Jim Borger makes the following interesting suggestion in comments to the “Do you follow the arXiv?” thread:
What I think would be way better is if the MathSciNet sent out emails with abstracts of newly published papers. With some very basic filtering, based on which authors, subjects, key words, etc you like, they could probably keep the emails reasonably small. That would be much more useful than the archive digests. Then you could truly keep an eye on whatever fields you want without much effort.
This would presumably be easy to implement, given some kind of personal login to MathSciNet — but do you want MathSciNet keeping track of what abstracts you looked at, and which ones induced you to click through to the article?
The right way to do this, I guess, would involve allowing us to tag MathSciNet abstracts, so that overlaid on the AMS subject classification would be an emergent user-generated classification scheme which I’d expect to be much richer and more useful. And it wouldn’t stop there — I imagine MathSciNet would keep track of everybody’s browsing in order to identify users with similar tastes, and make recommendations accordingly. “People who looked up Deligne’s “Le Groupe Fondamental de la Droite Projective Moins Trois Points” also liked…”
Three questions:
- Would you be into this?
- Does Google Scholar already do this for people who use it while logged in to their Google accounts? Is Google keeping track of my scholarly interests and ordering its Scholar search results accordingly, as it does for web search?
- Why doesn’t the arXiv allow tagging? Or does it, and I can’t find it? There are already links on each article page for bookmarking at CiteULike, del.icio.us, and digg, all places where you can tag; so arXived articles are tagged, but the tags are scattered across different services used by different populations. Why not tag where most people read?
By the way, I really like Jim’s new paper “Lambda-rings and the field with one element.” Yes, another definition of the category of schemes over F_1; but this approach smells particularly good to me. Here’s one thing I like. As always, you have some notion of which Spec Z – schemes descend to Spec F_1, and what should be meant by “descent data.” In Jim’s story, you can do the same thing starting with S-schemes, where S is an algebraic curve over some finite field F_q. But the target of this construction is not, as you might initially think, F_q-schemes — rather, there’s another category, “F_1^S-schemes”, which lies between S-schemes and F_q-schemes. In this category you have, e.g., some rank 1 Drinfel’d modules. I take this to be saying that you can’t take the slogan “Spec Z is like an algebraic curve over Spec F_1” too seriously; maybe there just isn’t anything which is to Spec Z as Spec F_q is to S.