Sociology: Popularity of a Person or a Country

Which is more popular? A country or a person? Consider the country called Sierra Leone located in west Africa.Sierra Leone is known for its diamonds, the devastating civil war which lasted for 11 years, and its role in the slave trade centuries past. Most people have heard about the country but do they know anything more than that?

Now compare with a person's name. Obviously, there's very few people with the full name Sierra Leone*. However, there are people with the last name of Leone. There's two methods here to see who's or what is more popular and both uses Google. The first is a simple Google Image search for 'Leone' which can be seen as follows:

From the first screen, the statistics for each image linked to the country or a person as are as follows for the first 23 images shown:

Sierra Leone: 7
Sunny Leone: 5
Ashley Leone: 1
Pino Leone: 1
Matthew Leone: 3
Rudy Leone: 1
Jim Leone: 1
Jennifer Leone: 1
Donna Leone: 1
Paola Leone: 1
Carlo Leone: 1

Clearly, Sierra Leone does lead but not by much. Combined, from the image relation percentage, the popularity of people with the last name Leone is much greater than that of the country of Sierra Leone. Taking a look with method two of examining number of Google searches for each of the 10 people and the country Sierra Leone reveals the following number of results in order:

1. Sierra Leone: 380,000,000
2. Sunny Leone: 57,400,000
3. Jennifer Leone: 16,500,000
4. Jim Leone: 15,000,000
5. Mathew Leone: 12,200,000
6. Donna Leone: 12,100,000
7. Ashley Leone: 11,000,000
8. Carlo Leone: 9,400,000
9. Paola Leone: 4,740,000
10. Pino Leone: 3,820,000
11. Rudy Leone: 2,800,000

Combined, the 10 people searches amount to 144,960,000 or over 1/3 of the amount of information for Sierra Leone. Clearly, the information for Sierra Leone still dominates but there is much interest in the people as well. As a sidenote, an interesting lineup of the popularity level of these people and what they do highlights what much of society has their minds wrapped around. In the order of the number of results by Google and removing the names Jennifer Leone and Jim Leone which are due to people with a really popular first name, people's minds are focused on:

1. Hot girls (Sunny Leone or Pino Leone)
2. Music (Matthew Leone or Ashley Leone)
3. Crime novels or fictional Venice (Donna Leone)
4. Science or justs Canavian disease (Paola Leone)
5. Politics (Carlo Leone)
6. Horses (Rudy Leone)

This is not very surprising at all given that to most people, politics and equestrian (art of horse riding) are hardly interesting, while almost no one will object to music and no guys will object to hot girls. Still,  the good sign remains that the country information still ranks first. Perhaps this shows that global politics is still interesting to many people but politicians are not since they come and go. *By the way, did you know that there's a town in Sierra Leone named Shen Ge? I plan to go there one day.

Research: Proposed Aerospace Papers

Predicting the Fate of Humanity for the Next Century
Much has been said about the Fermi paradox, the paradox on why if there’s supposed to be intelligent civilizations out there, we humans have not observed any sign of life. One depressing but possibly true answer to this paradox is that almost all intelligent civilizations eventually discover weapons of mass destruction and end up destroying themselves before expanding via spaceflight. In Michio Kaku’s book Hyperspace a while ago, the physicist made the statement that the next 150 years will be a pivotal stage of whether humanity will expand into the stars or revert itself to the stone age or become extinct. In this paper, a prediction following the spirit of Drake equation is proposed. This equation is called the Shen equation, i.e. Global Calamity Equation, and it predicts the probability that human civilization will terminate within a given amount of time:

P(civilization termination) = P(Nuclear War)*P(Global Epidemic)*P(Asteroid Impact)*P(Ecological Collapse)

The probability for each calamity is based on best estimates from literary reviews in their respective fields.

Modeling Galactic Civilization Expansion and Encounters
Though alien life has not yet been confirmed, it is interesting to speculate on the state of galactic affairs in the universe. How has galactic civilization evolved over the eons? Does contact between different civilizations necessitate growth or decay? If human civilization provides any indication, contact between human civilizations has seen the imminent collapse of less technologically advanced civilizations when confronting more advanced civilizations. However, this has not always been the case and sometimes both civilizations benefit.

In this model, the galaxy is modeled as a distribution of possibly habitable systems on a three-dimensional grid following the best estimates of recent exo-solar planet discoveries. With the passage of the first time step, i.e. a millennium, each galactic civilization expands by ten light years from its home star system. With the passage of the second time step, i.e. a millennium again, each galactic civilization expands by one hundred light years (to take into account technology advancement). This exponential rise continues indefinitely. Each star system encountered is settled thus unless already settled by another galactic civilization. Upon civilization encounter, a random number is generated which decides whether the star system changes hands between civilizations, remains the same, or is annihilated. The entire simulation is run for 1000 time steps or until the galaxy is thoroughly colonized.

On Piezoelectric Power Generation from Space Debris
With the inevitable rise of space debris in the near future, protection from hypervelocity impacts has become an important issue for any spacecraft launched. Given the high kinetic energy yield of such impacts, an idea is proposed to capture such kinetic energy through piezoelectric materials incorporated into current Whipple Shield designs. Capturing such energy can be used to power components such as onboard batteries. A model and design of such a space power shield is proposed here based on experimental and theoretical models from NASA’s ORDEM2K.