My favourite things

I've just been onto Amazon and I've ordered everything I want at the moment - that is the following three things:
- Bartok's Viola Concertos
- The Wire Series 1 on DVD
- De Profundis by Oscar Wilde.
I am officially happy, and I'm off for a run.

I've got the fantasy football blues

Andy Collins has just sent out the first fantasy football email update of the season and it's bad news for me. I'm currently positioned 18th out of 22 in our league. And there was me thinking that my finely-tuned research methods were infallible. This is my worst start since I can remember and in 2 or 3 weeks, when the season has settled down a little, I'll have to do a bit of analysis to see which players are letting me down. In the immediate term, hopefully Gerrard's goal yesterday will have made a bit of a difference.

Both the initial selection of players and transfer decisions in fantasy football would be a lot easier if the data were open. I've been arguing, at an informal / social level, for some time within Talis that the biggest semantic web opportunity out there is not education, but is in fact sport. Sport is something that loads and loads of people, from all sorts of backgrounds, are interested in, and certain sports in particular, e.g. football; cricket; baseball, lend themselves to both statistical and qualitative analysis. Crucially, it's not just the sports professionals that engage in that analysis, but lay people as well. The ongoing success of fantasy football / cricket / baseball and so on demonstrate a widespread hunger for active engagement in professional sports, and many many people like myself are part of leagues that may be organised by the media, notably the Telegraph and the Times in the UK, or more grassroots e.g. the league that Andy organises for his friends. It's easy to see that there would be considerable demand for semantic data services around sports, but equally, there's a significant number of people who would be willing to contribute data, in my opinion. Neither the Telegraph nor the Times provide APIs for people such as Andy, and as a result he has to perform a lot of the calculations manually, and the data is nowhere near as rich as it could be. The semantic web could enable relationships to be discovered in the performance of individual players, clubs and countries that aren't immediately apparent, as well as making statistics more accessible. My friends and I each pay £23 a year into Andy's league, so monetisation possibilities are readily apparent.

To the "player" who successfully develops a semantic platform for sports lovers, then, the spoils.

New running shoes!

This morning I've been out to "test drive" my new running shoes - Mizuno Wave Rider 11. I bought them yesterday at The Birmingham Runner Shop and they cost my £80, which for some reason is cheaper than my last pair of Mizuno running shoes.

Earlier on in the week, I went onto www.physiosupplies.com, and ordered some new insoles (in common with 70% of the population - apparently - I have dropped arches and need support when I'm running to avoid over-pronating, which is when your feet sort of roll inwards, causing tendonitis and shin splints in my case). My friend Graham, who's a physiotherapist in Manchester, recommended the site. He also has dropped arches and pointed me towards the Orthaheel Sports Orthotic Insole. A snip at £20. Incredibly they arrived less than 24 hours after ordering, on a standard delivery charge. These people should be running the country.

So out I went this morning on a 2.2 mile run. A pathetic distance I know, but I'm building up my fitness again and I'm very overweight. Well the Mizunos gave me the comfort that I'm used to now (the first time I tried a pair of Mizunos on, it felt like my feet were enveloped in a combination of air and cotton wool) but the insoles were the real stars. My feet feel properly supported for the first time ever and it's so reassuring. Maybe I'll never suffer the agonies of shin splints again? Who knows.

Overall, though, I felt like shit. It's hard to believe I'm the same person who ran the Manchester 10K race effortlessly as recently as June. But thankfully it's like childbirth (not that I'd know) - by the time the next run comes along, I've forgotten how awful the last one was. Time for a shower.

Tu me quieres querer; yo no quiero sufrir

Like most hispanophiles of my generation, I’ve always been struck by the utter appaulingness of Spanish pop music. Basically it’s poor quality heavily derivative soft rock, as John Hooper notes in the latest edition of The New Spaniards. I spent 6 months studying in Santiago de Compostela in 1985, and the only pop music I liked, apart from British stuff, were records that reminded me of great nights out – so that was a handful of Alaska y Dinarama tracks and the very acceptable (at the time at least) Colecciono Moscas (I collect flies) by Golpes Bajos. [I wouldn’t mind betting that if I played Colecciono Moscas on Youtube I would be horrified, so I think I’ll let the good memories lie.]

I reflected on this most disappointing aspect of Spanish culture over the summer as Dave and I spent a happy 3 weeks touring around Galicia – the first time I’ve been back to that part of Spain for 23 years. I needed to listen to the radio to try to “retune in” to the Spanish language, but the music nearly drove us both insane. This came as a genuine surprise to me, as I’d assumed that globalisation, and the internet in particular, would mean that previously heterogeneous countries would be levelling out culturally. After all, France has produced Air, Daft Punk and more besides, whereas in the 80s French pop music was more or less as dire as that of Spain. Spain clearly hasn’t moved on though, even though it’s a strikingly musical nation.

So why is this? When trying to understand why it is that British music is so effortlessly superior to any of its European counterparts, the conventional wisdom seems to highlight the urban concentrations of Britain’s population. But does that really explain the chasm-like gap? Spain has, since Franco’s death in 1975, become almost overwhelmingly urban, and this is particularly true of the younger generations. Spain’s got loads of cities and the vast majority of them are growing at an impressive rate. Admittedly it’s not always easy travelling between them, simply because Spain is incredibly mountainous, but that doesn’t strike me as a defining factor, especially in this day and age.

What I think might be the case is that there is almost too much continuity in Spain between its old traditional musical forms and the present. My friend Bill and I went to a fiesta in Granada in the early 1990s and flamenco was clearly in vogue among young people, for example. British teenagers and pop artists, on the other hand, aren’t constrained by the past, for reasons that will be culturally and historically complex but probably have a lot to do with the rapid industrialisation that Britain underwent and the rupture with feudal traditions that resulted. It’s only an idea and I may be wrong, but I do think I’m onto something.

Towards the end of the trip though, I finally heard a Spanish pop record that I liked. In fact, I absolutely love it. It’s called “Pretendo hablarte”, it’s by Beatriz Luengo, from the album Carrousel – yes, thanks to a combination of http://www.google.es/ and Youtube, I’ve managed to track (sorry) it down. It has the heart wrenching chorus “Tu me quieres querer; yo no quiero sufrir”, which doesn’t translate well but basically means “You want to want me; I don’t want to suffer”. It’s the perfect articulation of the painful yearning of love so if you’re feeling lovesick, or if you’re simply curious, go enjoy - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prfdtq3_EXs. Apparently they love her in France as well.

Books books books

Got this from Nadeem's blog, so I'm following suit.

The rules are:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE (can't underline with this editor so I'll put them in red)
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated (by implication it's all the rest and I can't strike out either!)
5) Reprint this list on your own blog.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (many, many times)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Debating Matters

I spent today at University of Birmingham, judging in this year's regional finals of Debating Matters. Debating Matters is a national schools competition that has been running for a few years now. I got involved this (academic) year for the first time when I attended a meeting of the Manchester Salon about social software last year. It was there that I met Helen Birtwhistle, and she invited me to judge in the first round of the competition.

To be honest, I wondered what on earth I'd agreed to. You see, my life is rather grown-up, extremely so in fact. I work in an office, Dave and I are childless, and I wouldn't dream of going swimming outside adult-only sessions. Dave and I occasionally take my friend's son, Ben, out on a Saturday morning, but definitely not as often as we should.

One of the great things about Debating Matters is that they put together excellent subject guides for the judges and debaters. In fact, I used one of them at work, on public libraries, a couple of years ago. They produce a summary of the principal arguments, and then provide an exhaustive list of URLs linking of good quality free of charge web resources.

The first round, which took place last October at Aston University, proved to be highly enjoyable, and was definitely my most rewarding experience of 2007. The quality of debates is staggeringly high. I still find myself wondering how it's possible, in such a dumbed-down society, that these sixth formers are able to navigate through complex debates such as stem cell research, and switch easily from abstract concepts to detailed examples and back again. That's really why I like Debating Matters so much - it gives me hope for the future. And to be given the chance to further develop the talents of those sixth formers by offering feedbacks baseed on my own life experience is simply a privilege.

So now when I sit in my Hall Green grown-up enclave wringing my hands about intellectual decline, I remind myself of the resilience of humanity, and that even at dusk there is still light.

What I learned about China this weekend

Spent a bit of time learning about China this weekend. I've been fascinated about China since attending a series of meetings in Manchester in the early 1990s about the emerging Asian economies, prompting me to visit Beijing in 1995. So through a few hours reading on the China area of The Economist website, followed by a telephone conversation with my very good friend Dave, this is what I've ascertained. BTW the following points may not be all consistent, but my priority is merely to record key points at this stage:

• China's economy is three times the size of India's. And Sino-Indian collaboration has been over-estimated.
• There has been a recent re-evaluation (downwards) of China's GDP, by applying what the World Bank and IMF call "purchasting-power parity" i.e. factoring in the price differences between the two countries. China is generally happy to be considered "poorer" as it provides a negotiating tool with US over exchange values etc. This revision downwards doesn't change the fact that China's growth has been nothing short of phenomenal.
• 8% of China's exports are to the US. This compares with Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong (20% apiece), Brazil (just under 20%) and perhaps surprisingly India (only 2%).
• Although Asian markets have not "decoupled" from the US economy as predicted, they nevertheless have acquired a degree of insularity that will stand them in good stead in the coming period as world markets react to America's woes. This is true even though this recession is more severe than the last, and Asian economies are more integrated into world markets.
• Domestic demand will remain strong in Asian economies and Governments now have more flexibility.
• US has been applying pressure for the Chinese yuan to be devalued. And indeed the Yuan has been climbing against the dollar since October, but this may not be a direct result of US pressure. Chinese policymakers now believe that the benefits of a stronger currency outweigh the risks. To date, a weak currency has benefited China, helping to grow exports further. But a stronger currency will reduce the costs of imports, especially food and raw materials, and curb the build-up of foreign exchange reserves. And the costs of holding the Yuan down are rising. China has to date held the Yuan down by purchasing foreign currencies very cheaply. And as a result a lot of people have a lot of dollars with very restricted options as to what to do with them. The resulting liquidity in the economy has been absorbed to an extent by selling Government bonds.
• If China were to let their currency inflate more, they could afford more imports which would in turn improve their international standing. Every time they increase their currency, though, their exports have suffered and their own internal economy isn't sufficiently broad and robust for them to stand on their own two feet at the moment. Compare this to US at the end of WW2 - with a huge powerful internal economy, they were in a position to assume global hegemony, which China certainly isn't at this point in time.
• China has had a dilemma regarding what to do with their considerable foreign exchange reserves. These have tended to be invested in Western banks, which has been welcomed as Western banks need capital right now to shore up their positions e.g. UBS which lost so much money on sub-primes.
• Is the Chinese phenomenal economic growth dependent on exports? Some commentators are saying this might not be the case, and that in fact, the growth is more dependent on investment.
• Asian markets recently went down as a result of the US crisis mainly because of the general fear of a global recession. China's companies are small, public-owned and therefore quite unstable. Plus, if we say that a big part of the global crisis is down to over-complex financial instruments which spread risk right across the market, then we can say that China is a part of this - it's part of the same markets so those same over-complex instruments also find their way there.
• Is there a case for saying that China is being over-hyped? Is the discourse slightly reminiscent of the way the Japanese economy was being discussed around 20 years ago?