在线英语听力室_免费在线英语听力学习网站

That’s a shout World Cup enthusiasts¹ don’t hear too frequently. Soccer’s known for low-scoring games, which makes it difficult to find an objective² means of measuring the skill of top players. In a given game, a couple might nail a goal or have an assist³. But who’s the best of the best?

This conundrum⁴ plagued Luis Amaral as a kid in Portugal. Now, a professor of biology and chemical engineering⁵ at Northwestern, he used his team’s computational skills to find the best. The work is in the journal⁶ Public Library of Science One.

Graduate student Josh Waitzman wrote software using data from the 2008 Euro Cup Web site. They mapped the flow of the ball among players. They evaluated the ways the ball can travel. And they were able to rank players based on how many times and ways the ball passed through them to finish a given shot.

Their rankings match the opinions of coaches and experts. For example, all agree that Spain’s Xavi is a great player. Amaral and his team say this network model could be also be used for non-soccer tasks, such as evaluating teammates on a group work project. (Annual report)

Thanks for the minute for Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Cynthia Graber.