The Alternative Olympics Medal Table

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Aug 042012
 

This is being written during the games, so the table is at a certain point in time; I will update once the Olympics have finished … and make it more complete, but the point stands.

Whilst the Olympics is not really about statistics, those of us with that perversion do tend to want to see the numbers. And every time the Olympics comes around, I get slightly irritated by the medal tables that appear. The headline medal tables simply rank countries in order of the number of medals their athletes have won, which is a spectacularly dumb way of ranking countries – with most other metrics there is the option of looking at deaths per thousand people, etc.

At present the standard medal table is led by China and the US. Both are enormous countries, so of course they get a lot of medals. And indeed the people in the US are probably saying that the US is outperforming China by the simple fact that it has pretty much the same number of medals despite being ¼ of the size! And that is quite right – so why do we not have a table of countries ranked by the population per medal – i.e. if a country has 50 gold medals, and 5,000,000 people then there is one gold medal per 100,000 people. If we do a table for that, we get some very different results :-

Rank Country Gold medals Population Population per medal
1 Great Britain 10 62m 6.2m
2 USA 21 314m 15m
3 China 20 1339m 67m

These results are very different and there very well may be other surprises if the full medal table is calculated. There are those who might claim this is a simple trick to get the UK on the top of the medal table, but it is not as simple as that … indeed this alternative medal table may well be helpful to larger countries. After all it shows that despite their total medal haul, they are not doing nearly as well as they should do!

Where Are All The UK’s Medals?

 General  2 Responses »
Aug 012012
 

Anyone would think that there is some sort of drastic failure on the part of the UK’s athletes, given a certain amount of consternation at the current UK medal haul, and with odious examples such as the idiot who chastised Tom Daley for his “failure”.

Perhaps the current medal haul could be better (as of writing, 2 golds, 2 silvers, and 4 bronzes), but those athletes who have not managed a medal up until now (despite expectations) have not failed in the conventional sense of the word. And this is not the old mythical English “It’s not the winning but the taking part that counts” rubbish.

What is easy to overlook is that an athlete who comes fourth in an Olympic competition may have failed to win gold, but has also succeeded in their chosen sport far more than we could. Or to put it another way, fourth best in the world means that someone is on the fourth step of a staircase 6 billion steps high, so that athlete who failed to get gold, silver, or bronze is still so far out of sight of the rest of us that we can’t see him (or her).

It is also easy to overlook that the difference between step 4 and step 3 on that 6 billion step staircase is tiny; sufficiently small that it is easy for an athlete on a less than perfect day to slip down a step or two.

We should be congratulating the UK’s athletes whether they get a medal or not.

And if you are still obsessed with the numbers of medals, look into the total that Europe has obtained as a whole. As a hint, China would not be in the top position.

Mitt Romney’s Olympic-Sized Blunder

 Politics  No Responses »
Jul 272012
 

No, not that one. His gaffe at criticising the ability of the British people to competently host the Olympic games may be foolish in the extreme. After all the time for such criticisms is not on the eve of the games, but well in advance when things could be done – all his comments have done is demonstrate that he has very little ability in the realm of international diplomacy. And makes it less likely that any British officials will take his more serious comments seriously in the future.

Given the imminent start of the London 2012 Olympic games, it is hardly surprising that everyone has concentrated on this aspect of Romney’s comments. And it certainly points him out as being totally unsuited to any kind of international diplomacy. But another comment also points the way to Romney being unsuited to being a US president; and in some ways is very much more serious.

He also commented on the fact that he had met with the chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (commonly and incorrectly known as MI6), which is a far more serious lapse in judgement that may indicate unsuitability for “domestic” matters as opposed to international matters. His meeting with the head of SiS was hardly top-secret, and the fact that it has been leaked hardly a matter for panic. The common practice of keeping such meetings private is probably more a legacy of SiS very secret existence – up until it was established on a statutory basis in 1994, the British government would refused to comment on any aspect of SiS; even whether it existed or not.

In security terms, you only comment on things that are secret if the benefit of doing so significantly outweighs the advantages of secrecy. Romney’s comments about this meeting indicate that he does not take security seriously; whilst this comment would on the surface would seem to compromise only British security and there in a very small way, his comments are likely to ring alarm bells with any US official involved in security. He would of course deny that his comments reflect a negligent attitude to US national security, and would quite rightly point out that there was no negative impact on US national security.

But it is not what he has revealed, but the fact that he revealed anything at all that indicates his attitude is wrong.

Olympic Enthusiasm

 Media  No Responses »
Jul 132012
 

This morning I caught a news item on breakfast TV about the results of a survey carried out by the BBC into the opinions of people into the effects of the Olympics on the UK. I was particularly interested in the part where it claimed that most people are yet to get “enthused” by the Olympics. Which is quite a common theme – every so often one media group or another goes out to find that people really aren’t that bothered by the upcoming Olympics.

Perhaps the media is made up of excitable types but they make the mistake of assuming that people who are not excited by the Olympics in advance of the events will not be excited whilst the events are taking place. I don’t know how everyone else reacts, but I tend not to get excited by events that are happening 6 months away, or next week. Even if they are fantastically exciting whilst they are happening.

The time to decide if the Olympics has been a positive thing or not is after the Olympics.