Olympics 2012 - Another Perspective II

Courtesy: Geckoam

(Not) A Game of Money
Continuation of Olympics 2012 - Another Perspective I

Does rich nations play more sports? And do they win more than their poor counterparts? Let's analyze the data for answers to these questions.

GDP Per Participant:  If I have more money at disposal, I would spend more time and money on sports and hence, would rank higher in terms of number of participants and medals. A poor country which secured one medal would have done it against innumerable odds compared to a wealthy nation and should actually rank higher. Taking the wealth of the citizens into account, we can rank nations based on how many athletes it produced per dollar of their gross domestic product (GDP).

For this purpose, I used GDP at Purchasing Power Parity Per Capita instead of nominal GDP. The reason being the GDP in itself would reflect the national wealth, not general prosperity of its citizen. A per capita GDP (PPP), though not equivalent to per capita income, does reflect the wealth of citizen while adjusting for varying cost of living across geographies. Now, getting to the ranks.

Best GDP to Athlete Ratio: China - 22 USD per capita per participant.

Worst GDP to Athlete Ratio: Liechtenstein - 47,033 USD per capita per participant.

So, China produces the maximum number of participants per dollar whereas Liechtenstein, the richest participating nation, produced the least. And India? Well, India did a rather good job here, standing at 7th position, spending 45 USD per capita per participant!

Correlation Coefficient - GDP and No. of Participants: 0.2626

Does rich nations play more? Yes, they do, but poor countries do as much too. The correlation coefficient which, even though positive, is just a quarter and signifies that the correlation is not that strong. Even though sports requires money, we can play with little money as well. Next time you are told that the lack of fund is sololy responsible for the pathetic state of Indian hockey, tell them about the correlation and I bet they would still continue their rant because it is easy to understand what lack of fund means but not correlation coefficient.

GDP Per Medal: Whereas GDP Per Participant tells us about how efficienctly the nation uses its resources to promote sports, GDP Per Medal tells us about the financial efficiency in winning games. Again, just like Population Per Medal, we are comparing only the 85 nations that won any medals.

Best GDP to Medal ratio: China - 95 USD per capita per participant.
Worst GDP to Medal ratio: Qatar - 51,350 USD per capita per participant.

China did it again, winning maximum number of medals per dollar of GDP. The filthy rich Qatar did worst on GDP to medal ratio amongst the 85 countries that won any medal.

Correlation Coefficient - GDP and Medals: 0.1938

Does rich nations win more than poor folks? As it is evident from the correlation coefficient, there is little correlation between individual wealth and games won. In other words, wealthy first world countries are very slightly more likely to win games than underdeveloped countries.

Even though money is a crucial factor in playing sports, there may be other factors at play which compensate for lack of money. What are those factors? The numbers won't tell that. And what is your guess?

As the numbers talk, it is evident that there is no clear relation between performance in sports and wealth. The potential of a middle-class kid next door transforming into a sport star is only slightly less than that of wealthy folks. At least, this is what the Olympics data suggests. To know the actual probability of it and the correlation between a wealthy family and sports performance, we would need a different set of data.

Participant Per Medal: A nation can field a large number of participants. Though it does improve the probability of winning more medals, the quality of participants have a rather major role to play. In my opinion, a nation which fileded ten participants and won 5 medals should rank higher than a nation which fielded hundred participants but won only 30 medals. Here is a comparison of nations based on how many quality participant they produced worth their salt.

Best Participant to Medal ratio: Botswana, China, Iran, Jamaica, Kenya - 4 participants per medal.
Worst Participant to Medal ratio: Portugal - 77 participants per medal.

India had a participant to medal ratio of 14 and ranked 47 out of 85 medal-winning nations.

In summary, China seems to have done well whether it is about utilizing money or about producing quality participants.

Correlation Coefficient - Participants and Medals: 0.897774

Now, this is an obvious conclusion. The more the number of participants, the more the medals. However, the point to point finger would be that there is no perfect correlation between the number of participants and medals and in fact, it is a tad less than 1. What it implies is nations with higher number of participants won less medals per participant when compared to the averages.

For a detailed look on the numbers, check out the spreadsheet below.

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Related Post: Olympics 2012 - Another Perspective I

Olympics 2012 - Another Perspective - I

Courtesy: Geograph

Number Games

Which country did best in London Olympics 2012? Does bigger countries play more sports than smaller ones? India performed its best ever in Olympics, but was it really best performance? We would try to answer all these questions with a pinch of statistics and I bet, answers will surprise you.

Olympics is an interesting event, not just from perspective of sports but also from statistical perspective as well, for example, to compare relation between sports, population, and GDP. If you take Cricket World Cup or FIFA World Cup, you get a skewed comparison because very few countries play cricket and in case of football, many countries might have competitive advantage in some other sports giving a wrong interpretation of data.

However, unlike Cricket World Cup or FIFA World Cup, we get a wider representation of countries and sports in Olympics allowing for a rather fair comparison.

Secondly, looking the medal tally, we cannot judge a nation's sports spirit because of varying factors such as population and economy. Here, I have tried to plug in those numbers and rank nations in a more justifiable way.

Finally, while the news papers are full of the wonderful performance of India and while the social media can't stop cheering the athletes even after the event is over, it is worth to introspect and find out where we actually stand and whether we are game for the games.

Let's get started with the basics stats of London Olympics 2012.

Maximum Number of Participants: Great Britain - 541 athletes
Maximum Number of Medals: United States - 104 medals
Most Populous Nation: China - 1.35 bn people
Wealthiest Nation (GDP Per Capita - PPP): Liechtenstein - 141,100 USD

Now, the more interesting (and more complex) stats.

Population Per Participant / Athlete Density: This number is the total number of participants divided by nation's population which gives an idea about how popular sports is in the given nation. In a populous country like China, there would definitely be many athletes and they would rank higher, but if you find higher density of athletes in nation, it implies people play more sports there. As the title suggests, it is simply the number of citizens out of which we would get one athlete.

Best Athlete Density: Cook Islands - 2224 people per athlete.
Worst Athlete Density: Bangladesh - 30,503,603 (3 mn) people per athlete.

What about India? It's third worst, 14,580,644 (1.4 mn) people per athlete, right above Bangladesh and DR Congo.

Correlation Coefficient - Population and No. of Participants: 0.3439

This number signifies the linear relationship between population and no. of participant of the nations, whether more populous nation field more athletes or not. The short answer is yes, they do. For the long answer, let's understand correlation coefficient first.

Basically, it tells us how two variable are related to each other. This coefficient may have value between -1 to +1. A value of -1 would mean that the variables are inversely correlated, i.e., if one goes up, the other goes down in the same proportion. Similarly, a value of +1 would mean that the variables are perfectly correlated, i.e., if one goes up, the other goes up in the same proportion. What about zero? Well, that means the variables are independent of each other and there is no correlation. Values in between -1 and +1 represents all the shades of correlation in between.

A value of 0.3439 would mean that there is a correlation, but not a perfect one (value of +1). In other words, even though populous nations have more athlete but not as much as less populous nations do when you take their populations into account. In other words, athlete density is more in less populous nations. In yet other words, people play more sports in small countries.

Population Per Medal / Performance Density: Population per participant gives us an idea about popularity of sports in each nation, but it fails to show how good the athletes are in sports. Pupulation per medal shows how good the nations are in the sports. The logic is that a tiny nation winning one medal should be ranked higher than a nation hundred times its population that has won ten medals. Here, we can only compare the 85 nations that has won medals out of the 204 participanting nations. The reason is simple, we cannot compare hair color of two bald people, can we?

Best Performance Density: Grenada - 105,000 people per medal.
Worst Performance Density: India - 201,698,903 (20.1 mn) people per medal.

What about the brouhaha surrounding India's wonderful performance? Well, looking at the athelete density and performance density, all one can make out is that it indeed is brouhaha. We are a nation of spectators and not players. We just want others to play the game and move our bums only when ordered to do so. India would definitely top the medal tally if the Olympic folks consider watching games 24/7 a serious game in itself. Until then, we gotta be content being first from the last.

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Related Post: Olympics 2012 - Another Perspective - II

Contagion Insanity

Insanity is contagious, prevalence of religion and patriotism is evidence. 

Enslaved in Pride

There was a most revealing rule: slaves were to remain illiterate. In the antebellum South, whites who taught a slave to read were severely punished. '[To] make a contented slave,' Bailey later wrote, 'it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.' This is why the slaveholders must control what slaves hear and see and think. This is why reading and critical thinking are dangerous, indeed subversive, in an unjust society.

Source: The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan

Suicide or Homicide? - A short story.

If you wish to kill yourself by hanging, would you stand on the floor and press your neck against the rope? Would you?

March 24, 1931: “He was found partially hanging with his feet touching the ground in his party office-cum-residence." reported The Hindu, in the article describing death of Karam Singh. This particular piece of text caught my attention. It is called "near hanging," i.e., feet touching the ground while hanging. What followed was a common sense investigation, few questions, and rational imagination of the event.

Who Karam Singh: Karam Singh was the legend of peasant uprising in Punjab in the latter years of nineteenth century. He was the founding father of Kisan Mukti Sabha, which went on to become the stage for men of the land who took up arms against colonialism, who rejected Gandhian strategy of pleading for rights to survive. Peasant uprising of 1889 was crushed by the British army, which ironically employed Indians soldiers. With two of his comrades dead and 7 years spent in jail, Karam Singh broke and lost the vigor for armed struggle. Once fierce in his youth, he had become frail, lost the flames in his heart, and had publicly renounced the use of violence to obtain freedom. He lived a life of simplicity in a small hamlet named Nabadgoan till his last day. On March 23, 1931, he was found dead, his small body hanging from the ceiling, his bare feet touching the mud floor. "He committed suicide," police said. "He was ill and unable to bear the pain of illness," they added with poker face.

The Execution: Near-hanging is not a good way to do suicide as it is often nonfatal. This is because even if you press your neck hard on the rope and try to hang, you will fall unconscious before death occurs and your body will automatically find support on ground (law of gravity). So, if you want to die, then you have to jump off a height with rope tied tight around your neck. A chair or bed are good options in home setting. Considering the height of chair/bed to be around 2 feet and elasticity of the rope, the body has to suspend in air some 1-1/2 feet above the ground. This will be the perfect setting of suicide by hanging. But Singh was found with his feet touching the ground.

Incidents of near hanging is usually found among the young population with average age of people attempting near hanging being 31. Many cases involve no intention of suicide but only "breath play" mostly involving teens and young adults. People try to strangulate themselves (breath play) for short duration to experience the hallucinatory effect as the oxygen flow to the brain stops. Of course, there are accidental deaths. Karam Singh at 78 does not fit the bill for this method of self murder, at least not statistically.

The minimum height recommended for judicial hanging (sentenced by law) is the length of the body. This ensures that enough pressure is applied by the rope on the neck, enough to cause almost immediate death. In a crude way, this pressure can be calculated as - body weight x gravity + momentum gained on falling. However, a height of a feet or two does a good job even though the death is not as painless as in the previous case. Freshmen in the business of suicide (and acrophobics) do try hanging themselves at ground level or at small heights. Since the body does not hang, the force applied by the rope on the neck is quite small. This situation is more like choking rather than hanging. Death, if it occurs, is quite painful and prolonged. Given the encounters Singh might have had with life and death, he must have known the difference between hanging and choking. Why would he choose a painful death?

Is it possible that he died and then not sustaining his weight, the rope loosened and his body was lowered to the ground? If the rope is loose, will it sustain his weight at the first place when he jumps off the height? Or possibly a holy ghost loosened the rope after he was dead.

Sources:

http://www.writing-world.com/mystery/suicide.shtml

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0020138303001104

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1342658/pdf/jaccidem00011-0063.pdf

The Note: Statistically speaking, around 35% of people who commit suicide, leave a note behind. Karam babu was a leader, man of the masses, a thoughtful person. He was an ideologist who would not stop himself from expressing his feelings. Given his personality, one would expect him to codify his final words, to the townsmen, to the comrades, before attempting suicide. Yet no note was found.

The Media: The media was quick enough to plug holes of suspicion by announcing it as "suicide" and the reason as "age-related ailments." And they came to the conclusion even before autopsy could be conducted. This is rather a rare behavior of news vendors, they are very curious to know the inside story, always on hunt for conspiracy. And here it was, a bland story of a suicide by a frail old man.

Skim through various brands of news and they all have the same standard version of the story. It describe the event in 2 lines (Karam Singh committed suicide by hanging, police thinks it is suicide) and then quickly shifts the focus to his life history (his involvement with peasant uprising, death of comrades, his imprisonment, release from jail). Then finally as an ending note, they described his renunciation of violent means for freedom.

The Season: Karam Singh supposedly had abdicated armed struggle after being released from prison. Still he was the founding leader and general secretory of Kisan Mukti Sabha, the same flag that waves atop Kanhalal's camp, the most wanted freedom fighter or terrorist, as the British would call him. Kanhalal had taken Karam Singh's place, he was the poster boy of armed struggle now. The same ideology rested in the hearts of both men. Though having rejected violence as means of revolution, it would be foolhardy to consider that Singh had no links with Kanhalal. After all both belonged to the same party, had same ideology, only the zeal of youth had faded in the former.

With increasing activities of KMS, the colonial rulers launched the Operation Black Buck. It was meant to flush out and clean the jungles off the so-called terrorist faction of KMS. With the Operation Black Buck on and army masquerading in the green land to hunt down the red rebels, it would make sense that the British officials had something to glean from Singh. Some information about the rebels, their whereabouts, their strategies, what else, I don't know. Anyway, these are just wild, wild, guesses. In short, Operation Black Buck might have had something to do with Karam Singh and his "timely" death just when the genocide of rebels is on.

The End: All the above facts (actually fiction) turned the needle of suspicion (or guess) in some particular direction, which certainly is not the plain and simple self annihilation. But the history was not to reveal the truth because as of 1931, British ruled the land and the ruler writes the history. Whatever it be, it was a cold matter. Decay of a body which cannot support the weight of its owner's ideologies does not gather heat. By the second day of death, Karam Singh, who once made headlines, was pushed to some obscure corner of inner page of newspapers. Autopsy report could never make it to print. There were other important issues to report. By now, Gandhi's “Quit India Movement” had taken the nation by storm. Emotions were burning high in all directions. Desire to be free was taking shape and form. Independence was imminent, tomorrow if not today. A faint smile had spread itself across million faces, hovering above the scars of loss, pains of struggle. In this chaos, who would remember the death of old ideologue, who could barely lift a handgun in his last days, but yet dreamed of that elusive freedom for the masses. Let him die, let him lie in peace. Who cares whether it was suicide or homicide.

Disclaimer: Everything written above is figment of my imagination and has nothing to do with any dead or living person. Similarity, if any, with any dead or living person, past or present event, would be just by random chance.

Mera Bharat Mahan

On March 10, 2010, Sajjan Kumar and 9 other accused in 1984's Sikh massacre get bail and walk free out of Delhi High Court without even being arrested. And the security pledged was paltry Rs 50,000. The cost of 2733 lives slaughtered in 1984 is just Rs 500,000, thats Rs 183 per life!


On the other hand, Dr Binayak Sen was incarcerated for almost 1 year before he could get bail. What was his crime? Suspicion that he has connection with Maoist. Few letters supposedly written by Maoist leaders and some other article. The Government of Chhattisgarh (India) thinks that reading these letters and articles makes you criminal. What Dr Sen did in the rural villages of Chhattisgarh? Treated the tribal and poor villagers there whom government failed to provide even the basic medical facility.

It took almost one year, protest by various human right activists, and intervention of international bodies before he could be granted a bail. All this drama even though there was no evidence against him.

Now, as August 15 comes, you will roam around with a Rs 5 batch of tricolour and sing "Mera Bharat Mahan." And of course, you have to vote to change the society, change the system, just as you have done for the last 60 odd years.
Related Post: The Lesser Devils

Marathi Manoos, Hindustani, or Just a Human on Earth

I stumbled upon an article in NDTV.com which apparently is month old and the issue has cooled down now, but anyway it excellently serves my purpose. Here is the article in original form:

"".... Yes, we all should support Raj Thackeray and take his initiative ahead by doing more...

1. We should teach our kids that if he is second in class, he shouldn't study harder, just beat up the student coming first and throw him out of the school.
2. Parliament should have only Delhiites as it is located in Delhi.
3. Prime Minister, President and all other leaders should only be from Delhi.
4. No Hindi movie should be made in Mumbai. Only Marathi movies must be made there.
5. Buses, trains, flights should be stopped at every state border and staff should be changed to local men.
6. All Maharashtrians working abroad or in other states should be sent back as they are 'snatching' employment from locals.
7. Lord Shiva, Ganesha and Parvati should not be worshiped in our state as they belong to north (Himalayas).
8. Visits to Taj Mahal should be restricted to people from Uttar Pradesh (UP) only.
9. Relief for farmers in Maharashtra should not come from Centre because that is the money collected as tax from whole of India, so why should it be given to someone in Maharashtra?
10. Let us support Kashmiri militants because they are right in killing and injuring innocent people for the benefit of their state and community.
11. Let us throw all MNCs out of Maharashtra. Why should they earn from us? We will open our own Maharashtra Microsoft, MH Pepsi and MH Marutis of the world.
12. Let us stop using cellphones, emails, TV, foreign Movies and dramas. James Bond should also speak Marathi.
13. We should be ready to die hungry or buy food at 10-times higher price, but should not accept imports from other states.
14. We should not allow any industry to be set up in Maharashtra because all machinery comes from outside.
15. We should stop using local trains as trains are not manufactured by Marathi manoos and the Railway Minister is also from Bihar.
16. Ensure that all our children are born, grow, live and die without ever stepping out of Maharasthra, then they will become true Marathis.

We need to make it clear once and for all, we are Indian first. Mumbai is Mumbai because it is a part of India......""

Source: www.ndtv.com

By this time, you must have been thinking what a great write up it is defining the soul of Indian integrity and that a state is meaningless without the country. True. Indeed it is a great article not just because it provides insight into Raj Thackeray's so-called hate politics or divide and rule politics (doesn't politics itself mean divide and rule). This article also serves as a template to understand another important phenomenon. Now do a small exercise. Re-read the above article again, but whenever you encounter words related to the concept of "Maharashtra," replace it with "India" and replace the concept of "India" with "world." Then, the last line would read as follows:

We need to make it clear once and for all, we are world citizen first. India is India because it is a part of the world.

You may replace India with United States, Pakistan, France, or Somalia. Yet the results are same. But we have never been taught that neither in school nor by the media. Why? Because this kind of thought is called ANTI-NATIONAL. Unfortunately, the common sense is also not that common for us to have our own opinion on such issues. The government of different nations have been doing the same thing what Raj intends to do, divide and rule, but it is given a different name, patriotism. If it is in the best interest of a state to be united with the country, then I believe IT IS IN THE BEST INTEREST OF A COUNTRY TO BE UNITED WITH THE WORLD, ONE WORLD. I know patriotism and nationalism are touchy issues and many questions remain to be answered, but I cannot make this post endlessly long. I welcome questions, comments, and criticism. More information about the concept of one world can be found in www.garrydavis.org.