{"id":459,"date":"2009-01-22T12:42:31","date_gmt":"2009-01-22T12:42:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=459"},"modified":"2009-01-22T12:42:31","modified_gmt":"2009-01-22T12:42:31","slug":"convenience-or-excess-specialization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=459","title":{"rendered":"Convenience or excess specialization?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The other day, <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/new\/#jan2009\">arXiv.org split<\/a> a popular category, astro-ph, into six subcategories. This is convenient&#8230; astro-ph, the astrophysics archive, was getting rather large, and the split into sub-categories makes it easier to find papers that are relevant to one&#8217;s specialization.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand&#8230; it also means that one is less likely to read papers that are not directly relevant to one&#8217;s specialization, but may be interesting, eye-opening, and may help to broaden one&#8217;s horizons. Is this a good thing?<\/p>\n<p>There are no easy answers of course&#8230; the number of papers just on arXiv.org is mind-boggling (they proudly announced that they&#8217;ve <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/new\/#oct2008\">passed the half million paper milestone<\/a> on October, with thousands of new papers added every month) and no one has the time to read them all. Hmmm, perhaps I should have spent more time applauding a recent initiative by Physical Review, their This Week in Physics newsletter and <a href=\"http:\/\/physics.aps.org\/\">associated Web site<\/a>.<\/p>\n<fb:like href='https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=459' send='false' layout='button_count' show_faces='true' width='450' height='65' action='like' colorscheme='light' font='lucida grande'><\/fb:like>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The other day, arXiv.org split a popular category, astro-ph, into six subcategories. This is convenient&#8230; astro-ph, the astrophysics archive, was getting rather large, and the split into sub-categories makes it easier to find papers that are relevant to one&#8217;s specialization. On the other hand&#8230; it also means that one is less likely to read papers <a href='https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=459' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","category-3-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=459"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":461,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459\/revisions\/461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}