November 19, 2012 · 8:00 am

First football match in Spain?

In the previous post I explained how I looked for some museum about the origin of football in Spain, which is regarded to have taken place in the province of Huelva, Spain.

The village of Rio Tinto claims such origin and it may well be so as it was there where the British colony working for Rio Tinto Company Limited established (at “Bella Vista” neighborhood).

The oldest football team in Spain is regarded to have been the Recreativo de Huelva (according to the Wikipedia originally known as Huelva Recreation Club), founded at the end of 1.889 by workers of the Rio Tinto mines and based in the city of Huelva, some 70 kilometres from Minas Rio Tinto.

I found some months ago, in the Spanish sports newspaper Marca, the following picture from an article of the “The Dundee Courier” (Monday, March 17, 1.890) covering the “first football match in Spain”.

It was supposedly played in Seville, at the Tabladar (close to Airbus Military factory nowadays), between the above mentioned Huelva Recreation Club and “Club de Football de Sevilla” (not related to the current Sevilla F.C.).

The article is an interesting read for its historic touch.

However:

  1. having been that Recreation Club from Huelva founded only in 1.889, by Rio Tinto workers,
  2. living many of the company workers at the village of Minas Rio Tinto, some 70 km from Huelva,
  3. having the workers other social clubs in Minas Rio Tinto (including Bella Vista) and
  4. being the company established in 1.873.

I’m afraid that probably the first match would have been played at Rio Tinto, not in Seville, and much earlier than in 1890.

At the mining museum of Minas de Rio Tinto, there is a small one-page text about the introduction of football by Rio Tinto Company Ltd. workers. In fact, in that text there is a mention of the celebration of a football match in 1.873 to celebrate the festivities of the local patron, San Roque.

But I am no historian, and thus would love to see some historian diving into that history and putting up the nice results in a museum in Rio Tinto :-).

Article of the “The Dundee Courier” (Monday, March 17, 1.890) covering the “first football match in Spain”.

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November 17, 2012 · 8:00 am

The origin of football in Spain

One of the sports introduced by the British working at the mine of Rio Tinto (post about the visit to it I made the last week here), was football.

Welcome to Minas Riotinto (“Birthplace of Spanish football”).

I didn’t expect anything special as I had not researched the topic beforehand but I hoped there would be something knowing that the origin was there. This was immediately confirmed as there is a signpost at the entrance of the village about the relation of it with football.

But then, there was nothing else but the statue you can find below in front of the local football club field (playing in who knows which division).

I asked at the mining museum whether there was something to be visited about football and its origin in Spain. There wasn’t. “The town hall has a project of building a local museum of football, but today there is nothing”. What a pity. I guess I am not the only person who when travelling is searching for this kind of places and memorabilia, thus I guess it could have some potential.

Statue celebrating the origin of Spanish football in Minas de Rio Tinto (Huelva).

It is not the first time that I get this disappointment. You may remember that I had the same feeling when searching for the roots of football at the Freemasons in London. I would love to see such museum like the one about golf in St. Andrews, I hope that one day I will be able to do so. To date, the closest to that is the one-page text below, found at the mining museum:

Page about the introduction of football in Rio Tinto by British RTCL workers.

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November 15, 2012 · 8:00 am

Rio Tinto

Rio Tinto is a river flowing through the South of Spain opening to the Atlantic ocean at Huelva. I had wanted to visit it since long time ago. It is not just any river: it is especially acidic (pH2), it has a high content in heavy metals and as its name points out, it is red (“tinto”), due the iron dissolved in the water.

The Rio Tinto area has been a mining site since ancient times, and it is there that the British mining company, bearing that name, was founded in 1873, when some international investors bought the site to the Spanish government. The mining activity grew so much that at some time it was reported as the biggest mining site in the world (especially for copper).

The influence of the operation in the area reached every corner of life:

  • The ancient village of Minas de Rio Tinto was brought down in order to exploit the underground below it and had to be displaced.
  • A huge train system (over 300km of rails), only second to the national state train system, was built to bring metals to the port of Huelva.
  • The British colony formed by the company workers and managers brought by the owners introduced all kinds of changes in the society: from religion to the introduction of several sports (football, tennis, polo, criquet…).
  • The Mediterranean forest in the area was completely destroyed. Today, the a forest of pine trees, more resistant to the acidic conditions has been planted.

At first, several dozens of children were employed (about 50 under age 10!), salaries would be paid out in coupons to exchange for food from the company, work conditions were deplorable. Years later, partly due to the pressure of organized unions led the company to improve the standards of workers and to provide several social benefits. A major cornerstone was the strike that occurred in the first days of February of 1.888 which ended in the killing of over hundred demonstrators (“Año de los Tiros“).

In 1.955 the Spanish State bought back a majority stake of the operation to the Rio Tinto Company Ltd., which was kept ongoing for some decades, but today is closed.

Today, Rio Tinto has a very different interest, as it serves scientists from NASA to study the bacteria living in the extreme conditions of the river. This helps them in studying the plausibility of life in Mars under similar conditions.

The landscape is unique, striking. We took several pictures of it and I share some of them below:

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The village has a wonderful mining museum, a train tour through the mining complex (11km route and back) along the river, a small mine can be visited (entering 200m into it) and a typical British house of the time is also open for tourism. It is a very interesting tour for a day (different packages starting from 10€; just ~60 km from Seville).

We also recorded some 5 videos along the train tour. See the first one here (you may find the rest at my Youtube channel):

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November 13, 2012 · 8:00 am

Wine app (technology entrepreneurship)

If yesterday, I shared with you a video I made for a course on creativity, today I wanted to share: Wine app.

Some of you have already heard about it: another course I am taking from Stanford University Venture Lab is “Technology Entrepreneurship” (taught by Chuck Eesley). As part of it, we have been teaming in groups. In each of the groups we are studying the viability of some product or service. In our case: a wine app.

You may see a presentation with the features we have in mind.

As part of the project we are carrying a survey, which many of you already received and quite some of you have answered (a big thanks!). If you haven’t, please take 3 minutes to help us with it.

I will keep you updated. Especially if we do come up with such an app :-).

This is the second season of this online course in Venture Lab. If you are only interested in the content of the lectures and not so much in learning process of working on the assignments, you may find the collection of videos here.

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November 12, 2012 · 8:00 am

Hotel Room Sports (Creativity)

At the beginning of the year, as a yearly goal I decided to keep on learning new things. One of the actions I took was signing up for some courses (in Coursera platform).

The courses were great, the way of learning is very encouraging: with videos, small and bigger assignments, online forums, students from all over the world helping each other, aspiring career starters and retired people wanting to learn something new together in a global class.

I followed them for some weeks but finally I was unable to keep up with them and dropped. I felt frustrated for that.

Some weeks ago a friend forwarded some information about some other online course from Stanford University Venture Lab. I decided to follow a couple of them, including “A Crash Course on Creativity” taught by Tina Seelig.

Those of you who know me well might think “a course on creativity, how unlikely of Javier?”. Well, I decided to join it because I thought it could be fun… and some of the assignments are fun!

In this post I wanted to first raise awareness of this kind of free education and, secondly, to share the video I took last weekend in Seville for an assignment. Enjoy:

What was the assignment about?

“Your challenge is to use TWO HOUSEHOLD ITEMS of any type – to come up with a brand new SPORT. Use your creativity to generate something you have never seen before.

 You will be evaluated on your creativity and presentation. Deliver a drawing, photo, or video demonstrating the sport. Feel free to include a short description.”

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November 8, 2012 · 8:00 am

Do teams make better quality decisions?

As part of a course module I took weeks ago, we carried some exercises on the composition and dynamics of teams. To respond to the question “Do teams make better quality decisions?” we did the following exercise:

Individually, we had to classify 13 professions according to the trustworthiness they inspired on each one of us (1 for the most trustworthy, 13 for the least). Then, we were grouped in teams and had to agree on a common new ranking (*). Then we checked both of our rankings with the ones provided by Ipsos MORI in a recent Veracity Index [PDF, 50kB].

See below the different rankings and relative deviations:

Rankings on trustworthiness.

The individual ranking is my ranking in this case.

The aim of the test is to check if the deviation between the individual ranking and the MORI one is higher than the deviation of the team ranking compared to the MORI one. That is the case with me (46) and my team (32) in the exercise. This is done to prove that the collective thinking will produce a better decision.

I still have trouble with the findings. It is obvious that the team decision provides a more balanced decision, the larger the group, the more balanced it is. But confess that I struggle to accept it as better or of a better quality.

To give you food for thought I emphasized in bold those professions in which the deviations were higher:

  • Ordinary people: who I found way more trustworthy than my team members did.
  • Scientists: who I find more trustworthy (1) than the MORI test does (6).
  • Business leaders: who both my team and I trust more than the MORI responders do.
  • Clergymen: which I found the least trustworthy (13), as opposed to the high ranking given by society (4).
  • Television news readers: who society at large finds more reliable than my team and I do.

Try yourself the test and see what you find :-).

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(*) In my group we opted for calculating first arithmetic averages and re-rank the professions and then we made two adjustment at the request of one member, a compromise the other two members agreed on.

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November 6, 2012 · 8:00 am

So much for composites…

Few weeks ago I was talking to a stress engineer from Eurocopter Spain about the different activities they performed. He was looking forward to the future work in relation to the latest EC 175, a helicopter built in cooperation with China for civilian and parapublic markets, mainly to support oil and gas exploration and search and rescue missions.

“At last we’re back to metal structures…”

He mentioned this in relation to apparent problems given by composites ones in their use in helicopters. This reminded me of a teacher (at engineering school) and former (very senior) colleague at Airbus Military, who was never seduced by the massive application of composites and he always called for their introduction following his mantra:

“Technology (in the context of application of science), is the most powerful means to increase the effectiveness-to-cost ratio.”

Which not always calls for the use of the latest technology available.

So much for the hype of composites…

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November 4, 2012 · 8:30 am

Looking at History through US Foreign Military Sales

If an alien came to Earth and had to quickly make sense of the last half century of History, he could get a first glimpse of geographical hot spots and changes of regime by looking at US Foreign Military Sales program data (please refer to my previous post for an explanation of the program and sources of data).

For example, take the figure below. It shows the historical data of FMS deliveries (in thousands of $) from 1970 to 2010. As you can see deliveries stopped in 1980. What is even more telling, in the 4 years to 1979 (from 1976-79) the arms sales delivered to this country represented a whole 34% of the complete US FMS program over that period (see the total volume of deliveries in this graphic from a previous post). Which country do you think it coud be?

Which country could this be?

This alien, combining these data would know that something that happened in that country, from representing a third of military sales to not taking part in the program ever again… you may have guessed right: Iran, where the Islamic Revolution started in 1978, the Shah left the country in 1979 and at the end of that year the hostage crisis started.

Having taken a look at the graphic of Iran, find below the one for Iraq:

 

In the graphic you can see that from 1970 to 2005 there were not FMS agreements and deliveries from 2006. Nevertheless you can see that during the 1970’s and 1980’s there were commercial arms sales to Iraq from American contractors (this is also published by DSCA), which deliveries stopped altogether in 1990 (invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 and subsequent first Gulf war). Then, once the second Gulf war had changed the regime, commercial and FMS sales restarted from 2003.

There are plenty of cases to look at: Cuba not forming part of FMS since before 1970, Russia neither (though receiving commercial arms since 1992), Spain having been always part of FMS program (including during dictator Franco’s time) but which agreements surged in 1982 with the order of 72 McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 fighters (the same year in which it joined NATO), Chile, Venezuela, China…

Russia: never part of FMS.

Before concluding this post let me show again the distribution of FMS deliveries during the last 60 years per region (shown in the previous post) and a table with the main receivers in each region:

FMS Sales per region (1950-2010, source: DSCA).

FMS Agreements per region and selected countries (1950-2010, in k$ – source: DSCA).

Which have been then the top receivers of FMS Arms sales agreements in the period 1950-2010? In order:

  1. Saudi Arabia (16.9% of global FMS program)
  2. Egypt (7.3%)
  3. Israel (7.1%)
  4. Australia (4.1%)
  5. Korea (South) (4.0%)
  6. United Kingdom (4.0%)
  7. Turkey (4.0%)
  8. Japan (3.7%)
  9. Germany (3.3%)
  10. Greece (2.7%)

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November 2, 2012 · 8:00 am

US Foreign Military Sales

The Foreign Military Sales (FMS) is a program managed and operated by US Department of Defense (DoD) on a no-profit and no-loss basis. Countries and international organizations participating in the program pay for defense articles and services at prices that recoup the actual costs incurred by the United States. This includes a fee (currently 3.8% of what the defense articles and/or services cost, in most instances) to cover the cost of administering the program.

Foreign countries may also opt to procure directly from American contractors in Direct Commercial Sales, though FMS ensures third countries rates similar to those received by the DoD (bargaining power) but the items will be the standard procured by the USA, not especially tailored to the needs of other countries. In any case the sales will have to pass the same approval requirements for the sale of defense materials to third countries.

The Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) is the one managing this program and the one which publishes the different deals (Major Arms Sales Notification and FMS Contract Awards).

The DSCA also publishes historical data of the FMS sales by year and per country and region. (I have always admired the openness of the different US agencies in their publishing of data to work with).

In the graphic below you can see the total US arms sales agreements with foreign countries and FMS-program agreements during the last 40 years.

Total Military Sales (*) and FMS-program agreements (in k$) per year.
[(*) Total Sales includes foreign sales not made through FMS program]

You can see how most of the agreements are close within the FMS program, which ensures moderate costs to the third countries and a standardization for US allies. You can notice as well how the first Gulf war and the recent wars in Irak and Afghanistan have increased FMS agreements.

However, given that military equipment takes time to build, there is a lag between those sales agreements and when the arms are delivered. See below the two lines representing FMS agreements and FMS deliveries (both in k$).

FMS (in k$): agreements vs deliveries per year.

You can see how the deliveries show a growth trend since the 1970’s, with peak at the end of ’90s.

The following question is: to which countries were those sales…

FMS Sales (1950-2010) per region.

I will end this post with this graphic, showing how the Middle East (“Near East & South East Asia”) is the region which received the most of FMS during the last 60 years. In a following post I will dive into which specific countries as that is a very interesting analysis deserving a single post.

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October 31, 2012 · 8:00 am

Crowdfunding science

I have written sometimes in the blog about crowdfunding. How I started funding loans for small entrepreneurs in developing countries via Kiva, or how I invested a small amount in the movie project “El Cosmonauta”, and more generally I have shared yearly contributions to other non-profits.

I heard for the first time about crowdfunding science some time ago, but didn’t keep track of it. Thus, when I read the last week in The Economist an article featuring some platforms where to crowdfund science I decided to take a look at those and to post about it in the blog. The purpose of the post is twofold: raise awareness about an initiative that I support (even if not yet with money) and to let myself keep track of them from now on.

The article mentions 4 platforms. Two of the platforms look more science-focussed and the other two more generalist:

  • Petridish: “Petridish lets you fund promising research projects and join first hand in new discoveries.”
  • Microryza: “We’re researchers and scientists. We live and breathe this stuff. We know that too many important research ideas go unfunded. So we created Microryza. We believe that the discoveries made through research help make the world better, that researchers should keep 100% ownership of the research and results, and that a community of people who care about science is all that’s needed to help seed fund new ideas.”
  • Rockethub: “RocketHub is the world’s funding machine. RocketHub is an international and open community that has helped thousands of artists, scientists, entrepreneurs, and philanthropists raise millions of dollars. We offer an innovative way to raise money (Crowdfunding) and tangible opportunities to take creative products and endeavors to next level (LaunchPad Opportunities).”
  • Indiegogo: “Everyone should have the opportunity to raise money. Now everyone does. People all over the world use our industry-leading platform to raise millions of dollars for all types of campaigns. No matter what you are raising money for, you can start right now with no fee or application process.”

I will let you know the moment I opt to engage with a particular scientific research :-).

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Note: I leave aside the debate of whether budget for science should be ensured by the states.

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