World's Greatest Sportsperson?

Is it possible to work out which living athlete is the best? Mathematician Rob Eastaway, co-author of The Hidden Mathematics of Sport, investigates.

The case for Indian batsman Sachin Tendulkar is certainly strong. His international career has spanned an astonishing 22 years, during which time he has never been dropped from the Indian Test side.

The "Little Master" has scored more runs and notched up more international hundreds than anyone else in the history of the game, although cricket fans will always be compelled by Donald Bradman's famous 99.94 batting average. And it's not just that he has scored more, it's the huge margin by which he tops the table.

Longevity and the accumulation of trophies is certainly an important factor in making greatness, but it is surely not the only one. After all, if you're only looking at durability at the top, then Tendulkar is outstripped by US golfer Tom Watson, who has been a serious challenger in the Open since 1975.

The trouble is, there are so many statistical ways to measure greatness.

One is to pick out those sportsmen and women who for a period of time are in a different class from their peers. The goal-scoring feats of Lionel Messi make him a candidate, but statistical measurements of footballers are always tricky, not least because it can be hard to disentangle one player's performance from the contributions of his team mates.

Champion of champions?

• Sachin Tendulkar - achieved 99 centuries in international cricket
• Usain Bolt - world record and Olympic record holder in the 100m, the 200m and the 4×100m relay
• Tom Watson - five-time Open winner, challenged at the top level since 1975
• Phil "The Power" Taylor - won a record 15 world darts championships
• Jenny Thompson - won more swimming medals and gold medals than any woman in Olympic history

The feats within individual sports are easier to assess, and in terms of quantum leaps, can anyone rival Usain Bolt?

The 100 metre sprint is the pinnacle of athletics where the world records normally mean shaving 1/100th of a second off the previous best time. Yet Bolt has broken that record not just once but three times, and in his most recent, mathematicians reckoned he could have knocked more than a tenth of a second off the record time had he not slowed up at the finish because his shoelace was undone.

Great sportsmen are head and shoulders ahead of the competition. In Bolt's case it's head, shoulders and a couple of strides too.

Or you can take a look at a sport's world rankings. Every sport uses a different system for rankings its members, but all of them are based on some form of objective, mathematical model.

To identify the world's greatest, why not look at which sportsman has managed to spend the longest amount of time as world number one. Tiger Woods managed to be top of the golf rankings for over 10 years, before his recent fall from grace. By this measure, though, there's a British sportsman who pips Tiger for the title.

Phil "The Power" Taylor has had an almost unbroken position as world number one in darts since 1998. And yes, darts is now officially a sport.

We can of course let the market decide. If a sportsman earns a lot of money, it must reflect his global appeal and success.

David Beckham, surely a great, has earned tens of millions over his career.

Yet on this score, the world's greatest sportsmen at the moment could be Alex Rodriguez. He's paid around $30m (£18m) per year, and that's before all the product endorsements. He plays baseball.

But can he really be called the world's greatest when his name barely registers in public consciousness outside his own country?

Of course greatness also depends on many things that are hard to measure - charisma, style and an ability to hit the headlines, for example.

With all this complex and sometimes conflicting data, perhaps we should put our trust in the wisdom of crowds.

Despite the diverse and often ill-informed opinion of the public, put enough people together and they often manage to come up with the right answer.

And if we ask the crowd who is the greatest sportsman, I think I know who'll come out top. Sachin Tendulkar.

Why? He would win by sheer weight of population. There are over a billion people in India who have little sporting interest other than cricket. And a billion people can't be wrong - can they?

Source: BBC

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11 year old calls Police for forced labor

A boy of 11 called a German police emergency line to complain of "forced labour" after his mother told him to help clean the home.

Police say the boy from Aachen, who has not been identified, spoke to an officer via the 110 number.

They say he complained: "I have to work all day long. I haven't any free time."

His mother told the officer the boy had kept threatening to call them, having repeatedly complained of having to do housework during the school holidays.

A transcript of the conversation, printed in local newspapers, revealed the officer asking the boy to describe the kind of "forced labour" he was doing.

The boy replied that he had to clean the home and terrace, it said.

Asked if he knew what forced labour was, the boy said he did, and the police officer asked to speak to his mother, who at that stage was standing next to him.

She explained he had called after being asked to pick up paper from the floor, adding: "He plays all day long and when told to tidy up what he's done, he calls it forced labour."

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14533749

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Itsy bitsy bar code bikini

(Reuters) - Soccer teams have home and away shirts,tennis and golf stars have clothes and gear with sponsored logos, but if you're a female beach volleyball star there's not a lot of costume real estate to hire out to the marketing folks.

That's why British beach volleyball stars Shauna Mullin and Zara Dampney will be sporting a teensy weensy high tech bar code on their itsy bitsy bikini bottoms when they compete in a high profile London tournament this week.

The Olympic pairing -- ranked 26th in the world -- will have a Quick Response (QR) code on their costumes at the Visa FIVB Beach Volleyball International, an intercontinental women's volleyballexhibition.

When photographed on a smartphone, the QR matrix barcode directs users straight to a specific website, in this case a site owned by online sports betting company Betfair.

The barcode, part of a sponsorship deal with Betfair, will be printed on the back of the bikini bottoms, where advertisers think it will attract the most attention.

"There is huge interest in beach volleyball and we want to ensure that our advertising campaign is seen and remembered by as many sports fans as possible," Betfair's Andy Lulham said in a statement.

"As far as we're aware this is the first time QR codes have been used in in-play sports advertising and what better way to test its effectiveness than by putting them on one of the places that is likely to get photographed the most."

The tournament, which is part of the official 2012 London Olympic Games sports testing programme, takes place in Horse Guards Parade, London, the ceremonial grounds which hosts the Trooping of the Colour each year on the Queen's birthday.

This venue will host the 2012 London Olympic Games beach volleyball tournament in a temporary arena which will be built next year and have a capacity of 15,000.

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Earth in Antimatter Belt?

A thin band of antimatter particles called antiprotons enveloping the Earth has been spotted for the first time.

The find, described in Astrophysical Journal Letters, confirms theoretical work that predicted the Earth's magnetic field could trap antimatter.

The team says a small number of antiprotons lie between the Van Allen belts of trapped "normal" matter.

The researchers say there may be enough to implement a scheme using antimatter to fuel future spacecraft.

The antiprotons were spotted by the Pamela satellite (an acronym for Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics) - launched in 2006 to study the nature of high-energy particles from the Sun and from beyond our Solar System - so-called cosmic rays.

These cosmic ray particles can slam into molecules that make up the Earth's atmosphere, creating showers of particles.

Many of the cosmic ray particles or these "daughter" particles they create are caught in the Van Allen belts, doughnut-shaped regions where the Earth's magnetic field traps them.

Among Pamela's goals was to specifically look for small numbers of antimatter particles among the far more abundant normal matter particles such as protons and the nuclei of helium atoms.

'Abundant source'

The new analysis, described in an online preprint, shows that when Pamela passes through a region called the South Atlantic Anomaly, it sees thousands of times more antiprotons than are expected to come from normal particle decays, or from elsewhere in the cosmos.

The team says that this is evidence that bands of antiprotons, analogous to the Van Allen belts, hold the antiprotons in place - at least until they encounter the normal matter of the atmosphere, when they "annihiliate" in a flash of light.

The band is "the most abundant source of antiprotons near the Earth", said Alessandro Bruno of the University of Bari, a co-author of the work.

"Trapped antiprotons can be lost in the interactions with atmospheric constituents, especially at low altitudes where the annihilation becomes the main loss mechanism," he told BBC News.

"Above altitudes of several hundred kilometres, the loss rate is significantly lower, allowing a large supply of antiprotons to be produced."

Dr Bruno said that, aside from confirming theoretical work that had long predicted the existence of these antimatter bands, the particles could also prove to be a novel fuel source for future spacecraft - an idea explored in a report for Nasa's Institute for Advanced Concepts.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14405122

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Flowing Water on Mars?

The dark 'tendrils', emerging from rocky Martian outcrops, are signs of flowing water, say Scientists

Striking new images from the mountains of Mars may be the best evidence yet of flowing, liquid water, an essential ingredient for life.

The findings, reported today in the journal Science, come from a joint US-Swiss study.

A sequence of images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show many long, dark "tendrils" a few metres wide.

They emerge between rocky outcrops and flow hundreds of metres down steep slopes towards the plains below.

They appear on hillsides warmed by the summer sun, flow around obstacles and sometimes split or merge, but when winter returns, the tendrils fade away.

This suggests that they are made of thawing mud, say the researchers.

"It's hard to imagine they are formed by anything other than fluid seeping down slopes," said Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project Scientist Richard Zurek of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but they appear when it's still too cold for fresh water.

Salty water

"The best explanation we have for these observations so far is flow of briny water, although this study does not prove that," said planetary geologist and lead author Professor Alfred McEwen of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona.

Saltiness lowers the temperature at which water freezes, and water about as salty as Earth's oceans could exist at these sites in summer.

"This could be the first flowing water," said Professor McEwen. This has profound implications in the search for extraterrestrial life.

"Liquid water is absolutely essential for life, and we've found life on Earth in pretty much every moist niche," said Dr Lewis Dartnell, astrobiologist at University College London, who was not involved in the study.

"So perhaps there could be hardy microbes surviving in these short periods of summer meltwater on the desert surface of Mars."

This was echoed by an expert on life in extreme environments, Professor Shiladitya DasSarma of the University of Maryland, also not involved in this study: "Their results are consistent with the presence of large and extensive underground salty lakes on Mars."

"This is an exciting possibility for those of us studying salt-loving (halophilic) micro-organisms here on Earth, since it opens the possibility that these kinds of hearty bugs may also inhabit our neighbouring planet," he said.

"Halophilic microbes are champions at withstanding the most punishing conditions, complete desiccation and ionising (space) radiation."

For geologist Joe Levy of Portland State University, a specialist in Antarctic desert ecosystems, who did not contribute to this work, they represent "a truly tantalising astrobiological target".

These small and mysterious tendrils could then be the best place to look for Martian life. Professor McEwen says that "for present-day life, these are the most accessible sites".

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14408928

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