Big Brother is Watching You...withowt ur sitayshunz?

Ever wonder just how influential a given document has been on THE ENTIRE COLLECTED HISTORY OF ACADEMIA?Worry no more! Thanks to the Princeton dynamic duo of David Blei, assistant professor of Computer Science, and Sean Gerrish, a doctoral student in the same department, in a couple of years you, too, will be able to scientifically prove beyond a shadow of a doubt just  how little influence your senior thesis has had on the world!But seriously, folks.Traditionally, a work's influence has been charted by keeping track of how many other works cite it as a reference, or, in the case of a website, how many other websites provide links to it. This, however, can show faulty data that either over- or undervalue a work's significance (We've all been there - citing for citation's sake).According to the Princeton University website, "[Blei and Gerrish's] method relies on computer algorithms to analyze how language morphs over time within a group of documents -- whether they are research papers on quantum physics or blog posts about politics -- and to determine which documents were the most influential."In other words, their method analyzed the text within documents, finds the first place that a particular word or phrase was used, and identifies it in later documents. This gives an approximate history of the term, and thus the idea.The approach can also be used to track the history of a word...I personally am looking forward to finding out where the word "metrosexual" came from.Now, I'm not taking "E-mails for Females" to knock out my QR requirement for nothing...I really don't understand how this kind of thing works.But I do know one thing: David Blei looks a lot more like Will Ferrell than Sean Gerrish looks like Yul Brenner.Am I right?