BloJJ

H=16

Just for the record (my own one, mainly) last citation search yielded an H number of 16. I hit 15 by the beginning of this year, and 14 almost exactly one year ago, which increasing intervals of 5 and 8 months for each increment. Next one by July next year, I guess.
That dynamics will eventually stop, because if it didn't, it would be impossible for anybody to have an H of 40 or 50. But who knows where the turning point is.
Etiquetas: publish or perish, papers

Renault and (My name is) Earl

Renault is not a very common car in the US. The company (as other European companies such as Peugeot) abandoned the US market, and has no plans to go back. One of the few models that sold there was the smallish Renault 5, branded Le Car and manufactured in the USA, and that's probably the one that Kenny has been seen driving in several episodes, in blue if I remember correctly.
But Renaults show up in a couple of places more: in 1x07, the car the old executive lives in is apparently a Renault 25, and in some other episode (can't remember which one), there's a wreck of a Renault 8 or 10. Those are not shown in IMCDB though.

Etiquetas: renault, cars, sightings

Caught by his own words

In 2004, freshly sworn into office, our leader Zapatero said in this interview in Time magazine:

That's what I call "citizen's socialism" — I accept that when an overwhelming majority of citizens says something, they are right

Last opinion polls say that 51% of Spaniards have an unfavorable opinion of Zapatero's performance as a president, against only 44% who have a favorable opinion.
The people has talked, and I guess the people is right. Let's see when he mentions that in a speech. Or interview.

Algorithm::Evolutionary 0.56 released

It's been a long time since the last release, two whole years, and during all that time anybody without the XML::Parser module would have been unable to install it. I have been using it all the time, and making improvements, but I couldn't make myself to release a new version until there was something really different. Still there isn't, but, hey, it's been a couple of years so it's time to brush up the thing, so here's Algorithm::Evolutionary 0.56, which passes all tests with flying colors, and which I've using lately for my PPSN papers
Etiquetas: perl, cpan, library, module, evolutionary algorithms

Turkey and Switzerland

Still no update on passes distribution, so we'll have to make do with what we've got. Here are Switzerland

and Turkey

For the time being, there is no clear pattern, at least from the centralization point of view. 0.07 vs. 0.09 in Czech Republic vs. Switzerland, and 0.13 vs. 0.06 in Portugal vs. Turkey.
Tags: soccer, euro2008, analysis

No new results on the Euro 2008 network analysis

I have analyzed the Czech Republic, whose network is quite different from Portugal, but there are no new results today. The first passing distribution page has changed, including now a few pairs from Croatia and Germany, but the rest stays the same. Maybe there's a cache problem, or it's just taking time to upload it. I expect it'll be fixed soon, I'm curious about preparing the Germany network.
Tags: soccer, errors, euro2008

It's always good to have somebody to blame

While many Spaniards are queuing up in gas stations and flocking to supermarkets to buy food to stockpile due to the nationwide transportation strike, our wise politicians led by our even wiser president have found somebody to blame:

Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero on Saturday blamed the European Central Bank for a recent jump in oil prices and market interest rates, saying its president, Jean Claude Trichet, had to show more prudence. Trichet last week warned that interest rates could be raised next month.

Not everybody is happy about that, obviously. The Germans, who have apparently not taken the socialist kool-aid, have said:

Asked about Zapatero's remarks, German government spokesman Thomas Steg said Germany viewed the ECB's independence as sacrosanct.
"We have no criticism to make of the ECB or of Mr Trichet. If Mr Zapatero sees this differently, he has to explain that," Steg told a regular government news conference in Berlin.

During hard times, even better than having somebody to blame is to have an allied you can turn to to support to politics at an European level, whatever they are.

Tags: Spain, it's the economy stupid, ZP

First results coming out: Deco and his betweenness

And here's the graph of Portugal in Portugal vs. Turkey, which Portugal won 2-0.

Nodes are sized according to betweenness: as you see, Deco is the betweenness king, the game organizer, right as it should be. Bosingwa and Pepe are also good organizers, while Cristiano Ronaldo is not really there. You can download the file from the git repository directly or create your own with the programs provided. And good luck!

Euro 2008: Network analysis

As we did 4 years ago, it's the time to make a network analysis of the Euro 2008 soccer tournament. Fortunately, full passes and intercepts statistics are being published; unfortunately, it's not done per match; it will not be difficult to extract per match stats via differential analysis, I guess. For the time being, I have created a a git repo with code that scrapes the page and downloads and distills player-per-player pass stats; more stuff will have to be done: put in in a format that can be understood by some network analysis program, and do the actual stats.
Our target is to try and find which network measure is a good predictor for match outcome, and, eventually, to predict which team will be the winner based on that. And publish it eventually in some congress or journal, obviously.

If you want to commit code to the repo, please sign in GitHub and send me your ID. Good luck!
Tags: soccer, social network analysis, euro 2008

The value of ideas

Talking with a physicist acquanintance about the number of papers we had submitted to a recent conference (9), he replied:
-I don't have that many ideas in a whole year.
In science ans in life, there are people who have ideas and those who haven't. But it's probably more worth the while to have a single idea and take it to bear fruit, than having thousands of them and leaving them in your Moleskine notebook or in the air of a single conversation. If an idea is not published, or built, or sold, it amounts to nothing.
That means that, at the end of the day, the really successful people are not those that spend their time having ideas. Ideating, if there's such a thing, takes only a tiny amount of time of the process. The vast amount is taken implementing the idea, debugging it, testing it, and here comes the boring part, doing experiments, writing them down, making mistakes, doing them again, writing it, sending it to a journal or congress, and so on and so forth.
The upside to it is that once you've got the process streamlined, you can have a single idea and stretch it to several publications, every single publication will take less of your time, which you can devote either to have more ideas or to take also those ideas to success.
The plain truth is that nobody will have as an epitaph "He had many ideas", but "His h-index is 999" or "He published so many books" or "he patented a single idea of which he lived the rest of his life".
Tags: philosophy, that's life, ideas