Maybe, but if they’re out they can’t lose, and if they can’t lose people won’t stop blowing the horns. Getting knocked out will only worsen the problem because they really won’t care anymore.
The Uruguyans just kicked the shit out of them 3-0. That should shut them up for a bit.
In their defence, it was never a penalty.
I emphasise that I am not sure Skinner is right. But assuming he is, you miss the point. His point is that his analysis suggests that there is a significant element of luck. If that is right then the team that wins may in a suprising number of cases just be the team that lucks out, rather than the team that has any particular quality that enables it to “win within the rules and inherent limitations of the game”.
This is silly. If there was no human play there would be nothing for statisticians to analyse.
It doesn’t require wizards, just multiband filters. Here is some software that will do the same if you are watching the matches on a PC.
Well the anti-vuvuzela viglilantes have won their first victory, vuvzelas banned from Wimbledon
Either that or you’re coming to New Zealand for the 2011 Rugby World Cup
I’m anti-anti-vuvzelas. I think they should be mandatory at every sporting event. Including The Masters and the International Chess Championships.
I wonder–should I follow Tiger Woods around at Pebble Beach this weekend blowing a vuvezla–how long it would be until all my hands were broken? 
Are you serious? They don’t get much more obvious than that.
RSA aren’t the only ones blowing these things, in fact in most of the crowd shots I’ve seen nobody is.
…as well as state funerals.
Link to a post about Skinner here. Link to paper here: it is entitled Soccer matches as experiments: how often does the ‘best’ team win?. You can think of it this way: low scoring game are analogous to experiments with low sample sizes. When the score is 1-0, it’s difficult to tell which team had a higher underlying probability of scoring: put another way, it’s tough to tell the underlying fitness or skill of each team. Games with 3-0 scores are clearer.
Another paper using a similar methodology is here: Soccer: Is scoring goals a predictable Poissonian process? - IOPscience They use 20 years of soccer match data to tease out the effects of team quality (constant per season), fitness (which varies throughout the season) and scoring randomness (which is higher for low scoring games). The scoring randomness is so high in soccer, that they couldn’t identify any significant variation in fitness, even with 20 years of data. The authors speculated that individual sports like tennis would have high fitness variation, while high scoring games like basketball would have lower pure randomness.
I love the sport, but I agree with Skinner. I think the '50s scoring average would be a big improvement. Of course, the tricky part is figuring out how to tweak the rules to increase scoring without fundamentally changing the game.
That’s not sad at all. The cheap plastic horns have turned me anti-South Africa. Nothing makes me happier than knowing they are (likely) eliminated.
With most noise makers, all you have to do is shove the device up the offender’s ass. Unfortunately, with vuvuzelas, doing that does not stop the noise, for they just keep tooting away.
I anticipated the USA-England game partly for the songs from the English crowd. There wasn’t any, and there seems there won’t be anything but that freaking noise. Honestly, get a different audio totem. I have no idea how this expresses your plight. I admit your plight, I just hate your drone of an expression.
And how exactly does this express your plight? How is this better than songs, which actually have lyrics and possibly a point or two? They might also be enjoyed by those around you (well, assuming you use something like the western major scale; let’s not go nuts and assume I can appreciate something using different notes or even positions for the flats).
“I’ve never met a nice South African
and that’s not fucking surprising man
cos they all blow those damn vuvuzelas
and that aint cricket…or football, either!”
Completely unsustainable assumption.
Actually, perhaps I misunderstood (I cannot access the paper). Are they assuming that team quality is constant per season, or did their model somehow show that it is, or something else?
Nuke South Africa. Those damm Vuvuzelas just cost us a goal.
Is a disgrace.
You know, for my money, nothing enhances the enjoyment of the beautiful game than 20 years of soccer match data to tease out the effects of team quality (constant per season), fitness (which varies throughout the season) and scoring randomness. It just brings all the excitement right to a head, doesn’t it?