castanyes blaves

A very interesting web application that studies the score distributions for different football leagues:
http://understandinguncertainty.org/node/228
Something that people already know is that Pay-per-view TV had a major impact in how different teams performed in different years. In the early 2000's, many more teams in Spain, Italy and UK had a chance to sign highly-payed players, because they were receiving the monetary influx from Pay-per-view TV. That narrowed the differences among the traditionally best-performing teams, and a group of teams that were traditionally in middle-of-the-table positions. Some teams were better at investing this influx of money than others, and this meant they had much better chances of winning the national league. But as Pay-per-view normalized, and teams with the highest media interest got back at receiving more money than the rest of the teams, sharp differences reappeared.
See for example the results for the Spanish League in 2000-2001: the variance due to chance went up to 60%.

Whereas last year: Barcelona and Real Madrid quickly dominated the scoreboard, and the % variance due to chance ended at 34%.

Italy before the referee scandal was down to 18%:

Long time, no post. Here is a financial one: Vince Cable (LibDem UK) on bank bonuses. Many many people would subscribe to these rules. That is not the problem. Politicians will say: if there is multinational agreement on these rules, let's apply them. The very moment when one important country decides not to go for them, then it's war. War many centuries ago was about having a fleet of ships with cannons, then it turned into air force, then into nuclear weaponry. Nowadays, it's a financial war. For example, reams of paper being written about artificial devaluation of the currency in China. This is as close as a Cold War as it was two decades ago.

BBC - Peston's Picks: Lib Dems: Smaller bonuses, smaller City?

These are the highlights:

1) All bonuses over £2,500 would be payable in shares, which couldn't be redeemed, or pledged as security for loans or turned into anything spendable for at least five years.

2) No one on the board of a bank, not even the chief executive, would be eligible for a penny of bonus.

3) Loss-making banks would be banned from paying bonuses.

4) Every employee of a bank earning more than the prime minister - which Mr Clegg defines as circa £200,000 - would be publicly named.