Once I Was a Physicist

I’ve always (not really 🙂 ) dreamed of being in Physics Today (and not in the obituary section!), but I never imagined that when it happened I would be called a computer scientist! From Physics Today, Aprill 2007 edition, in the web watch box (sorry subscribers only!):

Scirate
Dave Bacon, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, has devised a way to filter the torrent of preprints from arXiv and other servers. His experimental website, Scirate, works like flickr and other social websites. Individual users rank the preprints they come across. Scirate then gathers those rankings and lists the preprints according to their popularity.
http://scirate.com

My apologies to all you real computer scientists for whom calling me a computer scientist is very much quite an insult!

5 Replies to “Once I Was a Physicist”

  1. I think you’re too hard on yourself. I think you’re comparing yourself to software engineers, not computer scientists. From my (limited) experience, you seem as much a computer scientist as the rest.
    One thing you are certainly not is a graphic designer. You should work on scirate’s color scheme.

  2. Also, if you had a built-in viewer, you could keep track of how long someone spent reading a paper, how many pages they actually viewed, etc, and weight their vote with that info.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *