Marian Fitzwalter writes in.

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I have been following with growing dismay the downward spiral of the Yahoo front page. Yesterday, Yahoo.com carried as the top-left "Featured" entry a post that purported to provide the "real Olympic medal count". (Today the featured post was Five Hoaxes that Fooled the World. Please answer the door. The Barbarians may well be at the gates.)

The REAL Olympic medal count

By Chris Chase

Look, I don't know much about gymnastics, but I do know that landing a vault on two feet is better than landing one on two knees. Olympic gymnastics judges evidently disagree with me, as they awarded China's Cheng Fei a bronze medal yesterday even after she fell on her vault landing. American Alicia Sacramone finished fourth despite, you know, not falling.

And today, 12-year old 16-year old Chinese gymnast He Kexin won gold over Nastia Liukin based on an obscure tiebreaking rule. The two received the same score from the judges, but He won a tiebreak because an Australian judge apparently was watching a different competition.

Every judging break seems to have gone China's way during these Olympics. I'm not suggesting a conspiracy, I just think that judges are humans who are influenced by big names, fans and other external factors. Oh, and they're also terrible. Judged events will always be viewed with skepticism by those who lose for this reason, particularly those who lose to a member of the home delegation. (Think Roy Jones Jr. at the 1988 Seoul Olympics.)

It is because of this skewed inconsistency that Fourth-Place Medal introduces The Real 2008 Medal Count. Our medal count will tally medals won in sports decided on the field of play, not by a judge in a teal blazer.

The judged Olympic events we will ignore for our tally are: boxing, diving, equestrian, gymnastics, judo, taekwondo, trampoline and wrestling. We debated whether to include boxing, wrestling and the martial arts in the list, as they can be decided by competitors. However, because the judging is prone to error and shenaningans, we will include it.

The Real 2008 Medal Count

China: 22 gold; 11 silver; 11 bronze

United States: 21 gold; 19 silver; 21 bronze

As you can see, in the events where medals are determined by competitors rather than judges, the gold medal gap between China and the U.S. is greatly narrowed, and the total medal count is an American runaway. Counting the judged events, China has a commanding lead in golds. Hmmm... Nope, nothing fishy about that!

The post looks like nothing so much as the rant of a sore loser. It is one of the reasons that I have stopped reading Yahoo News lest I pollute my poor little grey cells.

Yahoo's Olympic coverage has left much to be desired. There is none of the video jazz that the NBCOympics.com site features. And for some reason, Yahoo News counts the total number of medals in ranking countries. The traditional methodology has been to rank countries on the basis of gold medals (followed by silver medals in case of a tie followed by bronze medals to break further ties). The Yahoo News method is to list countries on the basis of the total number of medals won. But a weighting of 1:1:1 for gold:silver:bronze? That is just mad.

There may be some method in that madness. When I first saw this listing, it occurred to me that the United States would rank higher than it ordinarily would under the traditional methodology because the United States had been favored to win more medals overall than any other team. It has been known for a while that China would win more golds than the United States, and if the traditional methodology were followed, the United States would clock in second. This has been known for a while - certainly from before this installation of the Olympics. An article published in the Social Science Quarterly authored by Prof. Daniel Johnson and Ayfer Ali has attempted to predict the number of Olympic medals won by each team on the basis of various determinants.

Included in their determinants are GDP and per capita income. Their prediction? In terms of total golds won : China first, then the United States and then Russia. In terms of total medals : the United States first, then Russia, and then China.

Eszter Hargittai takes up one of my pet peeves - the fact that American TV networks spend a disproportionate amount of time on sports that the U.S. contingent happens to be good at.

I thought I’d get this rant out of the way before the season hits. Watching the Olympics in the US is no fun, because the only thing you can watch is Americans winning. You’d think the U.S. is the only country ever winning from the coverage. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for Americans to win, but I’m happy for other people to win, too. In fact, in some ways it’s much more interesting when you have a diversity of folks competing and this is portrayed clearly in the coverage. It gets boring fast when all you can hear is the U.S. national anthem.

Web 2.0 changes the equation a bit, I think. It, of course, allows people to customize their viewing based on their preferences and their schedules. But also, blogs, youtube and wikis reach niche audiences (such as the audience for the paralympics) which thanks to their geographical dispersion have never before been reached so effectively.

The Olympics this year promises to be unlike any before for the Indian disapora. Not only because Abhinav Bindra has won the first ever individual gold medal for India, but also because of Web 2.0. Because the diaspora is geographically dispersed (and therefore have not constituted a major media market anywhere outside of India), narrowcasting by means of Web 2.0 and related technologies appears to be quite effective in reaching this demographic. I would have missed the video of the Abhinav Bindra medal ceremony - for several days at least - had it not been linked to under "Videos being watched right now..."  off the Youtube home page. I feel like the Beijing Olympics has already delivered, and it is still the first week. Here is wishing Raj, Saina and the rest much luck.

Update: Raj and the United States gymnastics team win bronze!

Marian Fitzwalter sends this in.

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Paul Rogers argues that "the waves of social discontent and insurgency in Asia's rising powers place [India and China] at the centre of questions about the world's dominant economic orthodoxy."

The exponential growth of the economies of China and India has won for these Asian giants a position of global economic and political prominence. But this process has been accompanied by profound internal discontent, some of which takes violent forms. The respective domestic experiences may be very different, but there are enough commonalities to suggest a lesson for the dominant economic model to which both states now adhere.

The east's far west

The killing of sixteen police officers and the wounding of sixteen others in an operation in the western Chinese oasis city of Kashgar on 4 August 2008 was the most severe incident of anti-authority political violence in China for many months. The precise responsibility remains to be established, but it is likely to have been perpetrated by a separatist Islamist group which sees itself as acting on behalf of the majority Uighur population of Xinjiang region (where Kashgar is situated). The timing, in the very week of the opening of the Olympic games in Beijing on 8 August - and following an apparently coordinated attack on two buses in Kunming in the southwest province of Yunnan on 21 July which killed two people - further suggests a political motivation.