This article comes up with a tool measuring the half-life of the code and demonstrates it on some project. What I was requested as an addition is the discussion of correlation of this metric with other metrics.
Being said that, a "paper" makes a difference compared to a "blog post" at some cases. Sometimes, in order to convince your directors and project managers about your change proposals to the programming processes, you need to support your idea with more serious work.
For example, in my previous company, I could use such an academic research in order to demand more time budget for "code-cleanup" periods where the team focuses just to re-writing the parts of legacy code, instead of bugfixes and new features.
I am surprised that this small request offended someone.
