Will Cristiano Ronaldo be a Portuguese hero? Will Robert Lewandowski finally wake up?
Euro 2016 Quarter-Finals Poland v Portugal Open ThreadPost + Comments (48)
by Randinho| 48 Comments
This post is in: Sports
Will Cristiano Ronaldo be a Portuguese hero? Will Robert Lewandowski finally wake up?
Euro 2016 Quarter-Finals Poland v Portugal Open ThreadPost + Comments (48)
by Betty Cracker| 329 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Assholes, General Stupidity
Political correctness has imposed a terrible burden on wingnuts. First PC demanded that they stop openly treating minorities and women as ignorant savages and children or risk social censure. Then it required them to bake cakes or pizzas for icky gays.
And now it demands that they relieve themselves inside a public restroom facility that may or may not contain a transgender person. That’s a pissoir too far for conservative radio personality and Fox News contributor Laura Ingraham, who stands athwart an incontinence pad, yelling PEE-PEE!
Oh we have a new transgender update for you as well. Oh no new transgender news for all of you who are bathroom-goers and public — you use public restrooms? I think a lot of people are going to be walking around with just Depends on from now on. They’re just not going to use the bathroom. Adult diapers, diapers for everybody. No one’s going to be going to the bathroom. You have little kids, there’s going to be no bathrooms. We’re just going to all wear Depends. Everyone will just be happy. Then you’ll be in your own bathroom. Everyone’s bathroom is just their own clothes, OK? So this is what we’re going to go to.
Sounds like an ideal solution to me — let sane people have the bathrooms while deranged bigots like Ingraham and her listeners marinate in their own bodily waste. Not only would this approach be über-convenient for staunch conservatives like “Diaper Dave” Vitter, it would bring a pair of metaphors to life as grownup conservative crybabies skulk around public places developing literal butt-hurt in the form of diaper rash. Win-win!
Open thread!
by Randinho| 19 Comments
This post is in: Sports
So, one competition is over (Cope America) and another (Euro 2016) is starting the quarter-finals . Here are a few thoughts.
1.) Leo Messi is getting heat because he wants to quit the international game. I really believe that the anger is misdirected. To begin with, Messi has one title that no Brazilian footballer has: an Olympic gold medal. Bear in mind that Argentina’s trophy drought for titles in competitions without age restrictions goes back to 1993, when Messi was six. Also, there appears to be more to it than that.
2.) Brazil, while Tite has a good record, why not, FFS, consider someone outside of Brazil? I had this discussion with my brother-in-law, who said, “No, we made football great.” I pointed out to him that they keep recycling the same coaches in and out. I also pointed out to him some of the requirements that UEFA has of its coaches to get a license and that CONMEBOL is just starting to implement requirements. He was astonished. Swallow your pride, Brazil. it’s taken a pretty big beating recently anyway.
3.) Speaking of Brazil, how did the CBF (Brazilian Football Confederation) let Eder slip through their fingers to Italy? He’s been a revelation for the Azurri.
4.) Speaking of the Azurri, Antonio Conte’s tactical wizardry is impressive. I write this and Arsenal fan, but it appears that Chelsea made a good choice.
5.) From 2008 to 2012, what made Spain’s midfield dominant was iniesta AND Xavi, not Iniesta AND Fabregas.
6.) Jürgen Klinsmann is getting heat for Argentina’s whipping of the USA in the Copa America, but did anyone seriously believe that the USA would win? In any case, I believe that Klinsmann deserves credit for this. They will never be great if they don’t have the best teams challenge them.
On a housekeeping note, I will be working during the start of the three games today, tomorrow and Saturday. I will schedule open thread posts, but sometimes they don’t post. I’ll correct it as soon as I can if it happens.
Some Football Notes Before the Euro 2016 Quarter-FinalsPost + Comments (19)
by Hillary Rettig| 37 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Heading out east to the retirement party of one of my partner’s colleagues. (We will be in Davidson, NC – email me if you want coffee.) We had planned for months to overnight in Beckley, WV, which is in the flood zone. So, inspired partly by John’s fundraising, I decided to solicit donations and see if we could fill the minivan.
Kalamazoo came through nicely. The entire car is loaded with people food, pet food, bottled water, and baby stuff; also, lots and lots of blankets, towels, and bedding. And lots and lots and LOTS of cleaning supplies. (Thanks for the good advice, commenter J R in WV!) We’ve also got (hope no one is bugged by the commercial links; these people did good)…
200 packages of Heilman‘s gourmet nuts in bags poetically labeled, “Nuts for You from Kalamazoo” (BTW they ship.)
A bunch of Dr. Bronner’s hemp-based soap and Manitoba Harvest Hemp Hearts (nutritious and vegan!) from a nice woman who helped organize this year’s local Hemp History Week event. (Hemp is good, right Juicers?)
Fastsigns—there may be one near you!–donated the sweet magnetic car signs. (See below.)
My partner and I probably spent the equivalent of an eight-hour day contacting people, picking up stuff, and filling the car. (He’s a good filler; obviously has the Tetris gene.) You could argue that it would have been more efficient just to write a check, but connecting with people, both in Kzoo and Beckley, has been wonderful; and people really seemed to love and appreciate the opportunity to donate.
It’s an eight-hour trip to Beckley, and I’ll let you all know how things go.
(Now, where did I put my show tunes…)
This post is in: Election 2016, Hillary Clinton 2016, Open Threads, Republican Stupidity
New @ABC News/WaPo poll shows Hillary Clinton's largest lead among non-white voters yet https://t.co/TtwnZNe6xF pic.twitter.com/h1IwPBMdip
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) June 29, 2016
Fox News Poll: @realDonaldTrump losing ground with: pic.twitter.com/MuRg8q1vT2
— FOX Business (@FoxBusiness) June 29, 2016
Holy cats. https://t.co/vleG7PRKRT
— Daniel Drezner (@dandrezner) June 29, 2016
Prediction market odds for 2016 via @PredictWise
– Hillary wins: 75% chance
– Dems retake Senate: 59% chance
– Dems retake House: 18% chance— Bill Deger (@muwxguy) June 29, 2016
Apart from that, what’s on the agenda for the day?
Just in: Obama and Clinton will hold their first campaign rally together on Tuesday. Charlotte, North Carolina.
— Gabriel Debenedetti (@gdebenedetti) June 29, 2016
Thursday Morning Open Thread: Be of (Guardedly) Good Cheer!Post + Comments (256)
This post is in: Open Threads, Sports
Nicholas Bagley over at the Incidental Economist passes along a great article about the value of non-academic peer review and its impact on learning:
Beginning in 2014, we designed a randomized, controlled trial to test the effectiveness of peer review with the food safety staff of King County, where Seattle is located. Half of the inspection staff was randomly assigned to engage in peer review. For sixteen weeks, these inspectors spent one day per week with a randomly selected fellow inspector, taking turns conducting inspections and independently scoring health code violations. We then used information from these peer inspections to identify and train for violations that cause the most confusion.
The results were remarkable. We discovered that, when observing identical conditions in restaurants, health inspectors disagreed nearly 60 percent of the time. Inspectors differed in their assessments of risk magnitude and in interpretations and applications of the health code to particular circumstances, resulting in varying citations for the same condition.
He is very excited to see peer review and peer coaching in the medical realm as a means of transforming the practice of medicine from folk ways informed by science to a more systemic practice. There are significant inconsistencies in treatment methods for the same example patient depending on where the doctor was trained, where he currently practices and what equipment is available (and who has an ownership stake in all of the various billable opportunities).
To some extent, peer review has always been a part of medicine—think here of M&M conferences. And it’s starting to get more attention. As Ho and Elias note, Atul Gawande wrote an important New Yorker article in 2011 about surgical coaching. Here at the University of Michigan, Justin Dimick has landed an NIH grant to investigate surgical coaching more generally.
My first thought was on soccer refereeing.
I’m at the point in my soccer career where I am spending a decent amount of time every year going to clinics, reviewing game film, watching highlighted clips from the MLS and international leagues to see what USSF wants us to do. I also get several formal assessments a year from either USSF or NISOA (the college referee umbrella group). These formal moments of training are valuable as they provide me with a framework of what I should be doing. (As a reminder I am not and never have been on the MLS track — those guys and girls are doing this 20 hours a week or more)
However it is not the best training I receive each year.
The best training is the long car rides home after East Nowhere State beat Palookaville College. This is where extremely strong post-game analysis occur.
Those rides are with two or three other referees who I trust know what they are talking about and with whom I have a long standing relationship with.
We can break down game situations. We can talk about body language. We can talk about positioning. We can honestly point out that I got to the goal line late as the assistant referee so there was unnecessary uncertainty on a corner kick/goal kick decision. I can tell a peer that I think he makes great decisions but that he needs to assertively own his decision. Right now he passively indicates direction or a serious foul or a trifling control foul with minimal je ne sais quoi authority. He is 5’4″ and will get run over unless he owns the field. We can talk about an orange card situation where I went yellow while my AR-1 thought it was a solid red and my AR-2 thought it was a legitimate yellow.
On a ride back from a regional identification tournament, the three of us talked about a single decision for three hundred miles and then another decision for seventy five more miles. These conversations can be extremely detailed and brutally frank moments of self-assessment and peer assessment. I have been told my people that I greatly respect that I truly fucked up a game (I agree with that assessment for that particular game, my head was not there at the start and the teams did something I was not ready for). I have told peers that a decision style that they use would get people hurt and would end careers. It can be a brutal car ride after a bad game and even after a good game, flaws will be identified, decisions points questioned. Very little smoke is blown up peoples’ asses.
These discussion work for two reasons. First, the conversation stays within the car. It is not reported back to assessors, it is not reported back to assignors (although sometimes they are in the car as well as they were running the middle) and it is not reported back to coaches. The conversation’s repercussions end the moment the car pool ends.
Secondly it is between peers. I know that if Amy is making a point about my body language contradicting my foul selection it is because she picked something up in her 2,900 games worth of experience. If John is arguing that a scenario where I went double ass-chewing when it should have been double yellow, it is because he had a similar experience in the MLS and got called out by a PRO assessor. If Ben is telling me I got too wide, I know I too wide and placing too much on him from to call. If I tell Andrew that he really needs to watch the hand check fouls because it was driving the game into the gutter, he trusts my judgement. When I told Al to own his decisions, it was because I had worked with him for seven years and had seen how it detracted from his games.
We’re peers. We have credibility with each other and we know that we are not trying to game each other for some type of advantage. If they make me a better assistant referee, it improves their chances of having a good game in the middle. If I make them a better referee on a tiny facet, it makes my experience as an AR better. I know that Chuck has been caught in a situation where there are seven touches within the 6 in two seconds or less and he groped towards figuring out an offside decision so the advice he gives on how he handled it makes everyone better.
This experience of peer coaching is extremely valuable and it should be transferable to most highly skilled domains as long as the incentive structure for the coaching is well thought out so that the act of receiving and learning from coaching is non-punitive, this seems like a good idea to me.
This post is in: Election 2016, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat, Readership Capture
Via persistent commentor JPL. It seems to have gone over well with the audience…
‘Four more years!’: MPs chant they want @BarackObama to serve another term as president https://t.co/E8Y7FUm1MA
— Globalnews.ca (@globalnews) June 29, 2016
Late Night Open Thread: President Obama on Populists (& Nativists)Post + Comments (78)