[LINK] Fwd: The Rise and Fall of Scientists
Gordon Keith
gordonkeith at acslink.net.au
Thu Dec 23 09:11:03 AEDT 2010
>From digitizing all those books Google has made available a large database of
words, from which time and use frequency plots words can be made . For
instance, here is the rise and fall of the word "scientist". (X-axis is year,
and y-axis is a normalized measure of frequency of use.) We peaked in the
written corpus of English around 1965 and have fallen by around 1/3 since. At
least our decline in the public share of mind seems to have leveled off.
"Science", "physicist", and "physics", "chemist", and "chemistry" etc. also
produce interesting graphs.
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=scientist&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=4
Regards
Gordon
The one thing we learn from history is that we don't learn from history.
-- Albert Einstein
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