Blind football

I was intrigued recently to learn of the existence of the World Blind Football Championship - the BBC has now written a detailed article about it so I have found out some more.

Footballs with ball bearings...some careful and limited shouting techniques between the five players on each team...rebound walls and no throw-ins...opaque eye patches to keep players on an equal footing, since some of them have partial sight and others are fully blind. Would be fascinating to watch, although I don't think it will have TV coverage.

It's interesting to read about the various compromises they've designed into the game to keep it competitive and exciting and allowing visually impaired players to fully express their talents for the game. The goalkeepers, for example, can be sighted and do not wear the eyepatches, but may not leave their areas. And there's no offside rule.

Apparently they also tried to find blind referees to officiate the matches...

...but they are all busy in the Premiership this week.

Comments

Andrea said…
Years ago when I was searching the internet for sports associations for the blind (because I wanted to possibly register my gym with them since wrestling is so incredibly tactile that it may be an appropriate sport) I found that they cover very unexpected sports like archery, football and cricket.

http://www.blindsports.org/sports.p
hp
13 August 2010 at 20:41
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is the difference between cognitive economics and behavioural finance?

This question was posed in an interesting LinkedIn discussion group (Behavioural Finance: Theory and Practice) by Kerry Pechter. I dashed off a quick answer which ended up being 500 words long. So I thought it might be useful to post on here. Can anyone tell me the difference between cognitive economics and behavioral finance? Cognitive economics is not yet a widely used phrase, though Marco Novarese and I have been using it as a name for a more microfounded version of what's typically called behavioural economics. So I'll answer the question based on how I use the term. The first difference is between "economics" and "finance". Economics is a broader field, including the trading of any kind of goods or services, whereas finance specifically focuses on investment and the value of financial instruments. Indeed I consider economics very broadly to be the study of how resources are allocated (by individuals, and across society). The more fundamental
Read more

Is bad news for the Treasury good for the private sector?

An intriguing post from Robert Peston raising the spectre of the Treasury failing to sell all the bonds it wanted to sell yesterday. Is this, as he implies, plain bad news for the government because their funding is getting more expensive? Or is it good news for private lenders - implying that investors are fed up with their "flight to quality" and are now considering private sector investments instead? The answer is dependent on two further questions: is investors' money switching to foreign investments, UK private lending or UK equities? are investors actually running out of money to invest - the infamous savings trap, where people in aggregate try to increase their savings but fail to do so, because the attempt to save reduces total income in the economy and available savings are reduced too? Hopefully we can find out. How could we figure it out? by looking at total UK savings this month - this is not an exact science but we should hopefully be able to see if the tren
Read more

Dead rats and dopamine - a new publication

My new paper, coauthored with Yohan John , Dakota McCoy and Oliver Braganza , is out in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. " Dead rats, dopamine, performance metrics and peacock tails " is about the universal emergence of proxy failure. When you measure and incentivise performance by a single metric (a proxy), the proxy will always become a worse measure of performance than it was before you added the incentive. This effect is also known as Goodhart's Law  in economics, and by other names in other fields - but the same underlying process drives the effect across multiple domains. Our paper studies it in management, economics, biology, neuroscience and other areas. Recent concerns about AI alignment are closely related to this phenomenon. The paperclip problem is a good example - if a sufficiently clever AI is given a single goal, to produce as many paperclips as possible, it may eventually destroy all of humanity and take over the whole universe in its efforts to maximise o
Read more