth­er­wise iden­ti­cal, con­tain­ing the same fig­ures, sec­tions, and text.

Co-authorship trad­ing is only one part of the op­er­a­tion. The other is ci­ta­tion stack­ing. In this model, a small, tightly linked group fun­nels an enor­mous vol­ume of pa­pers into the same hand­ful of jour­nals, then sys­tem­at­i­cally stuffs those pa­pers with ci­ta­tions to one an­other. The re­sult is a rapid, ar­ti­fi­cial ex­plo­sion in ci­ta­tion counts that makes them look like in­flu­en­tial ge­niuses.

Take John Gooddell, a pro­fes­sor at the University of Akron and a Lucey co-au­thor. Gooddell has pub­lished 68 pa­pers in Finance Research Letters alone, a jour­nal edited by Lucey. If each pa­per con­tains even a mod­est 50 ref­er­ences, that amounts to roughly 3,400 ci­ta­tions re­cy­cled through a sin­gle out­let. In 2024 alone, Gooddell pub­lished 61 pa­pers. He’s not do­ing re­search. He’s farm­ing ci­ta­tions.

Following Lucey’s re­trac­tions, Samuel Vigne was re­moved as the ed­i­tor-in-chief of International Review of Financial Analysis and Finance Research Letters.

In ad­di­tion to that anony­mous pre-print, there is also a 2025 pa­per writ­ten by ac­tual pro­fes­sors with so­phis­ti­cated econo­met­ric analy­sis & graph the­ory which de­scribes the ci­ta­tion car­tel in much more de­tail. The con­clu­sion of that pa­per is: ”Elsevier ecosys­tem jour­nals ben­e­fited from the cre­ation of the ecosys­tem … Elsevier jour­nals in the ecosys­tem have over­lap­ping ed­i­tors and Elsevier ap­points these ed­i­tors in co­or­di­na­tion with a sin­gle aca­d­e­mic [Brian Lucey] that man­ages the fleet of ecosys­tem jour­nals.”

Brian Lucey posted a re­ply to this pa­per, which was ex­tremely weak and does not con­tain any ta­bles or fig­ures. It mostly ig­nores the data and struc­tural model of the ci­ta­tion ring and in­stead leans on Lucey’s “lived ex­pe­ri­ence” as an ed­i­tor (“we have ex­pe­ri­ence shep­herd­ing…”), while also nit­pick­ing se­man­tics and phras­ing, such as Lucey com­plain­ing that they called him a “professor of fi­nance” in­stead of his full hon­orific, “professor of in­ter­na­tional fi­nance and com­modi­ties.”

The Elsevier ecosys­tem web page went live on 4 November 2020 , ac­cord­ing to Lucey’s re­but­tal. Below is a vi­su­al­iza­tion of the net­work be­fore and af­ter this tran­si­tion date, which shows a clear dis­tor­tion of the ci­ta­tion net­work. During 2021-2025, the Ecosystem ci­ta­tions per ar­ti­cle is 103 % higher.

2020 is also the year where Brian Lucey’s ci­ta­tion pro­file ex­hibits an ex­po­nen­tial “J-curve”, a Hallmark of ci­ta­tion rings. Did he sud­denly be­come a well-re­spected ge­nius in 2020? Or did he fig­ure out how to cheat the sys­tem?

In a com­ment to Retraction Watch, Lucey fur­ther ar­gued that ci­ta­tion car­tels are not a crime, be­cause every­one does it.

”Because here’s the thing: Elsevier are aware of [editors pub­lish­ing in their own jour­nals] as a pretty com­mon prac­tice in fi­nance and eco­nom­ics. We’ve given them ev­i­dence of hun­dreds of in­stances of this. And noth­ing has hap­pened, which does raise the ques­tion, you know, maybe they’re go­ing to go back and go look at all these. Presumably, they will treat every­thing the same.” Lucey shared his list of such in­stances. It in­cludes 240 ar­ti­cles, 133 of which are in Science of the Total Environment, which was delisted from Clarivate’s Web of Science in November.

Dr. Thorsten Beck, in a blog post, con­firmed that no, not every­one does it, and yes, it is a crime.

This in­ci­dent raises an im­por­tant ques­tion: is this com­mon prac­tice across aca­d­e­mic jour­nals? And are there rules for ed­i­tors pub­lish­ing in ‘their’ jour­nals? As I was ed­i­tor across three jour­nals for a to­tal of 11 years, I can cer­tainly speak to this (and clearly say NO).I don’t have for­mal con­fir­ma­tion but I have been told by sev­eral in­de­pen­dent sources that ul­ti­mately even Elsevier re­alised that this ed­i­tor was se­ri­ously dam­ag­ing the rep­u­ta­tion of the jour­nal, ap­point­ing a sec­ond ed­i­tor and then eas­ing out the ‘doubtful’ ed­i­tor from his re­spon­si­bil­i­ties.

The fall­out from the Lucey–Vigne era ex­tends far be­yond a hand­ful of re­tracted PDFs. What it ex­poses is a struc­tural weak­ness in how aca­d­e­mic “excellence” is man­u­fac­tured, mea­sured, and mon­e­tized. By pre­sid­ing over a co­or­di­nated clus­ter of jour­nals, a small group of ed­i­tors ef­fec­tively gained the abil­ity to print their own aca­d­e­mic cur­rency.

However, blam­ing Lucey and Vigne alone ig­nores the hand that fed them. Elsevier did not just “allow” this to hap­pen; they en­gi­neered the en­vi­ron­ment for it to flour­ish, be­cause of in­cen­tives: Elsevier’s in­ter­nal met­rics (Impact Factors) di­rectly ben­e­fit­ted from this be­hav­ior. It was a sym­bi­otic cor­rup­tion: the ed­i­tors re­ceived a fast-track to aca­d­e­mic star­dom, and Elsevier re­ceived a high-mar­gin, high-vol­ume pro­duc­tion line of citable con­tent.

This is the “paper mill” reimag­ined for the elite: not a base­ment op­er­a­tion in a third-world na­tion, but a pol­ished, cor­po­rate-man­dated fac­tory within the halls o the world’s most pow­er­ful pub­lisher. This is the nat­ural re­sult of a cor­po­rate man­date to max­i­mize prof­its by bundling jour­nals into mo­nop­oly-priced pack­ages, forc­ing uni­ver­si­ties to pay for the very “prestige” that Elsevier’s own staff helped to di­lute. As one EJMR com­menter noted, “The tragedy is­n’t that they cheated; it’s that the sys­tem was de­signed to let them thrive for a decade be­fore any­one both­ered to look at the data.”

The ques­tion now is whether Trinity College Dublin will fire Lucey.

They did not re­spond to my in­quiry.

An ed­i­tor of a psy­chol­ogy jour­nal was of­fered $1,500 per ac­cepted pa­per.

Richard Tol, a pro­fes­sor of eco­nom­ics at the University of Sussex, wrote that he was of­fered $5,000 per pa­per.

Muhammad Ali Nasir, a pro­fes­sor of Macroeconomics at Leeds University, wrote about how com­mon sell­ing pa­pers is in European fi­nance jour­nals: “I had been made such of­fers from anony­mous emails but I choose not to en­gage and in one case for­warded the email to EiC. I will be sur­prised if any ed­i­tor is not ap­proached by these peo­ple.”

This raises a multi-mil­lion-euro ques­tion: given their doc­u­mented cor­rup­tion, are the var­i­ous “educational con­sul­tan­cies” and spe­cial-pur­pose ve­hi­cles op­er­ated by Brian Lucey and Samuel Vigne used to cir­cu­late ecosys­tem funds, con­fer­ence fees, or “consultancy” pay­outs from au­thors seek­ing a short­cut to pub­li­ca­tion?

Here is a hy­po­thet­i­cal out­line of how such a cash-flow scheme could func­tion.“Hello [unknown, dis­tant in­sti­tu­tions], we of­fer con­sult­ing ser­vices: €€€ for ex­cel­lent ad­vice on how to pub­lish in top-tier fi­nance jour­nals. Our ad­vice yields re­sults.”

I’m not go­ing to pro­vide de­tails on how to cor­ruptly have a pa­per pub­lished. I’m just go­ing to spec­u­late on what could be go­ing on in a sit­u­a­tion like this. It could be based on “consultancy fees” for ad­vice on pub­lish­ing that you or your in­sti­tu­tion pay to one of those com­pa­nies. They give some ad­vice, in­clud­ing what pa­pers to cite, etc, and if you fol­low their ad­vice you are likely to be pub­lished in one of their jour­nals. This could be at­trac­tive for re­searchers and in­sti­tu­tions in, e.g., China and the Middle East.

Another anony­mous eco­nom­ics pro­fes­sor I spoke to told me:

Universities in East and West Asia pay cash bonuses for pub­li­ca­tions. Some au­thors hire a bro­ker (many ad­ver­tise openly on Facebook), other au­thors con­tact the ed­i­tor di­rectly. The cash bonus is shared be­tween the au­thor, bro­ker, and ed­i­tor. Besides sell­ing pa­pers, they also sell spe­cial is­sues, which al­low the guest ed­i­tors to do what they want.And they sell po­si­tions on the ed­i­to­r­ial board, which are im­por­tant for pro­mo­tion to the next aca­d­e­mic rank.Some pay­ments are in cash, oth­ers in kind. Finally, they or­ga­nize con­fer­ences. Registration fees more than cover the costs of putting on a con­fer­ence. The con­fer­ence name sug­gests it is or­ga­nized by a so­ci­ety, but it re­ally is Lucey who pock­ets the prof­its.

Brian Lucey and Samuel Vigne op­er­ate four pri­vate com­pa­nies in Ireland and the UK clas­si­fied un­der “other ed­u­ca­tion,” likely func­tion­ing as con­sul­tan­cies or spe­cial-pur­pose ve­hi­cles for aca­d­e­mic or pol­icy work.

The ex­is­tence of these con­sul­tan­cies war­rants in­ves­ti­ga­tion into po­ten­tial con­flicts of in­ter­est and fi­nan­cial mis­con­duct.

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Just a brief an­nounce­ment that I have been work­ing with Quanta Books to pub­lish a short book in pop­u­lar math­e­mat­ics en­ti­tled “Six Math Essentials“, which will cover six of the fun­da­men­tal con­cepts in math­e­mat­ics — num­bers, al­ge­bra, geom­e­try, prob­a­bil­ity, analy­sis, and dy­nam­ics — and how they con­nect with our real-world in­tu­ition, the his­tory of math and sci­ence, and to mod­ern prac­tice of math­e­mat­ics, both in the­ory and in ap­pli­ca­tions. The sched­uled pub­li­ca­tion date is Oct 27, but it is cur­rently avail­able for pre­order.

Last week I had to di­ag­nose a bug in an open source li­brary I main­tain. The is­sue was gnarly enough that I could­n’t find it right away, but then I thought: if I set a break­point here and fire up the de­bug­ger, I will likely find the root cause very soon… and then pro­ceed to mer­ci­lessly de­stroy it!

So I rolled up my sleeves, set the break­point, fired up the de­bug­ger, and… saw the pro­gram run to com­ple­tion with­out in­ter­rup­tions what­so­ever. My break­point had been ig­nored, even though I knew for cer­tain that the line of code in ques­tion must have been ex­e­cuted (I dou­ble-checked just to be sure).

Since I was in “problem solv­ing mode”, I ig­nored the de­bug­ger is­sue and started think­ing of other ap­proaches to di­ag­nos­ing it. Prey to my tun­nel vi­sion, I mod­i­fied the code to log po­ten­tially in­ter­est­ing data, but it did­n’t yield the in­sights I was hop­ing for. How frus­trat­ing!

My fin­ger­tips itched to write even more trou­bleshoot­ing code when it sud­denly dawned on me: just fix the darn de­bug­ger al­ready! Sure, it might feel slower, but it will give you the abil­ity to see what you need to see, and then ac­tu­ally solve the prob­lem.

So I fixed the de­bug­ger (it turned out to be a one-line con­fig­u­ra­tion change), ob­served the pro­gram’s be­hav­ior in more de­tail, and used that knowl­edge to solve the is­sue.

What a para­dox, I re­al­ized af­ter­wards. The very de­sire to fix the bug pre­vented me from see­ing I had to fix the tool first, and made me less ef­fec­tive in my bug hunt. This blog post is a re­minder to my­self, and to every bug-hun­gry pro­gram­mer out there: fix your tools! They will do won­ders for you.

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