You know what? I suspect a lot of ordinary people would put someone they knew personally high on such a list, not somebody likely to make the cover of a news magazine. I know that's true for me.

If you total up all of the top ten "admired men," you get 43 percent of the responses. Do the same for all of the "admired women," you get 52 percent. I'd like to think a lot of the rest are men and women the respondent knows personally, someone who doesn't get on the news (outside of maybe a small-town paper), or is famous in any way. The percentage such people would get under these circumstances would normally be 1 in 1,011, or about 0.1 percent. Hundreds of admired people lined up next to each other at the bottom of the list.

But I'd bet most of these unknowns would, in any objective analysis, be more admirable than most of the "top tens."