For some reason this list was published in early October with three full months left on the calendar. Do the tribals use a different calendar or do they just not care about it? What would happen in the unlikely situation where an afro-Saxon cures cancer, creates a more annoying ringtone, or solves the Mideast crisis in November?
Ironically, the list is sponsored by Starbucks, a place that sells a $10 brown beverage only affordable to white people.
Obama was once again left out of the top 100, this has led to a few theories.
To decide the top 100 the blacks used an impressive formula suggesting the process came from a more educated species:
“To identify and rank The Root 100, we developed a formula that defines influence as the marriage of reach and substance.
Broadly, we defined reach as how many people this person touches through his or her work. For substance, the editorial team scored each person based on how much he or she enriched our lives and made the world a more interesting, fun, beautiful or just place.
To calculate the substance score, our editorial team reviewed what each person had accomplished in the last year. Was he or she leading transformative change, championing big ideas, creating breakthrough art, advancing civic engagement or innovating in business and beyond? If yes, then on a 0-10 scale, that person would get a bigger number.
We checked news, blogs, critical reviews, awards and our own sharp editorial instincts to nail down the substance score. Folks who were big time in early 2010 but didn’t knock us out with great work into 2011 got low scores.
To calculate a score for reach, we first looked up the number of mentions in traditional media in the last year, using the LexisNexis news database. We also looked up the number of search results in Google in the last year and the total number of Twitter followers. To combine those three numbers into a single reach score, we then took the logarithm of each number and added them together (taking the logarithm compresses really big numbers so that celebs don’t have too much of an advantage over the less than famous).”
I hereby demand, in the name of fairness, the following: