Compiled by Prof. Horst Meyer, May 13, 2011 After preparing the webpages of the Duke Physics Distinguished faculty, starting with that of Fritz London (1900-1954), I recorded and tabulated their weblog counts. In addition of F. London, the webpages include those of Hertha Sponer (1895-1968), Lothar Nordheim (1899-1985), Walter M. Nielsen (1901-1981), Walter Gordy (1909-1985), Henry W. Newson (1909-1978), William M. Fairbank (1917-1989), Harold W. Lewis (1917-2000) and L.awrence C. Biedenharn (1922-1996). I was intrigued when following the pattern of these counts and comparing them. Here I wish to report briefly what I found.
Those four with the largest amount of “hits” and interesting features (London, Sponer, Fairbank and Lewis) are presented in the plot. To avoid overcrowding, the five plots which show counts with only random fluctuations are listed in the inset box with their average counts. I am much indebted to Henok Mebratu for producing the plots from the tabulations I had provided. The weekly tallies indicate the number of “unique hosts”, namely the different sources from which the “hits” originated. The total weekly size (in kB) from Monday to Sunday is a measure of the total number of “hits”. As an example, a weekly tally of 3.3 kB for Sponer on April 24 corresponds to 57 “unique hosts” and a total number of 305 hits. The country of origin for some of them can be gathered from the codes. A number of hits originate from Duke, some can be traced to an American University, when they end with “.edu”, some can be traced to a country abroad, mostly Germany , Russia, Sweden, UK. However most come from non-descript sources, like “1 b3091057.crawl.yahoo.net “ , or pool-71-111-207-93.rlghnc.dsl-w.verizon.net. It is interesting that Hertha Sponer, whose name is less well known than that of Fritz London attracts on the average a comparable number of weblog counts. The counts of Fairbank, who left for Stanford University in 1959, after having achieved an international reputation for his research at Duke, are on the average the third highest.
Plot of the weekly count (in kB) of the webpage “hits” for several distinguished Duke Physics Faculty as a function of time.
It is tempting to correlate a special activity in the number of hits with relevant events. For instance just before the Sponer lectures at Duke, there were peaks of activity in the Sponer weblog counts both on April 5, 2009 (not shown here) and April 9, 2011 (see plot). The German 2011 Hertha Sponer Prize, announced in November 2010, awarded to Prof. Martina Hentschel, a former postdoctoral fellow at Duke University working in Harold Baranger’s group, could possibly be related with a special counting activity shown between late August and early November 2010.
The counts for Harold W. Lewis show him to become a rock star over a short period in Fall 2010, when his weekly count rose to the incredible peak of 38 kB (921 unique hosts), and to a total of more than 3000 unique hosts when summed over eight weeks. It is very likely that there was confusion with another Harold (Hal) W. Lewis, (Professor of Physics, Emeritus, U. of California, Santa Barbara) who attracted much attention in the fall of 2010 with his resignation from the American Physical Society in connection with a dispute on global warming (See the article in Wikipedia). There it is stated that “Lewis's letter of resignation vaulted [him] to celebrity status among global warming skeptics”. The surprising observation is, however, that most of these “unique hosts” accessed the webpage of “our” H.W. Lewis repeatedly, on the average about 6 times, hence a total of about 18,000 counts, even though it is immediately apparent from the first page that he had died in the year 2000. Over the years since fall 2007 when the weblog counting started, the average number of weekly counts has been roughly constant, except for peaks and bumps such as those mentioned above, and some longer term undulations.
Department of Physics
