Graphs are awesome
I think I’m going to start incorporating graphs into the blog more often. I ran some numbers on the Olympic medal count and compared it to per capita GDP, and got the following result:
I really didn’t have any purpose in running these numbers. They’re interesting, there’s a relationship there, just not a big one. This should go to show that you don’t always get the desired numbers when you play with data. I was hoping there’d be a stronger relationship between wealth and the medal count since I’m an apologist for capitalism. Oh well.
Filed under: Numbers and Studies, Sports
Notes: The average world GDP per capita is 8800 dollars.
If you want a correlation between wealth and sports acheivement, Look to baseball. The new york yankees have appeared in almost one out of every three world series, and have the most capital consistantly. Also, just because an athlete represents a certain country doesn’t mean they are a product of it. But this doesn’t suprise me, life is tough in a thrid world country – that which does not kill you makes you stronger.
What’s the correlation coefficient? And what’s the dot down on the bottom with 15 or so medals?
Thanks Douglass, nothing like a professor to assign homework.
j/k
I’ll run the numbers sometime tonight. The dot you’re asking about is in fact China
Correlation= .524
The two statistical outliers were Russia and China
Captain Capitalism, watch your back! There’s a new graph man in town.