The impending Age Of Abundance was prophecied in the scriptures thousands of years ago.
Tiki-taka is characterised by rapid short passes and fast movement by the players. The idea is to dominate possession of the ball. That’s in sharp contrast to conventional tactics that focus on player formations.
it is looking ever more likely .... A chaotic disintegration would be a calamity ..... For the moment, breaking up the euro would be more expensive than trying to hold it together. But if Europe just keeps on arguing, that calculation will change. ..... Begin with Greece. There is a common fallacy, not least in Germany, that dropping the Greeks would be a fairly costless way to teach a useful lesson. In fact the European Central Bank (ECB) owns Greek bonds with a face value of €40 billion ($50 billion), which would be converted into devalued drachma and which Greece might not service. A further €130 billion or so of loans that Greece has received in the bail-out would have to be written down, or written off. The €100 billion of the temporary debts Greece has stacked up in the ECB’s payments system would crystallise into a loss. Add in a one-off grant of say €50 billion to tide Greece over—call it conscience-salving “solidarity”—and the bill might come to €320 billion. Estimating the price of a “Grexit” is guesswork, but Germany’s share might reach €110 billion of this, about 4% of the country’s GDP. ...... Ireland, Portugal, Cyprus and Spain also all owe investors abroad a net sum of 80-100% of GDP (the gross debt is much larger). ...... With the single market in peril and depression looming, Mrs Merkel would come under huge pressure to pay whatever it takes to save the rest of the euro zone. She would have no time to negotiate the pan-European federal discipline that she has always demanded as the price for German aid. A rescue would be a blank cheque. .... A bolder Plan B would amputate well above the site of infection, cutting off Spain, Ireland, Portugal and Cyprus too. Italy, which has net foreign debt of just 21% of GDP, would probably escape the chop: even with its heavy debts and chronic lack of competitiveness, Mrs Merkel would reckon that the euro zone could not function politically without it. ..... When you add up the ECB’s holdings of their bonds, the temporary debts in its payments system, written-off rescue loans, and a care package to soften the blow of being chucked out, the total for Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Cyprus and Greece comes to perhaps €1.15 trillion. Germany would also have to put money into its own banks, hit by losses in the five departing countries. Altogether, this might cost Germany getting on for €500 billion, or 20% of GDP. ..... the euro zone’s members should use their combined strength to create a banking union and to mutualise a chunk of the outstanding debt (as well as introduce policies to temper austerity and promote growth). ..... This more federal Europe would also involve costs. Recapitalising banks and financing a euro-wide deposit-guarantee scheme might cost €300 billion-400 billion, perhaps a third of it paid for by Germany. But this would be a one-off and might be reclaimed from the banks. Mutualising a slug of debt would lift Germany’s interest costs by €15 billion or so a year. The numbers are rough, but, even allowing for some extra loans to the south, rescue would be cheaper than break-up. And that is before you factor in the enormous political costs of disintegration, with, say, Greece departing into a new Balkan hell. ..... had the politicians agreed on who should pay what or on how much sovereignty to surrender. ...... Southern Europe’s economic rot is deepening and spreading north. Politics is turning rancid as the south succumbs to austerity fatigue and the north to rescue fatigue .... breaking up the euro would be riskier than fixing it. ... the choice will be between an expensive break-up sooner and a really ruinous one later.Europe going down the tube like this was not my idea of an Asian century.
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the Bank of Israel, which looks to searches like Sugarman’s to assess the state of the nation’s $243 billion economy..... The central bank stands at the forefront of the world’s hunt for new economic indicators, analyzing keyword counts for everything from aerobics classes to refrigerators -- reported by Google almost as soon as the queries take place -- to gauge consumer demand before official statistics are released. The Federal Reserve and the central banks of England, Italy, Spain and Chile have followed up with their own studies to see if search volumes track trends in the economies they oversee. .... “When central bankers were looking at traditional data, they were essentially looking out the rear-view mirror” ..... a 23-page paper he co-wrote in April 2009, demonstrating how data reported on the Google Trends service improved forecasts of auto and home sales and retail spending in the U.S. ...... Google makes its data available one to three days after users perform searches .... Using query volumes in place of government statistics that are not yet available ..... Searches predicted the inflow of British tourists into Spain with a lead of almost one month. ..... a “data revolution.” It’s “an enormous amount of information” that will better help “us understand in very real-time what’s going on.”
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| Image via CrunchBase |
The growth team was formed in late 2007, when Zuckerberg decided expansion was so important that it warranted a unit with its own resources. The site was approaching 100 million members, but its growth rate had cooled. ..... the growth team struck a deal with Google to let the search engine show Facebook profiles in its results. They also launched a feature called “People You May Know” ....... a companywide push to create a translation tool that let users in Spain, France, and Germany navigate the site in their native languages. Within two years of its creation, the team had expanded Facebook’s roster of users sevenfold, to 360 million. ..... a key to building more active members is spotting what she calls “magic moments.” That’s when a new user moves from thinking, “‘What the hell is this Facebook thing all about’ to ‘Aha! I understand, this is cool,’” says Gleit. Facebook tries to get users to experience this moment as early as possible by helping them find friends effortlessly. ...... her job entails wrangling with other teams at Facebook to highlight features on the site that improve engagement ..... “The next billions of people, we believe, are going to come through mobile” ...... governmental barriers like in China, and occasionally Vietnam, or competitive barriers like VKontakte in Russia ..... Quora, online storage company Dropbox, and Twitter now have their own growth teamsI was going to say Facebook's next billion will come from China. Zuckerberg's marriage to a Chinese woman, was that strategic?
Many readers will have watched the final of the Euro 2012 soccer championships on Sunday in which Spain demolished a tired Italian team by 4 goals to nil. The result, Spain's third major championship in a row, confirms the team as the best in the world and one of the greatest in history. ...... Spain's famous strategy of accurate quick-fire passing, known as the tiki-taka style. ..... a quantifiable representation of a team's style, identifies key individuals and highlights potential weaknesses. ..... think of each player as a node in a network and each pass as an edge that connects nodes. ..... the Spanish team pass more often..... image captures 417 passes by the Spanish team versus 266 for the Netherlands. ..... That the goal keeper was the Netherland's best connected player itself speaks volumes. ..... Players with a high betweenness centrality are crucial for keeping the momentum of the game going ..... the famous PageRank algorithm which measure's a player's popularity, as judged by the number of passes he receives from other popular players. ..... adding another node to represent the opponents goal and would record the number of shots .... measure the accuracy of passes .... The defensive strength of a team could also be incorporated in the model by tracking passing interceptions and recovered balls .... a way of collecting and analysing the data in real time to produce a network-based analysis of a game as it happens ..... In terms of data analysis, football has always lagged behind more statistically-friendly games such as American football, baseball and cricket, because it lacks the long pauses during which data can be gathered and analysed. That looks set to change.
