Comments on: astro-ph Rationalized

By: Bruce Macintosh

Bruce Macintosh — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 16:44:26 +0000

OK, from the descriptions, extrasolar planets go in Earth&Planetary.

Not sure where planet formation goes – E&P includes “structure and formation of the solar system” , solar and stellar includes “star formation and protostellar systems”‘; cross-listings might take care of that but that seems spotty so far.

I’m deeply curious to find out what “stellar astrobiology” is.

By: Bruce Macintosh

Bruce Macintosh — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 03:59:13 +0000

So extrasolar planets go where – “Earth and Planetary Astrophysics”? or “Galactic
Astrophysics”? I’m not strongly opposed, but I think the categories could have been defined differently.

By: Shantanu

Shantanu — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 05:54:06 +0000

Hi,
maybe gr-qc could be split up into gr-qc-ex (which focusses on experimental aspects
of gravity) and gr-qc-th which deals with everything else in gravity.

By: Scholar Blog » Astronomipreprintarkivet astro-ph opdelt i underkategorier

Scholar Blog » Astronomipreprintarkivet astro-ph opdelt i underkategorier — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 23:22:39 +0000

[...] system med 6 underkategorier. Dette diskuteres (bl.a.) på en blog kaldet Cosmic Variance, se her, og der er en række interessante synspunkter: nogle mener underkategorier er af det onde i det [...]

By: BG

BG — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 19:33:11 +0000

In an ideal world, this -would- just be another option for how to filter through papers. But like it or not, the categories the arXiv chooses really do affect who reads what papers. Perception shapes reality and all that.

What I don’t understand is that I thought there -was- a panel formed to come up with categories, and they even had a proposal put forth… what happened to that? Why was it put aside in favor of the current implementation? Did Andrew Connolly (who’s supposed to represent astrophysics to the arXiv advisory board) have any input? Why is this all so opaque?

Like I said previously: I support the change. It’s not the “what” that makes me feel unsettled — it’s the “how”.

By: Mike Hudson

Mike Hudson — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 16:48:54 +0000

@Hiranya

I think the feed above is for Cosmo Coffee forum discussions, not “arXiv new filter”.

I seem to recall asking Anthony for a feed for the latter, but he said it was not available.

As you say RSS can be useful to keep track of which ones yo have read and which ones you have not.

By: Hiranya

Hiranya — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 16:04:09 +0000

Actually it looks like there is some kind of “feed” here.
http://cosmocoffee.info/smartfeed_url.php
I don’t know enough about RSS to know whether this is what you want but it looks promising.

By: Hiranya

Hiranya — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 15:50:14 +0000

Hi Mike, I am afraid I am one of those people who never warmed to RSS feeds. I like sitting down with the day’s “catch” from the cosmocoffee filter with a cup of coffee, reading through and bookmarking the papers I want to read more carefully. I guess the RSS feed is useful if you don’t read the arxiv every day (e.g. while you are travelling)? I can ask Antony whether he can add it. I also get the full arxiv abstract email and if I have time I quickly page through it to see if the filter missed something interesting, but it only does so very rarely once a good set of keywords is in place.

By: Mike Hudson

Mike Hudson — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 15:07:50 +0000

@Hiranya, @Questioner:

Almost all of Questioner’s requests are satisfied by cosmo coffee, EXCEPT that while you can get customised arXiv results on a web page, you cannot get an RSS feed of these results (AFAIK)

Overall, I prefer cosmo-coffee to myADS because I can add author’s names into mix as well as abstract keywords.

By: Questioner

Questioner — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:42:41 +0000

Thanks!

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 12:23:12 +0000

Hi Hiranya. I’d missed the app you mention and it does look nice – thanks!

By: Hiranya

Hiranya — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 11:09:53 +0000

Omar, didn’t know about the myADS, I should check that out! The cosmocoffee app (written by Antony Lewis) allows you to filter all the arxiv sections (not just astro-ph) you want to read with your personal selection of keywords, bookmark papers you like with the option to add notes, and also to add them to your local journal club (there is an extra journal club functionality you have to set up first). It’s a neat tool.

By: Omar

Omar — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 10:01:25 +0000

Questioner – you can also use myADS to get a customized astro-ph mailing (or RSS feed), sorted by your own keywords:

http://myads.harvard.edu/

By: Hiranya

Hiranya — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 08:46:09 +0000

Questioner, your dream world exists
http://cosmocoffee.info/arxiv_new.php
I think I will keep using it rather than this categorization.

By: A. Gradstudent

A. Gradstudent — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 02:44:06 +0000

Bitch bitch bitch bitch….

Just kidding.

Thanks, Sean.

By: Questioner

Questioner — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 01:04:51 +0000

In my dream world (and this is really dreaming) I could go to arXiv, select from a small collection of keywords, and have a custom RSS feed appear.

Again, that’s in my dream world; although I can’t really think of a reason why they can’t do it!

By: Questioner

Questioner — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:59:07 +0000

I, for one, appreciate this attempt. For anyone who doesn’t like it, the old option is still available.

But is there any hope of something like this being done for hep-th, hep-ph, and gr-qc? Why only astro-ph?

Is there a place where suggestions for categories are being accepted?

By: Pope Maledict XVI

Pope Maledict XVI — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:49:18 +0000

The funny thing here is all the glee at not having to look at the titles of papers on the arXiv. I suspect that, for many people, reading the arXiv is a painful duty, and *anything* that reduces the time spent on it is welcome. As somebody said on another blog, the best thing about Christmas is that the arXiv gets turned off for a day. It tells us something about our true feelings about the kind of research we are all doing and [reluctantly] reading about these days.

By: Thor

Thor — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:43:50 +0000

Hmmm… I wonder how large the training set needs to be to categorize past entries. I’m guessing – I’m hoping, that the threshold is set low enough that past entries are tagged into multiple groups if they contain enough keywords from various categories. Does automatic categorization dump the entries into separate folders or are the entries just tagged? If the system can learn from individual subscribers interests, then it should be that much better. This shouldn’t be that big a deal in the end. Good improvement.

By: Ben

Ben — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:37:05 +0000

Link in my previous comment didn’t work because of a trailing comma: the 2005 categories are at http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/000643.html
They were: Cosmology; Galaxies; Stars; Earth & Planetary. So it was possible to have a worse system than the 2009 system.