Unusual citations

These are all legitimate, published journal articles:

• Annette Kuhn, “Adverse events of injectables, what kind of jet-skiers should be informed about serious vaginal injury, and what Kant thinks about it”, 19(8) International Urogynecology Journal (August 2008)
• Márcio Martins Pimentel & Reinhardt Adolfo Fuck, “Neoproterozoic crustal accretion in central Brazil”, 20(4) Geology 375-9 (April 1992)
• Wilhelm Fucks, “On Mathematical Analysis of Style”, 39(1-2) Biometrika 122-9 (1952)

Yes, Professor Reinhart Adolfo Fuck is a real person.

  11:14pm  •  Humour  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

What’s happening to Tiger Woods’ sponsorships?

As the number of women claiming to have been with Woods continues to tick into the double-digits, what’s happening to his money-making capacity? While I find it difficult to believe that, come the New Year, this whole affair wouldn’t have affected his golf game in one way or another, Woods makes most of his money from sponsorships. Bloomberg reports that he has endorsement agreements with Accenture, Nike, PepsiCo (Gatorade), Tag Heuer, EA, Upper Deck, NetJets, TLC Vision (where he got Lasik done), and P&G (Gillette). Apparently none of those deals have been affected yet, even though he’s all but disappeared off the TV.

The article also mentions a couple of interesting metrics that they use in the entertainment industry:

Before the reports, Woods ranked just below Oprah Winfrey on the Davie Brown Index, which tracks 2,800 celebrities. The index was created by Los Angeles-based Davie Brown Entertainment to provide a way to measure the use of celebrities in campaigns. …

Woods is the best-known active athlete, based on a September study by Marketing Evaluations, a Manhasset, New York- based research company that publishes the Q score, ranking entertainers by their appeal to consumers.

Among U.S. consumers over the age of 6, 86 percent recognized the golfer, with 28 percent saying Woods was one of their favorite personalities, giving him a +28 Q Score.

The average celebrity is recognized by 32 percent of the U.S. general population and has a +17 Q rating, according to Henry Schafer, the company’s executive vice president.

Update (12/14): Accenture drops Tiger Woods. Gillette has started phasing him out from their ads.

  2:06pm  •  Current Affairs  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Site Updates

For those of you who do follow my Twitter stream, I have created an RSS Feed which strips out any Tweet posts on Hear Ye! It’s right here (and also in the sidebar).

I also put in a captcha in the comment forms. Hate them, but they’re practically necessary due to all the spambots roaming around WordPress blogs.

  10:19am  •  Site News  •  Tweet This  •  Comments (3)  • 

Brrr

How’d it get so damn cold here? Yes that’s a layer of frost on my windscreen!

  12:20pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Australia’s World Cup 2010 draw

Germany, Ghana, and Serbia. There are no easy names among those. Australia has already been been pegged as the underdog in its World Cup group, and the odds at the bookies agree (at the moment $1.14 for Germany to progress to round 2, Serbia $2.15, Ghana $2.25, Australia $2.85). Some even think that we will emerge with zero points.

But the scene in 2006 was familiar, when we confronted Brazil, Croatia and Japan. Our opening game was with Japan. I remember the elation, standing in the chilly early morning air with 5,000 screaming fans in Circular Quay, for the result. We won’t be expected to win the opener this time around, but even a draw against Germany would be taken as a victory. I expect Australia to have a few surprises in store for all the naysayers in the world.

Some comments from a few mates…

“We should take down Serbia, the key game is Ghana. Sure they have Essien and an amazing track record (haven’t lost a game in 18) but have they got the Aussie spirit. Germans will kill us as [simile deleted for political correctness].”

“Our group is tough, but not impossible by any means. We can take down Ghana … if we’re on song. The efficient schweinhunds will be very hard….but not out of the question. With names like Hitzlesperger and Schweinsteiger they really deserve to do well. Who adapts best to South African conditions will play a part.”

“I think we’ve got a reasonable group.  We’ve beaten Ghana a few times (I saw the game in Sydney last year…though we weren’t pretty) and know them well.

“Germany is probably one of the more dangerous teams out of the seeds to draw.  Would’ve preferred England any day. We’ve gone through Asian qualifying without conceding much, but this was mainly due to Schwarzer’s heroics and a lack of clinical finishing by the opposition – there were some games we should have lost by 2 or 3 nil.  The Germans won’t make the same mistakes in front of goal.

“Serbia will be interesting.  In the last World Cup they went through qualifying without conceding a goal, but then absolutely imploded once they got there.  Remember that one game where 1 of their players got sent off and then the whole team gave up?  They lost 6-0 to Argentina and didn’t get any points from the group stage.  So I think our mental toughness could get the better of them.”

Of course, if Australia progresses to the second round, we will most likely face England. The prospect is absolutely delicious.

Start countin’ down the days!

  11:04pm  •  Sports  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Portraits of Power

Platon, a photographer for the New Yorker, set about gathering as many portraits of world leaders as he could during a UN conference. The snippets of audio attached to each photo are interesting to listen to as well. Of Ban Ki-Moon:

“This was the first shoot we did for the project … I really liked him and everytime he and his entourage passed me, often when he was walking with another head of state, he would always raise his arm to me as he walked by and shout out, “Platon! Hello!” So, y’know, when an important person like this does that everyone else around looks to me and thinks I’m suddenly more important than I really am. And that’s all I needed, often, to get people to sit for me.”

The Berlusconi clip was amusing, the comments for Mugabe were fitting, and the mistaken President of Madagascar was embarassing.

  4:51pm  •  Current Affairs  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Hear Ye! is back online

I’ve now made the transition over to WordPress. Pretty time consuming trying to export posts from my old database to WXR, and then importing them back in, while trying to preserve all the extra metadata (timezones, locations, etc). I think it’s all in good shape now. Hopefully this change means I’ll get back to posting a bit more.

There are still parts of the site that I’m going to be filling out over the next few weeks/months, but since I have the core functionality up for now, that’s all lower priority.

  2:37pm  •  Site News  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  •