Eva had the feeling that ....

The best that can be said of the Football Association's handling of Jose Mourinho's row with his medical staff, is that they did not take sides. They were not on his side, nor were they on the side of the former Chelsea club doctor, Eva Carneiro, a stance which sets them apart from the pressure group Women In Football who submitted a complaint to the FA and were subsequently "appalled" at the governing body's decision not to pursue the matter, adding that it was "A damning example of the FA failing to tackle discrimination".

The implication of this is clear: WIF are convinced that Mourinho was guilty of discrimination but has gotten away with it. True, the FA's process — failing to interview either Dr Carneiro or Mourinho — was hardly stringent, but as an independent translator attested that the manager had not used the feminine version of his Portuguese expletive, and that he hadn't directed anything at anyone in particular, there really wasn't anywhere for the case to go.

Now Women In Football also used the services of a translator, who claimed Mourinho did direct his comments at Carneiro but this is hardly independent is it? I don't doubt that WIF were sincere, but if the FA's translator had backed WIF's allegation, then surely Mourinho would have been charged?

Carneiro certainly has a right to feel aggrieved about sexist crowd abuse — she cites instances at West Ham, in particular — but Mourinho's crime here seems to be what Greg Dyke called "a failure of personal judgment and public behaviour" for which he should have apologised.

And now onto Dr Carneiro's probable wrongful dismissal case because Mourinho's behaviour as good as made her position untenable, although if the evidence is going to include the inference that Mourinho referred to her as a secretary, it is hard to see how that will stand up either.

Only a few days ago, Mary O'Rourke QC spoke about the issue, focussing specifically on Mourinho's assertion that, "Even if you are a kit man, a doctor or a secretary on the bench, you have to understand the game."

"Ninety-five per cent of secretaries are women", O'Rourke said, "Everyone listening to that would have taken it as a comment that women don't know anything about football. If you put that statement to 100 people, 99 of them would interpret it that way." All very true, but those 99 could be wrong. Mourinho specifically mentioned doctors and Eva Carneiro as is a doctor, so why would she then automatically become the secretary in his rant? Equally, what kind of secretary is meant or inferred by the use of the term? Someone who provides administrative support in an office or for example the second most powerful employee at FIFA, UEFA or the FA who all hold the title of general secretary.

Mourinho was wrong and my sympathies are with Dr Carneiro, but with any allegation that she was personally abused dismissed, adding that he derided her with the blanket term "secretary" is equally flawed.

Surely it should be enough that the manager of Chelsea FC completely undermined Dr Carneiro's ability to execute her duties as a medical professional and go from there?

Leading by Example

Only a day now to the big kick off and until there's some actual football for the media to cover at the expense of well, pretty much everything, the newspapers have been getting in the mood with some very odd "World-Cup related" articles.

The free newspaper in my hotel (I'm in Birmingham prior to a NSS conference) has got 32 pop stars to review the anthems of the competing countries. None of them are very complimentary, which as I'm familiar with some of their own stuff via my daughter's attempts at singing along to her iPod, is particularly ironic.

For example (no pun or play on words intended), Example — a singer, songwriter and rapper — doesn't like Argentina’s tune as it's "hard to sing along to and the words sound like something the Gallagher brothers might have written".

Having heard some of his stuff - second hand admittedly - I've looked up what I thought were the lyrics to a recent single, and had my suspicions confirmed.

His song All The Wrong Places contains this snippet of wisdom:

Like a rabbit in the headlights
Get your head right
Start a new life
Shiver in the moonlight

Not exactly worth adopting as any country's national anthem is it?
Not only does it not appear to have any consistency of phrasing of syllables, there's also a few substantial flaws.
Would any rabbit in the headlights even consider going to get his head right? The very nature of the phrase suggests that confusion and indecisiveness is presumed, and if the animal in question was in full command of its faculties then surely it wouldn’t be stranded in the headlights, about to get run over?

Equally, the idea that a rabbit seconds from becoming a stain on the tarmac is in any position to be embarking on grand lifestyle changes is at best optimistic. At this point in a rabbit's life it really is too late to consider the big questions.

As for shivering in the moonlight; it's hard to imagine a more pointless act in the circumstances. Mr Example really should be imploring Mr Bunny to get the hell out of the way. Anything else is pointless.

I agree that there are some very dreary national anthems out there, but it's hard to see how any of them could be improved by utilising Mr Example's lyrical insight.

Mirror Miller on the Wall....

As a life-long supporter of Leeds United, that the MP Damian Collins (Conservative: Folkestone and Hythe) has submitted a private member’s bill to the House of Commons calling for an extension to football’s so-called fit and proper persons’ test is particularly noteworthy now that Tim Kerr QC has overturned the Football League’s ban on Massimo Cellino buying the club.

Collins wants to give the Football Association the power to reject as a potential club owner any individual thought to be corrupt or untrustworthy, whether or not they are able to find ways to circumvent the official criteria. A laudable idea as I'm sure you'll agree; but why stop there? There are corrupt and untrustworthy people inexplicably escaping significant official sanctions in every walk of life. It's possible that even a member of the Government might not be a 'fit and proper person', and may be 'inclined to act solely, or mainly out of self-interest'. Lets say for example, Minister for Culture, Media and Sport. What if that person then fiddled their expenses, attempted to use their power and influence to bully the investigating watchdog looking into any offence, and possibly even got an acolyte to threaten journalists working on the story?

Surely anybody who acted like that is the last sort of person who should be allowed any authority?
And if such a morally-bankrupt individual did manage to rise to such lofty heights, shouldn't there be procedures in place to prevent them continuing to defraud the country at our largesse if they were discovered?

It really is an excellent proposal.
Perhaps Mr Collins will be kind enough to explain the nuance of separation in principle between Cellino, convicted fraudster ("capable of using every kind of deception" according to his arrest warrant) and now the owner of my beloved Leeds United, and Maria Miller, recently exposed expenses cheat and, yes you've guessed it: still Minister for Culture, Media and Sport?

Size is Relative

If you asked a real historian to name the biggest person in history you're unlikely to get past what do you mean by "biggest"?
As in height?
Do you really mean who was the most influential?
That would depend on your perspective as many considerations of size do.
And what perspective would that be? European, African, Middle Eastern or East Asian?

And all of this is before we even get to the issue of whether this is a valid question to ask. You probably don't think that it is, but if you really did want to ask "who's the biggest person in history?", you now don't need to bother as Steven Skiena and Charles B Ward have produced a pre-Christmas offering that will answer just that question for you. It's called "Who's Bigger? Where Historical Figures Really Rank" and - probably not just because it's Santa season - puts Jesus Christ on top.

Putting aside any debate about whether there's a god, and/or whether he's the offspring of that god, as there's no independent evidence to support that he even existed, why do the authors consider Jesus to be a "historical figure"? Napoleon and Muhammad fill second and third place, with William Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln making up the top five, and quick reading shows the next ninety plus to be actual people, so how did they come up with this list, if the "winner" isn't (wasn't?) verifiably a person at all?

Fortunately, they've answered that one for us, by explaining how utilising a statistical approach, inspired by Google's method of ranking web pages gives:

"We ranked historical figures just as Google ranks web pages, by integrating a diverse set of measurements about their reputation into a single consensus value.

Significance is related to fame but measures something different. Forgotten U.S. President Chester A. Arthur (who we rank as the 499th most significant person in history) is more historically significant than young pop singer Justin Bieber (currently ranked 8633), even though he may have a less devoted following and lower contemporary name recognition.

Historically significant figures leave statistical evidence of their presence behind, if one knows where to look for it, and we used several data sources to fuel our ranking algorithms, including Wikipedia, scanned books and Google n-grams.

To fairly compare contemporary figures like Britney Spears against the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, we adjusted for the fact that today’s stars will fade from living memory over the next several generations. Intuitively it is clear that Britney Spears’ mindshare will decline substantially over the next 100 years, as people who grew up hearing her are replaced by new generations. But Aristotle’s reputation will be much more stable because this transition occurred long ago. The reputation he has now is presumably destined to endure. By analyzing traces left in millions of scanned books, we can measure just how fast this decay occurs, and correct for it."

So it's not just the inclusion of people who may or may not have actually existed that's the book's only problem: there's also the issue of conducting a study of the biggest figures in history from a completely English-speaking perspective. No wonder the full list is mainly white, male and American.

If nothing else, the study has the potential to be the basis of a critical thinking workshop next year - possibly what's wrong with this list and why? - but doesn't do anything to answer the question the authors set themselves.
What's for next year?
Who's the biggest Belgian in history?
Poirot?

Twerky with Trimmings

I'm now back from yesterday's learner technology conference on big data where we learnt, amongst other things such as how the concept of learner analytics and big data can be used in educational contexts, what the country thinks is this year's best Christmas cracker joke.
Apparently its: "What does Miley Cyrus have for Christmas?" Answer "Twerky!"

Not withstanding that most of us are getting very bored with the whole twerking thing, especially those of us who live in Yorkshire (e.g. multiple hearings of the very unfunny "where does a Yorkshire man go every day?" "T'werk"), we should at the very least be pleased that cracker humour is at last reaching the 21st century, even if we have a government that with regards to Higher Education is still in the 1950s.

It's now been a week since our Chancellor announced the removal of the cap on student numbers by saying that “this year we have the highest proportion of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds applying to university ever” and that the cap will be removed “at publicly-funded higher education institutions in England by 2015-16”, with "alternative providers also being freed in a similar manner that year". Note that there's no mention of colleges. And still nothing to explain where they fit in. They're not HEIs, so are they "alternative"? The impact on franchised provision we work out (or guess), but what about directly-funded numbers? How can FECs plan for the next three years? What consideration do they need to give to validation agreements?

Fifty plus years of HE delivery in non-HE institutions and it's still some sort of governmental blind spot despite Vince Cable claiming to know all about Higher Nationals because his brother has got one (no, not a joke, I was at the conference where he said it).
Maybe nobody in the treasury consulted him.

Or maybe the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills was too busy considering the devastating effect that a nation singing Jingle Bells might have on the two-horse open sleigh industry...

Grave Doubts

It's in the news this week that archaeologists have discovered the final resting place of Alexander the Great.
Or maybe they haven't.
It's possible - well probable - that it's actually the ancient tomb of an anonymous Macedonian John Doe. Not that I'm cynical or anything, but it's easy to see why funding-hungry historians would make a headline-grabbing announcement that the Greek Culture Ministry has described as "overbold" speculation. The Greek public are apparently getting excited about the claim that the grave 370 miles north of Athens is that of Alexander, even though it doesn't quite stack up against the conventionally-accepted historical narrative that after his death in Babylon his body was taken to Alexandria in a honey-filled sarcophagus. Where he's resting now is admittedly a mystery, but ancient scribes recorded that some Romans like Pompey, Augustus and Julius Caesar visited his tomb in Egypt, with Caligula reportedly swiping the warrior's breastplate for a souvenir.

Next thing you know someone will be digging up a car park in a city like Leicester where I am now and claiming to have found the body of one of England's kings.
Oh...

Half-baked Breakfast Plan

I've just returned from three days  external examining in Belfast, where the lead story in Thursday's local paper was about the new president of the Faculty of Public Health describing his plan to prevent parents from driving their children to the school gates. Apparently, Professor John Ashton thinks that childhood obesity can be tackled by forcing pupils to walk a couple of hundred yards each day.
He says that

"One of the things we really should be doing is strictly prohibiting cars stopping outside school to drop kids off but have drop-off points, if at all, a few hundred yards away so at least the children get to walk a quarter of a mile each day from the dropping-off point ... it would make a difference."

Now it isn't that I think the sentiment is wrong, after all surely any exercise is better than nothing, but the removal of parental choice surely is. Pr Ashton's bullying tone is nothing to do with suggestions or recommendations, it's entry-level fascism. "Strictly prohibited" applies to all parents; not just those who haven't the sense to work out a food/fresh air ratio, or realise that maybe fried/fast food leads to little Johny/Jane/Jamal turning into something not-so-little around the middle.

This will doubtless lead to parents either risking the legion of ticket-happy goons waiting to enforce this directive on any car that dawdles by the school gates, or allow teenage art projects than have taken weeks to prepare getting ruined by a rain storm or blown apart in a gale. And for those who play sport, there's now the disincentive of lugging a cricket/hockey/football/rugby/etc bag an extra half-mile a day in addition to their school books!

Pr Ashton doesn't appear to have thought this though, but if he's the "UK's leading public health expert", what sort of alternative plan would those less qualified have come up with?