tulips

Is the World Cup so predictable?

Maybe not…according to what we have been witnessing.

Wired UK ran a piece of beautiful infographic (shown here in Flickr) a month before WC started with incredulous soothsaying ability (back then…) of how we are likely to see a final between Brazil and Serbia. It rang…

A country’s GDP is a better indicator of its chances in South Africa than its team’s formation.

and then, with some pristine logical and economical reasoning,

They found that, in almost three in four games, the outcome of a match can be correctly predicted by a formula based on the ratio between the two nations’ populations (bigger nations have a larger talent pool), GDP per head (the higher it is, the better the resources), experience (the more you play, the better you get), plus a constant to represent home advantage for the host nation.

Wow! The home advantage bit didn’t really work, hehe… Anyway, I looked around and behold, math!

Every match, i vs j, can be forecast by inputting population (pop), GDP per capital (y) and experience (exp) into a formula to give the unexpected goal difference (GD) or “edge”: GD(i,j) = 0.137 log (pop(i)/pop(j)) + 0.145 log (y(i)/y(j)) + 0.739 log (exp(i)/exp(j)) (+ 0.657 home advantage when South Africa play).

As of now, all that math have got only 5 of 8 teams that qualified for the last-16 or 62.5%, correct – US, England, Germany, Argentina & Korea Republic. It also predicted Germany to finished 2nd behind Serbia in their group (do a little recall, Serbia actually finished last), meeting England who topped their group (er, nope)! At least, they got this last-16 match “spot on”.

While I wait for the rest of the results to pour in the next 2 days, I’m still reeling from the Brazil-Serbia prediction.

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Swobu!

I stumbled upon some Orc goodness from the WOW wiki. Pretty well documented, including those rare lines that you need to click a hundred times to piss your Orc off.

Loktar! Tastingo! Btw, who could forget, the battle cries Vengeance for Zuljin!, and For Doomhammer!

Brings back those good memories, haha.

Yes, milord? [1]

SXSWi keynote on online privacy

SXSW Interative 2010 kicked off yesterday in Austin, Texas with social networking expert Danah Boyd giving her keynote speech on online privacy and publicity. Definitely something worth more than a chatter over tea. Danah rubs in together a few major privacy blunders from Facebook and Google in recent times, and she sums up the state of online social networking:

Ultimately, she says, “neither privacy nor publicity is dead, but technology will continue to make a mess of both.” We’ve been looking at privacy and publicity as a black-or-white attribute for content, when really it’s defined by context and the implications of what we’ve chosen to share.

From her affiliations, you would probably be least surprised by her use of Facebook and Google Buzz as examples of technologies that didn’t deal too well with privacy issues plus taking into account various psychological or usability factors. Btw, Windows Live is nowhere near a hit anyway (I’m by all means, not a Microsoft sympathizer).

TechCrunch has the report here.

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Logorama

Logorama, winner of this year’s Oscar for Best Animated Short. There’s about 2,000 logos in it, very arty and educational (?), though you get nothing much from its story.

You can watch all 16 minutes of it here. See if you managed a glimpse of Windows. Or McDonalds crashing into Weight Watchers, any coincidence?

How's the show?

Chopin 200

2010 is Fryderyk Chopin’s 200th birth year. In line with his bicentennial birthday, which has just passed on the 1st of March, there are numerous festivals, piano recitals and dedication concerts worldwide in commemoration of arguably, the world’s most played composer (if there’s such a title to be given). BBC Radio 3 has some live performance broadcasts that are worth a listen.

Feed yourself with a calendar of events and interesting reads over at Chopin Year Celebrations. If you stay in Europe, there’s probably not enough time to visit/watch them all.

Back here, I will celebrate it by challenging myself to his Ballades (which I have never attempted before). These days, you could drop by IMSLP for scores.

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