How do you measure a team's performance in the Olympics?
How do you measure a team's performance in the Olympics? The traditional way is to just count up the number of medals won... But what if the totals took account of factors that must have an influence, such as the size of a country's population or its economic power, or compared it to the size of the athletic team in London? The Royal Statistical Society and the Datablog have teamed up with four statisticians at Imperial College, London, to help us work out how those key factors might change the league table... The team, Christoforos Anagnostopoulos, Giovanni Montana, Axel Gandy and Daniel Mortlock [all Mathematics], looked at previous Olympics and traditional indicators such as the output of a country's economy (GDP), the size of its population - and also ways to weight the score by the size of each country's Olympic team.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/datablog/2012/jul/30/olympics-2012-alternative-medal-table
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Reporter
Caroline Jackson
Department of Physics
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Email: press.office@imperial.ac.uk
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