Where do they come from?

Of the 600 players, 66 or 11%, were born in New Zealand, with South Africa next on 40, Australia  36 and Argentina 35.  Outside the competing nations, the most frequent birthplace was American Samoa, with 6, which probably makes it the biggest per capita contributor to World Cup squads.  Australians were the most peripatetic, playing in 11 countries, closely followed by New Zealanders in 10, then South Africans in 7.

The countries fielding the widest range of birthplaces were England with 9 players not born there, including 2 New Zealanders, and others born in Australia, Jersey, Kenya, Samoa, Trinidad and the United States, while the United States pulls in 12 players born elsewhere, with 5 from American Samoa, 2 from Australia, and one each from Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa, Tonga and Zimbabwe.

In the Samoan team, more players were born in New Zealand (17) than in Samoa (13), with high proportions of New Zealanders in the teams from Tonga (8) and Japan (6).  At the other end of the scale, the teams from Argentina, Georgia and Romania were 100% locally born.  And just for the record, the New Zealand squad has 4 players not born in New Zealand – 2 born in Samoa, 1 in American Samoa, and 1 in Australia.

Where do they play?

Turning to where the World Cup players currently ply their trade, nearly a quarter of all the players, at 23%, play in various competitions in France.  Main foreign contributors there are Georgia, with 23 of its squad in France, followed by Argentina (20), Fiji, Romania, Tonga and Fiji  (9 each), Italy (7), and the United States (6). The next largest destination for players is England on 13%, then New Zealand on 9%, with Australia, Japan, South Africa and Wales on 6%.

Only Australia, France and New Zealand have squads playing only in their own country.  At the other extreme, the Pacific countries have very few playing at home, with Samoa and Tonga on 3% and Fiji on 23%, while Georgia is also on 23%.

Positions

The striking figure for front rows is that 59% of all front row players (props and hookers) currently play in France (35%) or England (24%), with 16% in New Zealand and 11% in South Africa.  However, most front row forwards were born in New Zealand (15 or 10%), with Australia next at 9 (6%).

The other position that stands out is first five-eighth or flyhalf.  Of the 41 players in this position in the 20 squads, 8 (21%) were born in New Zealand and 4 (11%) in Argentina, but 24% are playing in France and 12% in England.

So it was with some anticipation that I moved on to the Tokyo trilogy, set in a post-war Tokyo dealing with the aftermath of defeat, where the physical destruction of the city is matched by the destruction of society’s structures and norms, and by the physical and mental decay of the people having to face a wrenching change in their reality.  The first book in the trilogy, Tokyo Year Zero, is based on a real case, and tells the story of finding a serial murderer of women, from the perspective of a police detective.  Again, it is not an easy book, but the style brilliantly conveys the mind and fears of Detective Minami as his discoveries bring together his own past and the murdered women and their murderer.  So that was good, and it was one of those books that improve on reflection.

Which brings me to Occupied City.  Again, it is the story of deaths in Tokyo, and is again based on a true story of a massacre and robbery using methods linked to wartime research into chemical and bacterial weapons.  The framework for this book is twelve stories of the events, told from the perspectives of twelve people with an involvement in them, and is apparently similar to the approach in the Kurosawa film Rashomon (which I have not seen), and also to a Japanese tradition of a ghost-story-telling game.  Wherever it came from, I found the device for linking the stories to be obscure.

Bleakness is here, and collapse, both personal and of society, is pervasive, but I felt that this book somehow lacked the energy of the quartet and of Tokyo Year Zero, possibly because the different stories were too fragmented.  What does come through in a sad and compelling way is the corruption and duplicity of the rulers of the city, of both the occupiers and occupied, in their willingness to accommodate evil, and the implication that little has changed in this respect when we look at our world in our time.

The writing style is even more extreme in its use of repetition and of typography.  Whereas I found this worked in the earlier books, it tended to be more of a distraction in this one.

David Peace is bleak, and his writing is not easy, but it can be rewarding.  I will try his other books, GB84 and The Damned United, and I do have the Red Riding DVDs to watch.

Occupied City by David Peace, published by Faber and Faber, paperback 2010, ISBN 9780571232031

The Air New Zealand Cup round robin stage has now been completed, so I have looked at the figures for those games to see if there is any difference.  In the Jimungo Virtual Rugby competition, participants pick the outcome (who will win) and a score level (12 point margin or less; moe than 12 points).  A draw can also be picked.  The published data include the percentage of participants who have picked each possible result, and it is this information, plus the actual outcome, that I have analysed.  What I was interested to find out was the level of predictive success for both outcomes and margins, whether the crowd learned anything over the course of the competition, and whether any teams were more predictable than others.

The Air New Zealand Cup round robin stage is played by 14 teams over 13 weeks.  The teams range from unions which provide a base for Super 14 teams – Auckland, Waikato, Wellington, Canterbury, Otago – to provincial unions, some of which have been struggling in financial terms, and until this year with declining attendances.  An added fillip this season has been the planned restructuring of the competition for next year which is intended to reduce it to 10 teams, which has meant that those teams under threat of exclusion have had an incentive to succeed on the field and in boosting crowds.  The perennial issue of whether and to what extent the All Blacks will be available for their provincial teams has also been aired again, while the continuing impact of the Ranfurly Shield cannot be ignored (except, it appears, by Wellington)

One hypothesis is that the Air New Zealand Cup, being a domestic competition, should mean that Virtual Rugby participants have more knowledge of the teams and players than may have been the case with the international Super 14.  Countering this may be the greater degree of parochial attachment that such a competition provides, the relatively unknown status of many players and the extent to which removal of key players to international duties will affect team performance.  Also, what should we expect in terms of crowd wisdom?  Random picks should produce a 50% outcome when taken over 91 games and 61,239 participants (I have just tossed a coin 91 times and heads won only 45% but I’m not going to do it another 61,238 times), so crowd wisdom should do much better than that, but by how much?

So, what were the results.  Well, the average success rate of predicting the outcome was 61.45%, which was less than the Super 14 result.  For both outcome and margin, the success rate was 32.29%. Assuming that the crowd that participates in Virtual Rugby has more information than a random generator, is this sufficiently better than 50%?  I don’t think so.

The chart shows the extent to which the outcome (win/loss) success rate moved over the season.  The success rate got up to 90% for the penultimate round, and did improve as the season developed after an initial slump.  The earlier rounds were characterised by “upsets”, and if defined as an outcome that fewer than 20% of participants picked, then there were 2 upsets in each of the first four rounds (out of 7 games in each round), as well as in rounds 7,8 and 13.

The higher success rates in the later rounds could reflect better informed participants, having more information on how the teams played, while other possible explanations could be that more All Blacks were playing for their provincial teams and strengthening the larger provinces with more favoured teams, or that the variable of the draw had come together to pit top and bottom teams against each other, with more predictable outcomes (not sure that this stands up to analysis).

The outcome and margin chart tells a similar story.  In round 3 only 10% of participants got the outcome and margin right and in only one round did more than half of participants get it right.

So what about team support?  Well, the participants in Virtual Rugby had mixed results.  They were most successful with Counties-Manukau and Canterbury, i.e. the bottom and top teams from the round robin, while Wellington and Hawkes Bay ended up in the top 4.  Participants were not so successful with the other semi-finalist, Southland, or with Bay of Plenty and Taranaki, who sprang surprises in both wins and losses.  Margin predictions were most successful for Counties-Manukau again (presumably the extent of their losses), and Wellington (win margins), and least successful for Otago.

Looking at the wisdom of the crowd in picking the final order of teams in the competition (and leaving aside the complicating factor of bonus points), the crowd didn’t do too badly.  A difference of 3 ranking places was the maximum error, three each out of the top 4 and bottom 4 were correctly ranked.

Five ranking levels matched, but Southland did twice as well as predicted, Tasman, Auckland also did much better, but Waikato, Otago, Bay of Plenty and North Harbour did much worse (by at least 2 places).

In a graphical presentation, this chart compares actual ranking with the ranking by the level of crowd prediction measured by the average percentage of win predictions.

So how did the crowd do?  Not as well as it should have, in terms of win/loss outcomes, although it did get fairly close to the final order, with the exception of Southland.  So ok on the big picture. On outcomes, there may have been a degree of home team emotion supporting some predictions, while in some cases teams just played so well or so badly that pre-game predictions became irrelevant and no amount of information or expertise would have helped.  This is probably a good thing, and is certainly what has made this year’s Air New Zealand Cup a great competition.  It’s not broken, so why fix it?

The hypothesis would be that the aggregation of picks would tend to be pretty close to actual results.  However, we need to look at the criteria that separate wise crowds from irrational crowds, as set out in the Wikipedia entry on the book and subject:

Diversity of Opinion: each person participating will tend to have private information, which will (primarily) be their own eccentric interpretation of known facts

Independence: Not so sure about this one, since I am sure that some people (e.g. me) were influenced by the views of others as reflected in the level of support for particular results, especially where they don’t have any strong eccentric interpretation of their own

Decentralization: People do specialize and draw on local knowledge, but the other side of this coin is that they may well support an outcome favouring their local side irrespective of the facts and experience

Aggregation: Sky Sport Virtual Rugby provides the mechanism for turning private judgments into a collective decision

On this basis, the elements for a wise crowd appear to be there in Virtual Rugby.

Bad judgments can result when the crowd is:

Too homogenous: if there is not sufficient diversity within a crowd – in the case of Virtual Rugby it is likely that there is too great a focus on New Zealand teams, since the majority of the participants are (I assume) New Zealanders

Too centralized: I don’t think this is a problem since there were about 122,000 participants

Too divided: there is ample scope to share information through media reporting and commenting, and through other forms of information exchange, so people can choose what information they need

Too imitative: Choices are visible, in the aggregate, which could lead people to reflect the majority view

Too emotional: Well of course, clearly there will be biases, hearts will dominate over heads, Wellingtonians will support the Hurricanes, despite the evidence

Anyway, that’s enough about the theory, what abut the analysis.

Virtual Rugby is played by making a prediction for each game in each round of the Super 14, with choices being one side or the other to win by either 12 points or less, or more than 12 points, or a draw.

For the purposes of the initial analysis, I looked only at the outcome of the game and regarded a crowd prediction as successful if the actual outcome reflected the views of the highest proportion of players.  This includes predictions of both wins and losses.

On this basis, the crowd had a 69% success rate over the 14 rounds of the 2009 Super 14 season, i.e. it got slightly better than 2 out of 3 right.  Is this good?  I would have thought that it’s not so good.

A more detailed analysis by team and country is interesting:

Bar chart of success rate of crowd picks in Virtual Rugby, by team and country

The most predictable teams tended to be those that ended up in the bottom third of the competition, i.e. they were predicted to lose most of the time.  Not unrelated, given that they had three teams in the bottom third, the crowd did best with South African sides (75%).  It did worst with New Zealand sides, which could well reflect the emotional attachment to local teams.  The most unpredictable teams were the Crusaders and Waratahs, which can possibly be explained by their changing fortunes through the competition.

What about picking winners. The analysis shows that the crowd got it right for 80% or more of the time for the Hurricanes, Stormers and Blues, but less than half the time for the Reds, while crowd opinion was definitely against the Cheetahs.  It could also mean that Hurricanes supporters always pick their team to win.

When picking losses it was a bit of a mixed bag.  The crowd got it right for the Sharks, Bulls and Lions, but was nowhere near it for the Hurricanes and Waratahs.  I think that this supports the view that supporters of these teams let their emotion cloud their judgment.

Did the crowd learn anything as the season went on?  Not sure about that, although there is some evidence to support the proposition in that for the last three rounds at least the outcomes were well-predicted.

So what does this all mean, apart from a suggestion I have too much time on my hands?  What I think it means is that the crowd that does Virtual Rugby is reasonably well-informed but is not too wise. It also means that if you want to win at Virtual Rugby, don’t follow the crowd.

Further analysis comparing the crowd verdicts to the TAB betting odds would be very interesting.

In Not In The Flesh, Wexford and Burden are faced with a body that has been buried for 10 years until unearthed by a truffle-hound.  A second body turns up in a cellar not too far away, and the plot then revolves around determining who these people were and are their deaths related.  This is all very well done. The characters involved are often not very good people, and it is their human frailty and imperfections that are nicely depicted through the writing.  The crimes result from moments of human weakness, but their consequences for the perpetrators and for the families of the dead live on and affect their lives forever.

But running alongside the plot is the issue of female genital mutilation (FGM) that Ruth Rendell is campaigning against, in the House of Lords and in this book.  Wexford is placed in a situation of knowing what might happen to a five-year-old girl, but is unable to do anything definitive to prevent it happening.  A link through to the main plot is provided by DS Hannah Goldsmith, who tries to ensure that Wexford and Burden remain politically correct by avoiding sexist, racist or class-based language and attitudes – the message of the book being (I think) that traditional cultural practices are not per se ok simply because they are traditional in some cultures.  Female genital mutilation is wrong, full stop, and political correctness can sometimes blind us to wrongness.  The irony is that both Wexford and Burden are in fact sensitive and perceptive men – they have to be to do the work they do – and they do think and act correctly because they know the right thing to do – but Hannah doesn’t see this.

In the end, this twenty-first Wexford novel stands up in terms of the mystery that the Chief Inspector works his way through, and the Kingsmarkham background maintains its apparently inexhaustible supply of murderers and victims.  Did we need the distraction of the FGM campaign?  I don’t see why not, such issues are part of life, and to present them in the way that Ruth Rendell does here could well make us think a bit more about what is involved, and why people think and act the way they do.

Not In The Flesh by Ruth Rendell, published in paperback by Arrow Books, ISBN:9780099517221

For the full list of books by Ruth Rendell, including those as Barbara Vine, see the Wikipedia site

In Every Secret Thing, two eleven-year old girls are convicted of killing a baby, and following their release seven years later another child goes missing.  In The Power of Three, three teenage girls are found shot at school, one dead, one seriously injured, but the evidence doesn’t match the survivor’s story.  The plot in What the Dead Know centres on the disappearance of the Bethany girls, Sunny and Heather, in 1975, and the apparent reappearance of one of them in the present day.  The story unfolds through a range of perspectives at a range of times – the woman claiming to be Heather Bethany; Kay Sullivan, a social worker; Miriam Toles, previously Bethany, the girls’ mother; and the police, Kevin Infante, Nancy Porter, Dan Lenhardt, and Chet Willoughby, the policeman on the original case.  The other major character in the book is Baltimore and the countryside around it.

Laura Lippman maintains a superb tension, flicking backwards and forwards in time and place and perspective to bring us pieces of the story, pieces of the characters.  Every now and then there are surprise revelations, but the police continue to chip away to try and find the truth.  The outcome is brilliant in its inevitability.  The characters in this book are reminiscent of characters in Anne Tyler’s books, in that they possess a quality of peculiarity or eccentricity that takes them a little outside the normal – it could be Dave Bethany’s Fivefold Path, or Kay Sullivan’s recourse to reading books in preference to other people’s company – and provides an explanation for why things might happen the way they do.  This is one of the best books I have read this year.

What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman, Published by Orion (2008, paperback); ISBN: 978-0-7528-9337-2

Other books by Laura Lippman:

Featuring Tess Monaghan – Baltimore Blues (1997), Charm City (1997), Butchers Hill (1998), In Big Trouble (1999), The Sugar House (2000), In a Strange City (2001), The Last Place (2002), By A Spider’s Thread (2004), No Good Deeds (2006), Another Thing to Fall (2008).

Other – Every Secret Thing (2003), To The Power of Three (2005), What the Dead Know (2007)

Short stories – Baltimore Noir (ed. 2006)

See also the Wikipedia entry and the fantasticfiction site entry.

However, life takes a turn for the worse when he has to visit a prospective customer in Clear Lake, a place of cheap tract houses in the Valley.  It turns put that the it’s Dan Brown’s place, Dan being a real mean dude, well-known since their school days for causing all sorts of mayhem and mischief, including a few dead and broken bodies.  He recognises Dean as “Johnny Magic” and proposes that he should sing a song for Buddy, Dan’s little brother, who has just been stabbed to death, and whose body is sitting in the back of Dan’s truck in a freezer.  First of all though, Dan has to find out who killed his brother, with the main suspect being the lead singer of a girl band called “Pomona Queen”.  This is also the brand name that Dean’s great-grandfather had chosen and printed for his oranges, but which never got used.  Dean tries to escape, fails, and spends the rest of the day and night in a surreal tour through Pomona and its surrounds, as events unfold and the truth of the stabbing becomes clear, sort of.  By the end, it seems that Dean’s “theology of hope” might have some validity, but we wouldn’t bet on it.

Kem Nunn’s writing moves seamlessly from the historical to the present, from Dean’s inner musings to the ever-present danger of dialogue with Dan.  In terms of the writing, this seems to me to be the most assured of Kem’s Nunn’s books that I have read.  It is certainly very funny in a noir sort of way.  I particularly liked the quotes from F P Brackett’s history of the area at the beginning of each chapter, and especially the first, which includes a description of the original inhabitants of Southern California as “…squat, fat and unattractive.  Untrustworthy they were, and ready to kill on provocation or for gain, but not brave or fierce.”  This could just as easily apply to the Southern Californians who inhabit this book.

Pomona Queen by Kem Nunn, published by Washington Square Press (1993, trade paperback), ISBN: 0-671-79877-4

Other books by Kem Nunn – Tapping the Source (1984), Unassigned Territory (1986), The Dogs of Winter (1997), Tijuana Straits (2004)

Burke’s use of words and the rhythms of the language he puts on the page is pure poetry, and make for compelling reading.  Some examples:

Fear was a gray balloon that floated from place to place, object to object, and each time he tried to confront it, it moved someplace else, transforming the most innocuous of situations into dilemmas that he would never confess to anyone else, lest they know him for the frightened man he was.

and

The world has become an unforgiving prison where the images from a mistaken moment have not disappeared with sleep and instead pursue you wherever you go.

In Dave Robicheaux’ Louisiana, everyone is special, everyone has a story, everyone has come to the place in the world that they now occupy through a series of decisions in which they were not necessarily a willing participant, but the consequences of which they must now confront.  What Burke succeeds in doing is to illustrate the sheer immensity of the impact of Katrina by focusing on the impact it had on the lives of several people when their intersecting stories come together at a point in place and time, and the tragedies and violence, but also the redemption, that unfold as a result.

The key stories are those of an insurance man, Otis Baylor, and his daughter; Bertrand Melancon, a young black “street puke” who had been involved in the rape of the daughter, the death of a priest, and the looting of something valuable from the flooded house of a mob boss.  And of course there is Dave Robicheaux, former New Orleans cop, recovering alcoholic, now working for the New Iberia Sheriff.  The violence and misery of the events they are involved brings forth a figure of evil, Ronald Bledsoe, who threatens Alafair, Dave’s daughter and is determined to get his hands on the valuables that Bertrand has hidden.  Dave continues his lifetime journey through the underworld of crime and pain, trying to do good, often succeeding, but dependent on the goodwill of Sheriff Helen Soileau, his boss, and the dubious assistance of Clete Purcell, his friend.

The fight between good and evil takes place between and within the characters, but there is another force that looms large – the ineradicable fact of the failure of much of the US government to recognise and address the extent of the tragedy and its impact on the people of New Orleans, and the futility and cruelty of those who preyed on their neighbours.  Against this Burke recognises the individuals and groups who, like the US Coastguard, toiled unceasingly to try to save lives and restore some faith in the human spirit.  In introducing the story, Dave Robicheaux recalls the tragedy of Vitenam and says:

When I go back to sleep, I once again tell myself I will never again have to witness the wide-scale suffering of innocent civilians, nor the betrayal and abandonment of our countrymen when they need us most.

But that was before Katrina.  That was before a storm with greater impact than the bomb blast that struck Hiroshima peeled the face off southern Louisiana.  That was before one of the most beautiful cities in the Western hemisphere was killed three times, and not just by the forces of nature.

This is the Dave Robicheaux novel you must read.

The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke, published by Phoenix (2008, paperback), ISBN: 978-0-7538-2316-3

See the Wikipedia entry for James Lee Burke, including bibliography.

Listen to a podcast of Kim Hill’s 5 July 2008 Radio NZ interview with James Lee Burke.

Trafford Sewell is the modern-day Winston Smith, a “civil servant of sorts” who works for NatDat, the National Data bank, which collects and stores “Every single recordable fact about every single person in the country…Every financial transaction, every appearance on a CCTV camera, every click on every computer, every quirk of every retina, every filling in every tooth, captured and entombed in the mainframes of NatDat…”  But Trafford wants some degree of privacy, somewhere he can think thoughts that he doesn’t have to blog about.  He would also like some privacy with his wife Chantorria, and to protect their baby, Caitlin Happymeal, in a world where vaccination is abhorred, and child mortality is rife.  He hesitates to Tube the birthing video and is reprimanded by his Confessor.

Trafford does find a way to think for himself and to learn about ideas and science, and above all about reason.  Just as Winston Smith saw that the proles provided hope for the future, so Trafford sees that reason and the theory of evolution are the way the world will be saved – perhaps not soon enough for him, but the tyranny of the Temple will certainly be overcome.  It would be interesting to spend more time on the parallels with Nineteen Eighty-Four.

I said that Ben Elton was bleak, but what reinforces the bleakness is that the awful world of Blind Faith is already happening, in parts, and it is easy to see us going there.  Elton shows us that the trends he works on are related and interconnected, and come down to the importance of ensuring that individual thought can be maintained; that privacy, whether physical, mental or spiritual is essential to us; and that blind faith should not trump reason and science.  There are lessons for how we use technology to support society, and importantly there are unforeseen (but perhaps inevitable) consequences that will arise whenever new ways of communicating and sharing become universal, and subject to human behaviour.

Blind Faith by Ben Elton, published by Black Swan (paperback, 2008), ISBN: 978-0-552-77391-1

Other books by Ben Elton – Stark (1989), Gridlock (1991), This Other Eden (1993), Popcorn (1996), Blast from the Past (1998), Inconceivable (1999), Dead Famous (2001), High Society (2002), Past Mortem (2004), The First Casualty (2005), Chart Throb (2006)

In Friend of the Devil, Peter Robinson creates an intricate plot that intertwines past and present crimes and links together different murders being investigated by Alan Banks and by Detective Inspector Annie Cabbot. Annie is facing her own demons, including her feelings for Banks, and she doesn’t handle them all that well.

The crimes they are investigating are the death of a girl in The Maze, the ancient cobbled alley ways in fictional Eastvale, and that of a tetraplegic woman in a wheelchair on the coast. The links are to two separate crimes in the past, including a possible serial rapist and his death, and a shocking trail of death and sexual attacks by a sadistic couple. The story reflects on the impact of crime on the victims, and the tragedies that ensue. Events do stray towards the unlikely, but the skill of the writer makes them believable and in a sense inevitable, given what we learn about the people concerned

Banks has some of the characteristics of the typical fictional police detective – independent thought, but he recognises the political reality of his profession; relationships that generally avoid the permanent, but with plenty of promise at the start; and an unexpected attachment to different kinds of music, in his case not exclusively the jazz or classical tastes of some of his fictional contemporaries. Peter Robinson also knows how to write interesting sidekicks – not just Annie Cabbot, but also Winsome Jackman and Kevin Templeton, and not to forget Detective Superintendent Catherine Gervaise. The families of the victims are beautifully drawn and seem very real. Current technology, whether recreational or forensic, is also well-handled without taking over.

For me, this has been a very satisfying series, with the quality maintained all along. The writing is unobtrusive, the characters real, and the resolution of the crimes satisfying. This includes the books where Banks has gone into his past, or into his family, to resolve a mystery.

Friend of the Devil by Peter Robinson, published by Hodder (2008, paperback), ISBN 978 0 340 83691 0

See Wikipedia entry

Other books by Peter Robinson:

Alan Banks series – Gallows View (1987); A Dedicated Man (1988); A Necessary End (1989); The Hanging Valley (1989); Past Reason Hated (1991); Wednesday’s Child (1992); Dry Bones That Dream (1994); Innocent Graves (1996); Dead Right (1997); In A Dry Season (1999); Cold is the Grave (2000); Aftermath (2001); The Summer that Never Was (2003); Playing with Fire (2004); Strange Affair (2005); A Piece of My Heart (2006); All The Colours Of Darkness (2008).

Other books – Caedmon’s Song (1990); No Cure for Love (1995); Not Safe After Dark (1998); (short stories)