On January 16 from 2-3p, don't miss Dr. Steven Skiena's talk at YahooLabs entitled "Who's Bigger? A Quantitative Analysis of Historical Fame". You can watch it LIVE on the Yahoo Labs website homepage and ask questions or comment on the Yahoo Labs Facebook and Twitter (#BigThinkers) pages.

Abstract: A discipline of computational social science is emerging, applying large-scale text/data analysis to central problems in the humanities and social sciences. Here we study the problem of algorithmically-constructing quantitative measures of historical reputation. Who is more historically significant: Beethoven or Elvis? Washington or Lincoln? Newton or Einstein?