World Cup Soccer's Growing Multiculturalism

World_cup_graphic

Is World Cup soccer moving away from the sort of team=country nationalism that leads to flare-ups like 1969's "soccer war" between El Salvador and Honduras? It's often remarked that the players on many teams this year came from immigrant families, but this interactive graphic from the Brazilian newspaper O Estado de Sao Paulo really makes the change clear. In 1994's cup, the lines between country-of-origin and country-played-for are mostly broad verticals, criss-crossed with a few thin veins that represent, for example, one Italian guy playing on Brazil's team. By 2010 the thick lines are crossed with many more of these strings, representing, for instance, how Brazil's team this year has players born in nine other nations.

It's also a lovely piece of work, using interactivity to convey information in a way print could not. Kudos to Larry Yu for finding it.

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In markets, medicine, justice, politics, psychology, and economics, "Rational Man" is dead. As the science of human behavior enters the post-rational era, we no longer think of ourselves as cool calculators in pursuit of our objective self-interest. Mind Matters is about this change and its effects on how we live. It's about the reasons people perceive, feel, think, and act as they do, and the gaps between what we think we're doing and what research says we're doing. Most importantly, it's about how this sea change affects the institutions we live by: courts, hospitals, governments, stock markets and other entities that still run on the presumption that people act rationally.

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