Who Has Qualified For the 2010 World Cup?

June 15th, 2009, 3 Comments »

For reasons I can’t quite grasp, I enjoy watching the FIFA World Cup more than any other sporting event. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s the most-watched sporting event (and, quite, possibly, any event) in the world. The final is as close as I’ll probably ever get to the shared experience of the Moon landing. Or maybe it’s just that the football/soccer is terrific, and the stakes are as high as they get.

It’s got nothing to do with national pride, because Canada’s men’s team has only ever qualified once, in 1986. They were knocked out in the earliest ‘group phase’, and in fact never scored a goal. I live in hope that they’ll at least make it back to the World Cup in my lifetime.

For those unfamiliar with the tournament, 32 national teams qualify. This time around, those 32 are whittled down through regional competitions from 204 member nations over a year and a half leading up to the World Cup finals. Here’s where they come from:

  • Europe: 13 places
  • Africa: 5 places (and South Africa, the host nation)
  • South America: 4 or 5 places
  • Asia: 4 or 5 places
  • North, Central American and Caribbean: 3 or 4 places
  • Oceania: 0 or 1 place

The selection process is incredibly baroque–it’s worthy of a Common Craft video. However, this Wikipedia article does an exquisite job of laying out all the permutations, and staying up to date with the ongoing matches. If you’re supporting a particular nation, or are remotely interested in the competition, this (combined, perhaps, with the newly-revamped FootyTube) is a terrific way to keep abreast of each nation’s shifting fortunes.

To answer my own question, as of today, only five teams have qualified for the tournament: Australia, Japan, South Korea, Netherlands and the hosts, South Africa.

A quick OCD aside: there are actually 208 FIFA members–Brunei, Laos, Papua New Guinea and the Philippines failed to register for the tournament. Wikipedia lists 203 sovereign states, so now I’m curious about the members on the FIFA list who aren’t on the list of sovereign states (and vice versa). A few examples of non-countries on FIFA’s list include the Faroe Islands, Palestine and Bermuda. I’d be curious to find an exhaustive comparison of the two lists.

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Math is Hard, Let’s Go Into Other Professions

May 26th, 2008, 9 Comments »

Reddit points to what promises to be a controversial article about women’s preferences for work:

Now two new studies by economists and social scientists have reached a perhaps startling conclusion: An important part of the explanation for the gender gap, they are finding, are the preferences of women themselves. When it comes to certain math- and science-related jobs, substantial numbers of women - highly qualified for the work - stay out of those careers because they would simply rather do something else.

I’ve always felt that a goal of 50-50 splits in all workplaces seemed a little artificial. Men and women are different, and so each profession probably has a natural ratio of men to women. Some are going to be 75-25 in favour of women, and others are going to be 60-40 in favour of men.

Of course, we need to design a working world where women don’t face discrimination or inequity, regardless of what job they want. That’s tricky, and it’ll only get trickier if we start making assumptions about what women want.

There was another interesting point in the article, discussing how men and women tend to differ in achievement:

Women who are mathematically gifted are more likely than men to have strong verbal abilities as well; men who excel in math, by contrast, don’t do nearly as well in verbal skills. As a result, the career choices for math-precocious women are wider than for their male counterparts.

This is pretty anecdotal, but that was definitely true for my high school class. The smart boys were good at Math and the sciences, but usually not top of the class in English or Literature. The top-performing girls, conversely, seemed to be good at everything.

9 Comments »