then WordPress. Not having posted for a while, I’m trying to get things in order and keep up to date (or at least a little more than posting once every 18 months), and I’m switching to a competitor. The new site (with the old posts) is now http://asluckwouldhaveit.blogspot.com/
April 25, 2009
August 25, 2007
Charisma in football managers
I’m sitting on a train to Durham, and delighted to see that they have wireless internet. So, rather than do the work I should be doing to make use of the dead time, I’ve been reading random things on the net for the sheer thrill of doing so on a train. And in my effort to catch up with whatever the national press have published about today’s football (soccer if you’re reading in the US – does anyone read this?) I found myself looking at Russell Brand’s column in today’s Guardian.
Brand writes about his disillusionment with the national team, something many of the people commenting (and I) identify with. One (or is that two?) of the (3) reasons given for this relates to the England manager, Steve McClaren, who seems to react to what the press clamour for, and continues to bring back into the fold rather aged players. While I agree with Brand in finding this upsetting, I think there’s another more fundamental reason why McClaren will never win favour in the hearts of the nation: he’s dull!
If I think back over previous England managers, it seems to make sense, at least from the little information I have about this through TV and press. Steve McClaren has always been dull, as manager of Middlesbrough and now as England manager. I’m not saying he’s not a nice chap – indeed he might well be – but when I see him interviewed, I just don’t think he’d be a good bloke to have a night out with, or even to chat to over a beer. He just has that sad droopiness about him.
The same was true (though in a different way) of Sven Goran Eriksson. While he may have had a way with the ladies, this doesn’t make him interesting – if he hadn’t been England manager, I wouldn’t be leaping up to chat to him at a party. He’s just not got the charisma. I’m sure he’s very charming, and he seemed to have the loyalty of the players, but nothing carried over to me the TV viewer. And the press gave him a hard time for not seeming to do much or express much during England games.
Going back further, Glenn Hoddle was passable but a little barmy – he’d have managed if he hadn’t got into all that faith healing stuff. Graham Taylor was dull, though. I like him, and I like his commentary on the radio, but he doesn’t really have a spark that makes him top of a list to invite to a party. Bobby Robson was good – he was quirky, interesting, and a little bit odd, but generally, I think we liked him. Certainly, we liked him when he quit the job, and I think that even though we (the public) may have had our difficult moments with him, he engaged us, so he passes the interesting test.
Of course, the man at the top of the list, the one who many of us would still like to be England manager, is Terry Venables, El Tel. Even his nickname is exciting. He’s just a lovable rogue, a dodgy geezer, but one who seems to be able to try new things, get excited about the game, and engage with us as well as the players. We love him for the trouble he gets into, we love him because the FA don’t (and it gets better all the time), and we love him because he seems to know how to live life. Oh, and he didn’t do too badly as England manager. But, as is often the way with these things, the problem is that the powers that be can’t cope with someone so difficult and dodgy.
And this is the fundamental problem. There are able managers, but exceptional ones are hard to come by. When they do appear, they often have some curious characteristics Look at Jose Mourinho at Chelsea – clearly a top manager, but sometimes over the top in several respects. Excellence doesn’t always wear a grey suit!
June 27, 2007
June 3, 2007
Grammatical Sloppiness
It’s that time of year again. Reading through and marking a pile of exam scripts is always a chore, because of the time it takes out of the week when there are other things that need doing, because of the tight deadlines that often need to be met, and because of the care and attention that one needs to put into it (quite rightly). Most of all, however, the thing that I find most difficult, is having to read through scripts by students who can’t spell or can’t write coherent sentences. This is not just something I encounter in exam scripts, but in all sorts of other documents produced by students at all levels, undergraduate and postgraduate.
So it is interesting to see that it’s not just academics who suffer. According to Recruitment and Employment Commission reports The Guardian this week (2 June 2007), “Around half of all CVs received by recruitment consultants contain spelling or grammatical errors, and these are most likely to be made by those aged between 21 and 25.”
The impressions left by well written or poorly written documents are so important that they can often have as great an impact as the content of the document. I advise all my students that they should take a huge amount of care over writing, but far too many turn in sloppy work.
So, a word of advice to anyone starting a course at university: in addition to studying your courses, work at your writing skills during your entire degree programme. There’s no point getting a degree if you can’t get people to read your CV and employ you. Impressions count!
January 30, 2007
Go
I’m currently trying to move from Southampton to London, and it’s a pain having to trawl through the piles of stuff accumulated over several years. Many things have been thrown out, and should have been thrown out years ago, but some things are rediscovered on the process of moving. Like the game of Go (invented more than 2500 years ago in China), and the rather too posh set I bought myself only a couple of years ago. I decided that I wanted to play, to learn to play, properly, after having dabbled with it too many years earlier.
I gave the game a certain cachet when, as an undergraduate, I first discovered it, being played by two of my lecturers, John Washbrook and Simon Peyton Jones, at lunchtime. Only later did I begin to understand the inherent difficulty of Go, as opposed to other games like Chess, especially for machines.
And this week, coincidentally, I read in The Economist (27 January 2007) that the performance of machines is now improving, by using Monte Carlo techniques. For example, the MoGo system is apparently ranked 2,323rd in the world, and in Europe’s top 300.
Not sure it’s worthwhile learning to play now!
November 11, 2006
The Netflix Prize
I’m intrigued by the announcement of The Netflix Prize. Already some of the students in the lab are keen to see if they can win the $50,000 or even the $1,000,000 prize!
From the website: “The Netflix Prize seeks to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences. Improve it enough and you win one (or more) Prizes. “
And from The Guardian:
“US online DVD rental service Netflix Inc has announced a version of the Longitude prize for film geeks – a $1m bounty to the first person to develop software to improve its movie recommendation system by 10%.
Currently, the system “learns” the individual taste of each of Netflix’s 5.2m subscribers by asking them to rate the films they watch. This data is then used to generate a list of suggestions or “recommendations”, unique to each user.
To win Netflix’s prize, the software program must demonstrably improve upon the current movie-recommendation system by at least 10%. The differences will be tracked by a program that quantifies how well the recommendation systems predict which movies will be liked or disliked by a profiled consumer.”
Blog, anyone?
It seems that everyone has a blog. I don’t know whether I’ll use this, but it seems like a good way to keep track of random interesting bits and pieces. I did try to create one on my own website, but because I’m new to this blogging game, I don’t really understand the rules, so using WordPress seems like a sensible way to manage it more easily. Maybe I’ll work it out and do my own thing in time.
