'SPOTY' is the annual BBC 'Sports Personality of the Year'.
This Quibans takes an article from a year ago. It appears that it is updated each year (and
is nonsense every time!). The versionfor 2019 has been done as a video (but includes the same graphics as in 2018).
Here I present the article a section at a time, with a
question after each. My thoughts and
comments appear together at the end. You may want to give students the address of the webpage and ask them to go through it for themselves.
BBC Sports Personality of the Year: How
do you win the main award?
14 December 2018
The BBC Sports Personality of the Year 2018 will be crowned on Sunday but what are the key factors in the make-up of previous winners? From birthplace to facial attributes, we've been analysing the ideal candidate...
The award was first handed out in 1954 and there have been 60 different winners, with Andy Murray the only person to win it on three occasions.
Question 1: This image appears at the end of the article. It suggests that to win SPOTY you ideally
need to do athletics, to have been born in London, to have blue eyes, to be 29
years old and to have had your achievement in August. Any comments at this stage?
Here is the first image:
Q3) Why is this
unsurprising?
=============================================
Q4) Any comments?
=============================================
Recall the line of text near the start of the article:
The award was first handed out in 1954 and there have been 60 different winners, with Andy Murray the only person to win it on three occasions.
Q6) Looking at the previous image, what can we
work out?
Q7) Why is this
not a surprise?
Q8) So let’s look back at the diagram we started
with. Any further comments?
Here are my answers:
Q2) There are lots
more athletes than there are motor racing drivers and there are lots of sports
included under the heading ‘Athletics’.
There are really only 11 England cricketers who might be in with a
chance and footballers suffer because people will only vote for national team
players and not those from clubs they don’t support,
Q3) London is bigger
than anywhere else, so it has a larger proportion of the population.
Q4) What has this got
to do with success in sport or with popularity?
Does having green eyes make you less popular? No.
Does it make you less successful?
No. And the facial hair is presumably
partly to do with fashion.
Q5) If you have blonde hair you are more likely to have blue
eyes! So these two things are linked.
Q6) There are 65
winners here, so some people have won it twice.
Q7) Many awards will
have been because of events that take place in the summer, such as the Olympic
Games (July/August) or Wimbledon (June).
There are most winners from athletics and that is overwhelmingly a
summer sport. Is it also likely that
those who win things in Jan/Feb/March are forgotten by the time you get to December
and the voting for SPOTY?
Q8) We have said already that athletics and August are
likely to be linked and that London is the biggest city in the UK, so is likely
to have more people who are born there.
The blue eye colour is interesting: for the men it was equal, but by
including the female winners you get blue being the mode. Clearly, if you are male then this isn’t
relevant! But hold on: vastly more men
have won than women, so should that be mentioned here?
Here is a list of the Athletics winners of SPOTY (from Wikipedia):
Of the Athletes, 5 were born in London (Christopher
Chataway, Seb Coe, Daley Thompson, Fatima Whitbread and Jonathan Edwards).
The final four of those appear to have brown eyes, leaving
only Christopher Chataway. He was
23 years old when he won and his big
achievement (breaking the 5000m world record) took place in October.
Chataway meets only the first 3 of the 5 criteria. Are there any who meet 4 of them? Jonathan Edwards is the only one of the
athletes who makes 4 out of 5. He was a
Triple-Jumper, born in London, was 29 and his world championships win was in
August.
None of the other winners (from any sport) get 4 of the
5.
So this is an example of where appealing to the averages at
every stage doesn’t help us in predicting the winner.
Extension: Number 1 song at Christmas
This used to be one of the biggest songs of the year. Many different newspapers carried exactly the
same story. This version comes from the
Independent:
Music experts find formula for ‘perfect’
Christmas number one
Music researchers have crunched the numbers on Christmas songs to
find the perfect formula for a festive hit.
Experts
at a UK music label looked at every Christmas number one from the last 50 years
to see what they have in common and determined that the Pet Shop Boys’ 'Always
On My Mind' came closest to being the quintessential tune for the holidays.
“I
think we’re a long way from an algorithmically-generated Christmas number one,”
said Howard Murphy, founder of Ostereo which conducted the research, in a press
release accompanying the data.
“But
certain characteristics do make a song more likely to resonate with audiences
at Christmas,” he added.
For
a song to hit the top spot on Christmas Day it needs to be three minutes and 57
seconds, in the key of G major, played at 114 beats-per-minute and performed by
a 27-year-old solo artist, according to the research.
Other
key trends among the songs analysed were that the majority were ballads, nearly
half were cover versions and nearly all were about something other than
Christmas.
'Always
On My Mind' hits the ideal length and key exactly, as well as being a cover of
Elvis’ 1972 hit, but is slightly faster than the formula suggests at 125 bpm
and performed by a duo who had an average age of 31.5 when the song hit number
one at Christmas 1988.
'Mary’s
Boy' by Boney M came a close second, researchers said, with a tempo of 113 bpm,
length of four minutes two seconds and a key of F, two semitones lower than G.
Clearly this isn’t a ‘formula’ – they have just averaged the
attributes of all the Christmas number one songs over the years. What types of average have they used for each
attribute? How is this story related to
the SPOTY one?
Sources:
