Me being interviewed in EE Times

You may have seen my recent interview in the Times.

Okay, it wasn’t actually the NY Times. It was the EE Times. EE is a big city right next to NY. It’s even bigger than NY.

Right: EE Times stands for Electrical Engineering Times, and I was interviewed by chief editor Junko Yoshida as part of an article about our web community, MATLAB Central. It came out pretty well, I think:
EETimes.com – Social engineers get caught in the Web. The pitch that set the story in motion was the idea that engineers aren’t social, so why are they getting social on the web? Engineers, as everyone knows, prefer to eat lunch in their cubicles and keep company with their slide rules, Boba Fett action figures, and twenty-sided dice.

Of course this idea is flawed: even the gangliest geek knows it’s no fun to play Dungeons & Dragons alone. Still, it was enough of a hook to hang a story on, which is a good thing, because we got to talk about our site. Something significant really is happening with the traffic growth we’re seeing on our community site, but I associate it with the same trends that we see everywhere else. The bottom line is that social computing works. If you can find ways to aggregate individual effort for the common good, a lot of good stuff happens. You see that in the consumer space with things like camera reviews and Netflix recommendations, and you see it in every engineering discipline. It all adds up to a lot more traffic to our File Exchange and Newsreader sites. For instance, suppose you needed to generate time-varying Rayleigh fading channels based on autoregressive models to support your fading channel simulation. Well, what would you do? I’ll tell you what you’d do. You’d end up here.