There seems to be an ever increasing amount of research around the concept of fame, or at least the New Scientist seems to be publishing more of it. Here’s a news piece about how fame is not fair.
Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury from the University of California, Los Angeles, analyzed the fame of “ace” pilots who fought for Germany during the World War I by comparing the number of web pages that now mention each pilot with the number of planes that the pilot shot down.
They discovered that rather than being directly proportional, the fame of the pilots actually increases exponentially with the number of planes they shot down. This means that fame is not distributed fairly among the 393 pilots in the sample.
I’ve had a couple of long conversations with a friend (who’s yet another new scientist reader) about this and she was getting riled about the unfair nature of this. These power law things are part of human nature, and even more fundamentally part of very basic natural science.
November 9th, 2003 at 8:59 pm
PArt of human nature? or humans are part of nature. Some good comments on the provocative language used in network theory; and why it might be riling your friend here:
http://ahtisaari.typepad.com/moia/2003/10/network_theory_.html
/mj