Classic Watches For Men

An academic study has borne out what the French have always claimed – that they get a rough deal from English referees. Analysis of 70 Super League games involving the Catalan Dragons between 2006 and 2009 reveals what the researchers say is a persistent bias against the French on the part of British officials.

Dr Lionel Page, of the Judge Business School at Cambridge University, said the findings show that referees penalise foreign teams more than their fellow-countrymen, although the difference is less marked when the match is on live television.

"This bias implies that the French could have won nearly twice as many matches with neutral refereeing," said Dr Page. "Rugby is characterised by the necessity for referees to make a large number of subjective decisions in ambiguous situations. This study shows that these subjective decisions play a disproportionate role in the final match result."

Dr Page said that similar patterns emerge from his study of rugby union's Super-14 competition. "These results should prompt rugby federations to work further to limit the amount of referee subjective decisions in a match using more technology."

Dr Page, a French-born economist with no background in either code of rugby, has offered to share his findings with the Rugby League. "But they were not very keen," he said.

driver from www.independent.co.uk

Alarming news that stadium rockers Kings of Leon were forced to abandon a recent gig following a surprise airborne pigeon attack undoubtedly represents what music observers would politely describe as their "Spinal Tap moment".

The American stars are now experiencing something of a backlash from disgruntled fans who fear the group have lost face courtesy of their hasty retreat from the St Louis stage after bassist Jared Followill found himself being pelted by droppings.

"The Sex Pistols would have played extra long in these conditions just because!" insists one irate correspondent. Another nostalgically adds: "Give me the old Kings of Leon any day, I'm sure they remember the good old days back in Tennessee when they got more than pigeon shit chucked at them."

Over to the band's drummer Nathan Followill, who offers the following impassioned defence in the wake of the criticism. "Don't take it out on Jared. You may enjoy being shit on but we don't," he profoundly declares.

* What with the plunging poll ratings and Lembit Opik's new stand-up comedy career, these have been testing times indeed for the Lib Dem faithful.

While their once popular leader Nick Clegg struggles to defend the coalition's cuts, I hear matters at the party's Cowley Street HQ have been aggravated further by a recent staff "cull" that has prompted an unwelcome merger between its Policy Development and Outreach departments (before you ask, no, I didn't bother to check what that second one does).

This has led to the newly united "PDO" wing of Lib Dem operations – regrettably now childishly pronounced "paedo" by their party colleagues. "The PDO acronym hasn't gone down at all well with the staff affected by this," I'm assured.

"They may have been the lucky ones who survived, but now they're paying the price by having to put up with this kind of stupid name-calling every day. The joke is already wearing pretty thin."

The days when they were happily basking in the reflected glory of Cleggmania must now feel like a very long time ago.

* With everyone from Mrs Duffy to his so-called "union mates" at Unite cruelly turning their backs on him in recent days, embattled Labour leadership contender Ed Balls could be forgiven for feeling a tad sorry for himself.

Well, not a bit of it thank you very much! Indeed, clearly in contemplative mood, Balls now sees fit to movingly quote one George Eliot – albeit inaccurately – to sum up the task before him.

"Only cowards fight fights that they know they are going to win," the misty-eyed politician proclaims. "But it takes courage to fight a fight you might lose."

A courageous man indeed.

* I feel duty-bound to report a reward is on offer for the return of a guitar belonging to classical musician Craig Ogden. His spokesman writes that "disaster struck" on Monday when Ogden left the instrument in the back of a black cab. The guitar, we're told, is worth £15,000. The statement concludes they are prepared to pay "£5,000" if returned. Perhaps the author of the published press release might have been wiser to leave out the fact it's actually worth three times as much?

* Gillian Anderson insists that life as a cult television pin-up is a more complicated business than we might imagine. In her latest message to devoted stalkers – OK, "fans" if you're going to be pedantic – the occasionally batty X Files star insists finding the right words doesn't always come easily.

"Every time I decide to share about anything in my life it seems too vague that there's no point really or if I get specific I feel like a twat because I feel like I have so much and how dare I share about my fortunate existence," she writes. "I don't have anything profound to say or any words of wisdom. I could recommend books that I'm half way through or music I have downloaded but not really listened to, but it all feels hypocritical. I have nothing to say about anything."

I was going to ask Gillian for a signed photo, but after all this, frankly my illusions are shattered.

driver from www.independent.co.uk

She can read minds, sling beers and toss back shots with werewolves. Not to mention work a pair of short-shorts across two states. No wonder True Blood's Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) is the dream girl for three guys who put the super in supernatural.

So far she's been loyal to her first love, Civil War-era vampire Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer), but a heartrending breach of trust will soon tear the two apart, leaving an opening for calculating Viking bloodsucker Eric Northman (Alexander Skarsgård) and sensitive werewolf bodyguard Alcide Herveaux (Joe Manganiello).

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"It will shake the very core of their relationship," says executive producer Alan Ball of the shocking incident that wounds the couple in Season 3. "Bill and Sookie's love for each other is authentic and they want to make it work. But it might get harder and harder."

Sookie's love life is a huge reason viewers are sucking up True Blood by the gallon. The Emmy-nominated drama, based on the best-selling book series by Charlaine Harris, is HBO's biggest hit since The Sopranos. Set in backwater Bon Temps, La., and surrounds, it's a Southern Gothic gumbo of hot sex, deep love and vampire politics, with enough story lines to choke a gator.

But underneath it all is the battle for Sookie's heart that's been raging since Season 1. Fans have chosen sides, and it's on for Team Bill versus Team Eric (unofficial team T-shirts are available online), with new rival Alcide now running as a dark horse, er, wolf.

Team Bill diehards held their breath in the Season 2 finale when Bill was kidnapped just after proposing to Sookie. This season kicked off with Bill being hauled away by werewolves working for vampire king of Mississippi Russell Edgington (Denis O'Hare). Sookie's search for her intended landed her in Russell's clutches, too, and she might have died along the way if not for Alcide's protection. Add to that the conniving Eric; Bill's maker and ex, Lorena (Mariana Kleveno), who's said she'd like to wear Sookie's rib cage as a hat; the dangerous vampire queen Sophie-Anne (Evan Rachel Wood); and you've got one bloody mess.

Still, Moyer (Paquin's real-life fiancé) believes that, when it comes to true love, all the mayhem is manageable. "I can't get into slinging matches about who's better for Sookie because it's just ridiculous," he laughs. "Bill is for Sookie, the love of her life."

Moyer makes a good case for why on a moonless night in an outdoor scene that will air in the Aug. 8 episode. We won't reveal too much, but we will say he's ready to fight Russell, who has put Bill's progeny, teenage vamp Jessica (Deborah Ann Woll), in danger. Bill's all passion and protectiveness, and definitely someone you want in your corner — or any room of the house. Score one for Team Bill.

But during the escape from Russell's mansion that eventually leads to this moment, Moyer hints, "Sookie does something we haven't seen her do yet for Bill. It being the roller-coaster ride that their relationship is, something happens immediately that makes things go awry."

driver from www.tvguide.com

Will a hotter climate mean more immigration? In some places, yes, that's quite possible. Earlier this week, a team of researchers led by Princeton's Michael Oppenheimer published a study  suggesting that as global warming causes agricultural yields in Mexico to decline, an additional 1.4 million to 6.7 million Mexicans could migrate to the United States by 2080. (The team analyzed data on emigration, crop yields, and climate from 1995 to 2005 in order to make their forecasts.)As always, caveats abound. The social consequences of global warming are always the hardest things to predict. Immigration rates are never driven by physics alone, but depend on plenty of other factors, such as U.S. border policies or the changing structure of Mexico's economy. And it's always difficult to tie specific social trends to climate change. People in rural areas have been migrating for a long time, whether to seek out work or because the rainfall's dried up or the soil's eroded. Global warming will exacerbate these pressures, yes, but it's hard to attribute any single event—or single migrant—to man-made climate change. That's one reason why forecasts of "climate refugees" vary so wildly.

Still, climate-driven migration is a concept that's received a lot of attention in recent years. As the planet heats up, droughts spread, and sea levels rise, millions of people are going to be uprooted from their homes and farms and move elsewhere. According to a 2007 World Bank report, the vast bulk of this migration is expected to take place within developing countries, with people moving from rural villages to urban centers. One big concern here is that places like Lagos or Dhaka are already swelling exponentially, and their infrastructure can barely keep up, which is why so many "megacities" now sport massive slums.

But there's also likely to be a fair amount of migration between countries—and the consequences there are much harder to predict. As the rising oceans chomp away at Bangladesh, for instance, as many as 15 million people may have to abandon their towns and villages by mid-century. Partly in response, India has been constructing a 2,100-mile long fence to barricade itself against the predicted influx of climate refugees. This old Greenwire piece by Lisa Friedman features a number of national security experts in India openly fretting about how rising seas will destabilize the borders between the two countries.

There are even consequences for Western politics. Over in Europe, a variety of ultra-right-wing nativist groups take these climate-migration forecasts very seriously. In his excellent book Forecast, Stephan Faris talked to members of Britain's BNP, which is trying (unsuccessfully) to forge an alliance with greens. A lot of them rant on about how immigration is terrible for the environment, since a person's carbon footprint swells when he or she moves from a poor country to a rich country. Similarly, in France, Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front has started hitting on environmental themes of late. Few actual environmentalists want anything to do with these parties, and there doesn't seem to be anything comparable in the United States, though if global warming does put pressure on immigration, it's certainly possible that green nativists could find a toehold here.

driver from www.tnr.com

Statistics had a mother who was dedicated to keeping orderly records of governmental units ( state and statistics come from the same Latin root, status) and a gentlemanly gambling father who relied on mathematics to increase his skill at playing the odds in games of chance. The influence of the mother on the offspring , statistics , is represented by counting, measuring, describing, tabulating (^!|S), ordering , and the taking of censuses all of which led to modern descriptive statistics. From the influence of the father came modern inferential statistics , which is based on theories of probability.

Descriptive statistics involves tabulating, depicting, and describing collections of data. These data may be either quantitative, such as mea¬sures of height , intelligence , or grade level-variables that are characterized by an underlying continuum or the data may represent qualitative variables , such as sex, college major, or personality type. Large masses of data must generally undergo a process of summarization or reduction before they are comprehensible.

Descriptive statistics is a tool for describing or summarizing or reducing to comprehensible form the properties of an otherwise unwieldy (Kl)mass of data.

Inferential statistics is a formalized body of methods for solving another class of problems that present great difficulties for the unaided human mind. This general class of problems characteristically involves attempts to make predictions using a sample of observations.Forexample,a school superinten-dent( l& W F? "fe )wishes to determine the proportion of children in a large school system who come to school without breakfast, have been vaccinated or whatever.Having a little knowledge of

statistics,the superintendent would know that it is unnecessary and inefficient to question each childjthe proportion for the entire district could be estimated fairly accurately from a sample of as few as 100 children.Thus, the purpose of inferential statistics is to predict or estimate characteristics of a population from a knowledge of the characteristics of only a sample of the population.

Beauty has always been regarded as something praiseworthy. Almost everyone thinks attractive people are happier and healthier,have better marriages and have more respectable occupations. Personal consultants give them better advice for finding jobs. Even judges are softer on attractive defendants (tt'o'). But in the executive circle,beauty can become a liability.

While attractiveness is a positive factor for a man on his way up the executive ladder,it is harmful to a woman.

Handsome male executives were perceived as having more integrity than plainer men;effort and ability were thought to account for their success.

Attractive female executives were considered to have less integrity than unattractive ones;their success was attributed not to ability but to factors but,however,yet ^pniSEtt — such as luck.

All unattractive women executives were thought to have more integrity and to be more capable than the attractive female executives. Interestingly, though,the rise of the unattractive overnight successes was attributed more to personal relationships and less to ability than was that of attractive overnight successes.

Why are attractive women not thought to be able? An attractive woman is perceived to be more feminine (^TttW) and an attractive man more mas-culine (;Pj 14 W) than the less attractive ones. Thus,an attractive woman has an advantage in traditionally female jobs, but an attractive woman in a traditionally masculine position appears to lack the "masculine"qualities required.

This is true even in politics. "When the only clue is how he or she looks,people treat men and women differently, "says Anne Bowman,who re-cently published a study on the effects of attractiveness on political candidates. She asked 125 undergraduate students to rank two groups of photographs, one of men and one of women,in order of attractiveness. The students were told the photographs were of candidates for political offices. They were asked to rank them again, in the order they would vote for them.

The results showed that attractive males utterly defeated unattractive men,but the women who had been ranked most attractive invariably received the fewest votes.

The biggest safety threat facing airlines today may not be a terrorist with a gun, but the •nan with the portable computer in business class. In the last 15 years, pilots have reported /veil over 100 incidents that could have been caused by electromagnetic interference. The source of this interference remains unconfirmed, but increasingly, experts are pointing the }lame at portable electronic devices such as portable computers, radio and cassette players and mobile telephones.

RTCA, an organization which advises the aviation (-ffiL^E.) industry, has recommended hat all airlines ban (3£jh) such devices from being used during "critical" stages of flight, >articularly take-off and landing. Some experts have gone further, calling for a total ban luring all flights. Currently, rules on using these devices are left up to individual airlines. And tlthough some airlines prohibit passengers from using such equipments during take-off and anding, most are reluctant to enforce a total ban, given that many passengers want to work luring flights.

The difficulty is predicting how electromagnetic fields might affect an aircraft's omputers. Experts know that portable devices emit radiation which affects those wavelengths vhich aircraft use for navigation and communication. But, because they have not been able to eproduce these effects in a laboratory, they have no way of knowing whether the interference night be dangerous or not.

The fact that aircraft may be vulnerable (fy-JtlfaWi^to interference raises the risk that arrorists may use radio systems in order to damage navigation equipment. As worrying, hough, is the passenger who can't hear the instructions to turn off his radio because the nusic's too loud.

He lived in a small town about 40 miles from my home. He had served five years in a New York prison for robbing a restaurant. When he returned to his family, Mr. Spears couldn't find a job. Everyone knew he had been in prison and nobody trusted him. Finally, in desperation, he calmly walked into a local barbershop where he was well known, pulled out a gun, and took all the money the barber had. Up to this point it had been a fairly routine crime, but then something unusual happened. Mr. Spears didn't try to get away. He got into his car, drove slowly out of the town, and waited for the police. When they caught him, he made only one request. He turned to the arresting policemen and said: "Would you please asked the court to put my family on welfare just as soon as possible?"

Japan is a case in point. It has reduced automobile crashes on some roads by nearly 75 percent using a simple optical illusion. Bent stripes, called chevrons (A^M) painted on the roads make drivers think that they are driving faster than they really are, and thus drivers slow down.

Now the American Association Foundation for Traffic Safety in Washington D.C is planning to rep eat Japan's success. Starting next year, the foundation will paint chevrons and other patterns of stripes on selected roads around the country to test how well the patterns reduce highway crashes.

Excessive speed plays a major role in as much as one fifth of all fatal traffic accidents, according to the foundation .To help reduce those accidents, the foundation will conduct its tests in areas where speed-related hazards are the greatest — curves, exit slopes, traffic circles, and bridges.

Some studies suggest that straight, horizontal bars painted across roads can initially cut the average speed of drivers in half. However, traffic often returns to full speed within months as drivers become used to seeing the painted bar. Chevrons, scientists say, not only give drivers the impress ion that they are driving faster than they really are but also make a lane spear to be narrower. The result is a longer lasting reduction in highway speed and the number of traffic accidents.

It was the Greeks who invented the idea of the city, and urbanity continues as a thriving tradition. But in the first decade of the 21st century, urban life is changing. "Cities are now junctions in the flows of people, information, finance and freight," says Nigel Harris, a professor of development planning. "They're less and less places where people live and work."

The enlargement of the European Union in December in 2002 has given residents of up to 13 new member nations freedom of movement within its borders. At the same time, an additional 13.5 million immigrants a year will be needed in the EU just to keep a stable ratio between workers and pensioners over the next half century. All this mobility will make Europe's cities nodes of nomadism, linked to each other by high-speed trains and cheap airline flights. The bustle around airports and train stations will make the crowds in Europe's great piazze look thin by comparison. Urban designers, with a freshly pricked interest in transience rather than stasis, are even now dreaming up cityscapes that focus on flows of people and fungible uses for buildings.

Public spaces are due for a revamp. Earlier architects conceived of train stations as single buildings; today's designers are thinking of them as transit zones that link to the city around them, pouring travelers into bus stations and surrounding shops. In Amsterdam, urban planner Ben van Berkel, codirector of the design firm UN Studio, has developed what he calls Deep Planning Strategy, which inverts the traditional "top down" approach: The creation of a space comes before the flow of people through it. With 3-D modeling and animation, he's able to look at different population groups use public spaces at different times of the day. He uses the data to design spaces that accommodate mobs at rush hour-and sparser crowds at other times.

The growing mobility of Europe has inspired a debate about the look and feel of urban sprawl. "Up until now, all our cultural heritage has been concentrated in the city center," notes Prof. Heinrich Mfiding of the German Institute of Urban Affairs. " But we've got to imagine how it's possible to have joyful vibrancy in these outlying parts, so that they're not just about garages, highways and gasoline tanks." The designs of new buildings are also changing to anticipate the emerging city as a way station. Buildings have been seen as disconnecting, isolating, defining. But increasingly, the quality of space that's in demand is1 movement. 1. What is the main idea of the passage?