[WWI] 1 rb paper critique

[iban]

Mike Kavanaugh wrote:
> Of course, I'm joking.  This topic is too subjective and involves factors unrecognized by anyone alive.  Any analytical conclusions are meaningless unless you want to prove the whole exercise was a waste of time.  
>   
but that's just it, mike.  yes, fame is subjective, tho no less real and 
influential a factor in daily life for all that, both then and now. 

and yes, the relationship between fame and achievement is even 
slipperier.  that makes it twice as interesting that the most concrete, 
measurable example they could find to study the connection between fame 
and accomplishment is wwi aces.  nobody is saying this is a perfect, 
flawless result, but it is several big steps closer to objectivity about 
those subjective topics than we have ever been able to get before. 

the fact that they've been able to develop predictive equations that 
work pretty well for fame/achievement relationships in general as a 
result of this study is more intriguing yet.  as one example, they show 
a plot of the number of books some of those aces wrote and sold (those 
contemporary reports you like so much) vs. those same aces' fame as 
measured by google hits.  they overlay this with the plot their equation 
predicts, and the correlation is pretty impressive.  that's not just 
significant, it's also worth a great deal of money in this day and age.

as for whether this is a waste of time or not, and the related question 
j.r. asked about who funds these studies anyhow, take a closer look at 
the obvious application these guys are working on.  among other things, 
being able to make these kinds of correlations more accurately applies 
directly to ensuring the relevance and ranking of search engine 
results.  last time i checked, neither google, yahoo, msn, amazon, or 
the other big search players were particularly starved for cash.

this means that at some point in the near future, when you search the 
net, you can be grateful that not only did german wwi aces pioneer 
aviation, and make big advances in aerial warfare strategy and tactics; 
you can also be grateful that in the process of doing so, they created 
such valuable meta-data that almost a century later those patterns could 
be mined for equations that will make internet search results more 
relevant and useful, for you and for the hundreds of millions of others 
who use the net each day.

of course, it was probably because he was thinking about such things 
that the baron was a bit distracted on that fateful day and flew a 
little too close to aussie gunners on the ground.   ;)

iban.