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This page contains all of the posts and discussion on MemeStreams referencing the following web page: [cond-mat/0310049] Theory of Aces: Fame by chance or merit?. You can find discussions on MemeStreams as you surf the web, even if you aren't a MemeStreams member, using the Threads Bookmarklet.

[cond-mat/0310049] Theory of Aces: Fame by chance or merit?
by Neoteric at 7:00 pm EDT, Oct 14, 2003

Theoretical conversation between mikhail simkin and his thesis advisor:

advisor: So how's your research going?

mikhail: Yeah I'm not really "motivated", I sorta want to just sit on my ass and surf the net.

advisor: You can't just waste time searching for useless crap on the internet, this is UCLA dept of Electrical Engineering. You'd better have a publishable paper the next time I see you.

mikhail: crap...


 
RE: [cond-mat/0310049] Theory of Aces: Fame by chance or merit?
by Dedalos at 9:56 am EDT, Oct 17, 2003

Neoteric wrote:
] Theoretical conversation between mikhail simkin and his thesis
] advisor:
]
] advisor: So how's your research going?
]
] mikhail: Yeah I'm not really "motivated", I sorta want
] to just sit on my ass and surf the net.
]
] advisor: You can't just waste time searching for
] useless crap on the internet, this is UCLA dept of
] Electrical Engineering. You'd better have a publishable paper
] the next time I see you.
]
] mikhail: crap...

This study stems from our recent research on scientific citations
(M.V. Simkin and V.P. Roychowdhury, "Read before you cite!"
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cond-mat/0212043).
Through the analysis of misprint propagation in scientific literature we concluded that 80% of citations are copied from the lists of references used in other papers.
There is a good popular article about that work in the New Scientist:
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993168

In a follow up paper
(M.V. Simkin and V.P. Roychowdhury, "Copied citations create renowned papers?"
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cond-mat/0305150)
we had shown that this citation copying can explain why some papers are a lot more cited than the other.
In other words some papers can become famous by chance, totally independent of their merit.

Afterwards we started to wonder whether fame at all depends on achievement. However, for the scientists, though an objective measure of fame does exist (the number of citations to their work), it is difficult or impossible to define an objective measure of achievement.

At this point I recalled one case where such measure does exist.
Initially I became familiar with it through my aviation hobby. Flying an airplane does not imply studying WWI aces, but every pilot (at least in America) read "The Spirit of Saint Louis" by Charles Lindbergh. In that book the aviator described his celebrated 1927 New-York - Paris flight. There was a prize set for the first man to do such flight, which Lindbergh
had won. Among other contestants was French pilot Captain Rene Fonck. He was the second highest-scoring ace of WWI and ... only a Captain. Lindbergh, though he just recently completed his military training, was also a Captain, and, upon landing in Paris, was promoted to Colonel. Why Fonck was only a Captain? I made Yahoo search for Rene Fonck. It produced many results. I found the (anticipated) answer: Fonck had undesirable social qualities.
Among the search results also was the directory of aces, which came handy few years later.

---
Dr. Mikhail Simkin
http://www.ee.ucla.edu/~simkin/


[cond-mat/0310049] Theory of Aces: Fame by chance or merit?
by Rattle at 10:27 pm EDT, Oct 14, 2003

] We study empirically how fame of WWI fighter-pilot aces,
] measured in numbers of web pages mentioning them, is
] related to their merit or achievement, measured in
] numbers of opponent aircraft destroyed. We find that on
] the average fame grows exponentially with achievement; to
] be precise, there is a strong correlation (~0.7) between
] achievement and the logarithm of fame. At the same time,
] the number of individuals achieving a particular level of
] merit decreases exponentially with the magnitude of the
] level, leading to a power-law distribution of fame. A
] stochastic model that can explain the exponential growth
] of fame with merit is proposed. The model also provides
] likelihood of deviations from expected fame; it predicts,
] that the odds to be ten times more famous than expected
] from one's merit are ten in a million, while the odds to
] be ten times less famous are as high as one in ten.


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