India, May 17 -- Alcuin of York, the eighth-century scholar whom Charlemagne kept at his court like a particularly useful piece of furniture, is regularly credited with vox populi, vox dei, i.e., the voice of the people is the voice of God. He did not mean it as praise. Writing to Charlemagne around 798 AD, he warned against those who parrot this phrase: "the turbulence of the crowd," he wrote, "is always close to madness." Alcuin had spent enough time in courts to understand that what sounds like the voice of the people is often the voice of whoever last shouted loudest.

Twelve centuries on, the shouting has been automated. A paper published in Science on January 22 this year, by twenty-two researchers spanning Cambridge, Yale, ETH Zuri...