It will be my birthday on Tuesday. Last year, I reached the painful conclusion that there wasn't enough time left to read every book ever written. This year, my gloomy realisation is even more painful - I will not be able to correct everyone's mistakes before I depart.
Last year, the journalist Malcolm Gladwell conducted a survey of chief executive officers of Fortune 500 companies for his book Blink. He discovered that while in the US population 14.5 per cent of all men are 6ft (1.83m) or taller, among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies the proportion is 58 per cent. And while 3.9 per cent of American adults are 6ft 2in or taller, almost a third of the CEOs were that tall.
Iain Dowie famously coined the phrase 'bouncebackability' to describe Crystal Palace's ability to come from behind. But this is a typical manager's idea, so optimistic. What fans are interested in is 'throwawayability': which teams toss away hard-earned leads? Now we know that 'throwawayability' exists because we proved last season that 'bouncebackability' exists (although, hilariously, Palace don't have it) and 'throw-awayability' is the flip side of it.
The statistics John Wesson has compiled in The Science of Soccer show that Premiership football players are vastly more likely to have been born in the first half of the school year. These were the biggest boys in the class and were thus selected for the school team. How fair is that?
An invaluable little book.... What Makes a Terrorist uses standard tools of economics and statistical analysis to get at the truth about terrorism.... Krueger finds one familiar fact in all his numbers. Countries with fewer civil liberties tend to produce more terrorists.
[A]n important new book. . . . Professor Akerlof and Rachel Kranton have invented Identity Economics.
You may wonder why a question of manners has got me so exercised. It's because I believe in a simple rule. If you see a person you know behave unreasonably to someone else, you can bet your last pound that before long he'll be behaving like that to you.
Classic was Jimmy Savile’s use of the cloak of authority and kindness. Savile’s celebrity allowed him to acquire this authority. As we consider the regulation of the media and the legal right to privacy it is worth reflecting on how the Savile scandal happened. It happened because the aura of Sir Jimmy’s celebrity protected him from scrutiny by the press.
You know what I wonder about? This - the more details of Sven-Göran Eriksson's love life that appear in the press, the more contempt he attracts for his choice of substitutes in England games. Now, we haven't done the research, but my guess is that Sven's performances in the sack and that of his subs on the pitch are not correlated. So why do we link them?
