Vivek’s Blog

Yeah, you don’t need to be a genius to figure this one out. And yes, there have been several articles written on this already. But what the hell, one more doesn’t hurt.

The FIFA Football World Cup lasts about four weeks. It involves 32 teams divided into eight groups. From almost all the continents. By comparison, the current cricket world cup took about seven weeks and had half the number of teams. The one obvious difference is the length of the games. A football game lasts ninety minutes plus stoppage time. In the knock-out stages you get the odd game with extra time and penalty shootouts but the game still gets over in less time than one innings in a typical game of cricket. This allows FIFA to schedule several matches in a day. They have four or more games per day with a pair of games kicking off together. So you have two time slots with two games per slot. With this system in place, the group stages get over in a hurry even if they occupy a large section of the tournament. With cricket, it’s just not possible. Each game takes 8 hours to complete and as such, organizers are unwilling to stage more than two games in a day. How will you show these games? It’s not like you can start late and get away with it. If the games aren’t shown live, sponsors won’t pay the organizers anything. What can they do? Selective broadcasting. If you have more than two games a day, show country-specific games. For example, if India play Pakistan, give the game priority for Indian and Pakistani viewers. Show other games if you have other stations available or as highlights packages. Hell, they went down to a game a day for the Super 8s!

You get down to sixteen teams and from then on, it’s a knock-out format all the way up to the final for football. I think this is where the cricket world cup is screwing up. Instead of moving straight to a knock-out format from the group stages, they go to another group stage. They call it the Super Sixes or the Super Eights or whatever but we all know these are less than super. With confusing rules and points carrying over from the group stages, the Super whatevers ruin the party. To make things worse, circumstances allowed Kenya to get to the semi-final last time around. This time, Bangladesh and Ireland made it through although India and Pakistan were not up to scratch this year. If the organizers are still wondering why no one was coming to watch the games, look no further than India and Pakistan bowing out after three games each.

One way to fix this is to reduce the number of overs in one-day cricket. To be honest, I no longer sit 8 hours watching a game. I used to but it ends up being a colossal waste of time. Cut back down to twenty or thirty overs and have a bunch of games everyday in a world cup. With shorter games, the crowd is more likely to be entertained. You know how they’re going to have a Twenty20 World Cup? Yeah? Make that the main event and scrap the current format.

With each team playing up to seven games in the Super stage, it’s no wonder that the WC was long. So for a team to go all the way, it meant playing 3+7+2 = 12 games. Over seven weeks, that’s not much. But imagine if we cut out the Super stage and instead go with a knock-out format after the group stages. The top eight teams would then play in the quarter-finals (4×2). Winners move to the semis (2×2). Those winners play the final. So you have 4+2+1 = 7 games in total after the group stages! This WC would be over in a reasonable amount of time. How they organize the groups and decide on the quarter-finalists is up to them. You can have two groups sending four teams each. Or four groups sending two teams each. WC 96 anyone? India-Pak quarter-final? In a high-pressure situation, we saw a fantastic game of cricket. Tempers flared, bowlers took a beating, and India finally claimed victory after Pakistan had started well. “Do-or-die” situations usually produce good games.

Of course, the ICC is going to take the lessons from this world cup and ruin the next edition as well. I lost interest this year after India went out. But one contributing factor to the lack of interest was the utter lack of good games. The Australians have now won 29 of their last 29 WC games. It’s a streak that has seen them lift three world cups in a row. Seriously, cricket is slowly turning into a boring spectacle. The Aussie juggernaut shows no sign of slowing down and the ICC needs to evaluate what’s happening with other teams in world cricket. Why did England, who beat the Aussies in their own backyard earlier this year, not even manage a semi-final spot? Why do the South Africans continue to flounder in big tournaments when it counts? And what happened to Bob Woolmer?

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The last post left off with me crashing to bed after I couldn’t stay awake to watch a Bond movie. The next morning, I woke up fairly late. There were a few presentations that I did want to go to but again, the bus schedules were such that I didn’t feel like it. Also, we wanted to go into the city after missing out on the previous two days due to exhaustion and laziness. So, around 12pm, we set off for San Francisco.

This time, we took a ferry from a different port and boy was the port beautiful! It was very cloudy and was drizzling but that didn’t anything away from how pretty the place was. By the time we got into San Fran, things were clearing up and it looked like a beautiful day. And yes, the stalker returned. He was on the exact same boat as us. Who thought he’d go and take the ferry from the same place we did on the one day we decided to take it from there? He was on the boat and very near us. Kind of jostled with us for space to click photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz.

This stalker business was getting worrisome. We got off the ferry and went to the MUNI station to hop onto a street car in order to get to Fisherman’s Wharf. We walked around the Wharf a bit, ate an expensive lunch and then walked some more. It’s a lovely place and if you like sea food, this is paradise. Us vegetarians need to be content with bread and soup. It was getting late and we had to catch the 4:30pm ferry back to the hotel, so we got onto another streetcar to take us to the ferry terminal again. Riding a streetcar is a lot of fun! Most of them in San Fran are decades old and you can see the vintage machinery that they run on! It’s a unique experience since you get to ride on a streetcar on the same road as other cars and buses.

We managed to get on the ferry back and then bundled into the hotel’s shuttle to get to our bus. The bus took us to the airport and we sailed through check-in and security. We had a couple of hours of waiting time so I decided to peek into some shops. I also read a bit before getting dinner for later. As you might remember, domestic flights in the US don’t give you any food. American was pretty bad but surprisingly, Delta was decent. They gave us small boxes with some snacks. The plane was one of the good ones with an LCD behind every seat and trivia games and satellite television. I got addicted to the trivia game but couldn’t manage to beat this one guy MIKE. Once he left, I was winning but a bad touchscreen response meant I somehow exited the game before it was over. I was pissed!! I just to sleep after that. Before we landed however, I did manage to sneak a win! We landed to a thunderstorm brewing. We were very worried about not making it to NY because of the impending thunderstorm but luckily, we landed before it got worse. I got back to my room and almost immediately went to sleep. It was 8:30am! I woke up 5 hours later.

What happened to the stalker you might ask? I didn’t see him after getting off the ferry. So, whatever. All in all, a fun trip. I fell in love with San Francisco. It has the big city feel without being crowded like NYC. Maybe I will get another chance to go there and spend more time. For now though, this is the end of this series. Done. Move along!

So let’s move on with the chronicling.

I woke up at 6:30am and took a shower. I ate the continental breakfast delivered to my room before rushing out to catch the bus to the university. The bus schedules were idiotic. Buses only operated between 6:45am and 10:00am and then between 4:00pm and 6:30pm. That meant that if you were presenting at 3pm like I was, you had to go before 10am and STAY there until after your session got done. So I was at the university from 8am to 5pm that day.

We got to the university and got on line to register for the conference. It was a nice campus - very green. They gave us a bag, a name tag, a bottle of water, conference schedules, and guess what, a temporary tattoo with the conference logo on it! So exciting! After getting all that swag, me a friend decided to explore the campus. We spent some time in the library computer lab. Sat around and took pictures of the pretty campus. Then we went to lunch. I was surprised that the vegetarian lunch pack was actually pretty good. After lunch, we just sat around going over our conference presentations and making sure we knew what we were talking about.

At around 2:45pm, I went to my assigned room and waited there. I was up first in the 3pm session. My presentation finally started and I thought I went over it fairly well. I still had time left when I finished because I didn’t get any time warnings (2 minutes or less). I got three questions. The first two were good and I think I was able to provide satisfactory answers. The third one, well, I don’t think I quite understood what the question was. I tried my best to explain it but obviously my answer wasn’t what he was looking for. Thankfully, a couple of people in the room that understood him bailed me out. HUGE THANKS!!!!

The guy was a professor from SUNY Brockport and it seemed he was on a mission to harass everyone that day. Three more presenters after me got a question from him. Each question was equally confusing and the students obviously weren’t quite sure how to answer him. I was in good company. The last guy in the session was this professor’s student. And guess what, the professor kept his mouth shut. Quite what was expected. Was he trying to sabotage everyone else’s presentation to make his guy’s look good? I thought so. But, his student got a question that he answered incorrectly!! The professor had to stay shut because he was his adviser. I found that to be some kind of retribution.

My session got out at 4:40pm and I met up with my buddies to get on the bus back to the hotel. We were too tired to want to go into the city again. Hence, we just got a quite dinner at the hotel restaurant and went to our rooms. I did some homework and reading that was due. I think my friend just passed out. We decided to go to the conference a little later the following day since there was nothing we wanted to see in the morning. We checked out posters in the two afternoon sessions after grabbing lunch a bunch of stupid pictures. Some of our school-mates were presenting so we were there to encourage them.

I saw a couple of really cool posters: one by a EE student from Columbia showing a voltage generator using alternative solid state devices that can produce steady voltages for use as references and another one on two-photon spectroscopy that produced a blue laser from two near-infrared lasers. They weren’t ready to call it a laser yet because of the nature of it’s production. But it looked like one!! And they were using the same kind of rubidium cell that we use in our lab as well as a laser at 780nm just like us. So that was quite fun!

The Guy Who Stalked Me

So you’re probably wondering why the title of all these posts are (will be) called The Guy Who Stalked Me. Well, because a guy did stalk me. When I was reading the first poster, this dude from Milwaukee comes up and starts asking the poster guy some questions. Now these two are EE majors and I took one EE class. But I found the conversation interesting and hung around until it was done. We thanked the presenter and walked away. While roaming around aimlessly, I bumped into that same guy again. All right, we were in the same area so that wasn’t alarming.

Then, I went up to the second poster and was reading it when this guy shows up and starts asking questions again. This time though, I knew more about what was going on and most of his questions were boring. But I waited for my turn and asked some questions of my own. And then, finally, I left the poster and went to hang out with my friends. After the poster session was done, we walked out of the poster hall and started going to the cafeteria to get food. The guy was walking behind us.

We had the special “Mexican Fiesta” dinner and had plans to go into the city after that. But we got lazy and played table-tennis and ate dinner at the hotel restaurant again. Then we trooped over to a friend’s room to watch a Bond film. I was way too sleepy to hang around even though they were watching Living Daylights. I went to bed.

Part III to follow.

Pictures:

Link 1

Link 2

Part I

Waking up early Wednesday morning to get on a university bus to go to JFK International Airport to catch a flight to San Francisco, CA was not very fun. American Airlines is pathetic. No food on a near six-hour trip and a rough landing is what we got. Add to that a small headache and an hour-long bus ride to get to a pick-up spot to get to the hotel. But, but, but! The hotel was lovely. The room was a super-expensive $199 a night affair but hell, I wasn’t paying for it. Had a tablet for the headache and off we went to the ferry terminal to get to San Fran!

It was a pretty ride even though it was freakin’ cold with the wind. We saw the Golden Gate bridge as well as Alcatraz up close during the ride. We got to San Francisco and walked around the city until we got to Chinatown. Walked around some more and then went to a Chinese restaurant to get dinner. It was a great dinner and I even used chopsticks to eat some fried rice.

We walked around Chinatown a bit and then made our way to a bus station to catch the cheapest means of getting back to the hotel. The bus ride wasn’t particularly enjoyable and we were let off quite far from the sole hotel pick-up spot. We had to walk at midnight on the highway. We did make it back to the hotel just fine and after watching some family guy, I went off to bed. Had to wake up quite early the following morning to get to the university for the conference.

Part II to follow soon.

Pictures:

Link 1

Link 2