The “medals” R post by [TRInker](http://trinkerrstuff.wordpress.com/2014/02/09/sochi-olympic-medals-2/) and re-blogged by [Revolutions](http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2014/02/winter-olympic-medal-standings-presented-by-r.html) were both spiffy and a live example why there’s no point in not publishing raw data.
You don’t need to have R (or any other language) do the scraping, though. The “`IMPORTHTML`” function (yes, function names seem to be ALL CAPS now over at Google Drive) in Google Drive Spreadsheets can easily do the scraping with just s simple:
=IMPORTHTML("http://www.sochi2014.com/en/medal-standings","table",0)that will refresh on demand and every hour.
Here’s a [live URL](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Al7I7nS0BP50IfThs55OKv5UPI9u-ctZgZRyDQma_G8/export?format=csv&gid=0) that will give back a CSV of the results which can easily be used in R thusly:
library(RCurl) sochi.medals.URL = "https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Al7I7nS0BP50IfThs55OKv5UPI9u-ctZgZRyDQma_G8/export?format=csv&gid=0" medals <- read.csv(textConnection(getURL(sochi.medals.URL)), stringsAsFactors = FALSE) str(medals) 'data.frame': 89 obs. of 6 variables: $ Rank : chr "1" "2" "3" "4" ... $ Country: chr "Norway" "Canada" "Netherlands" "United States" ... $ Gold : int 4 4 3 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 ... $ Silver : int 3 3 2 1 0 3 2 0 0 0 ... $ Bronze : int 4 2 3 3 0 3 0 1 0 0 ... $ Total : int 11 9 8 6 2 7 3 2 1 1 ... print(medals) Rank Country Gold Silver Bronze Total 1 1 Norway 4 3 4 11 2 2 Canada 4 3 2 9 3 3 Netherlands 3 2 3 8 4 4 United States 2 1 3 6 5 5 Germany 2 0 0 2 6 6 Russian Fed. 1 3 3 7 7 7 Austria 1 2 0 3 8 8 France 1 0 1 2 9 =9 Belarus 1 0 0 1 10 =9 Korea 1 0 0 1 11 =9 Poland 1 0 0 1 12 =9 Slovakia 1 0 0 1 13 =9 Switzerland 1 0 0 1 14 14 Sweden 0 3 1 4 15 15 Czech Republic 0 2 1 3 16 16 Slovenia 0 1 2 3 17 17 Italy 0 1 1 2 18 =18 China 0 1 0 1 19 =18 Finland 0 1 0 1 20 =20 Great Britain 0 0 1 1 21 =20 Ukraine 0 0 1 1 22 - Albania 0 0 0 0 23 - Andorra 0 0 0 0 24 - Argentina 0 0 0 0 25 - Armenia 0 0 0 0 ... 87 - Virgin Isl, B 0 0 0 0 88 - Virgin Isl, US 0 0 0 0 89 - Zimbabwe 0 0 0 0
Which frees you up from dealing with the scraping and lets you focus solely on the data.
You can set it up in your own Google Docs as well, just make sure to publish the spreadhseet to the web (with ‘everyone’ read permisssions), strip off the `pubhtml` at the end of the published URL and add `export?format=csv&gid=0` in its place.
If I made a Venn diagram of the cross-section of readers of this blog and the [Data Driven Security](http://dds.ec/) web sites it might be indistinguishable from a pure circle. However, just in case there are a few stragglers out there, I figured one more post on the fact that the new book by @jayjacobs & me is available _now_ in electronic form (not pre-order) wouldn’t hurt. The print book is still making it’s way from dead trees to store shelves and should be ready for the expected February 17th debut. 




I tend to obsess over fonts and the latest obsession is