{"id":2965,"date":"2010-07-08T13:36:35","date_gmt":"2010-07-08T12:36:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=2965"},"modified":"2010-07-08T13:38:26","modified_gmt":"2010-07-08T12:38:26","slug":"can-an-octopus-predict-football-matches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=2965","title":{"rendered":"Can an octopus predict football matches?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sections of the media have become very excited about the fact that apparently an octopus in Germany has correctly predicted the outcome of every World Cup game that Germany has played in South Africa. Typical of the coverage is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/sport\/worldcup2010\/article-1293021\/WORLD-CUP-2010-Paul-psychic-Octopus-correctly-predicts-German-result.html?ito=feeds-newsxml\">this piece<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>A few points are worth noting. First, statistically this is not a big deal. Each game, the octopus has a 50:50 chance &#8211; you might as well toss a coin. Second, he doesn&#8217;t always get it right &#8211; according to <a href=\"http:\/\/economictimes.indiatimes.com\/news\/news-by-industry\/et-cetera\/FIFA-World-cup-Octopus-oracle-keeps-perfect-record\/articleshow\/6142218.cms\">this item<\/a>, he only managed to\u00a0 predict correctly less than 70 per cent of the Germany team&#8217;s results in the 2008 European Championship. Third, Paul &#8211; that&#8217;s the name of the creature &#8211; is British and displayed no such talent when he was in England.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sections of the media have become very excited about the fact that apparently an octopus in Germany has correctly predicted the outcome of every World Cup game that Germany has played in South Africa. Typical of the coverage is this piece. A few points are worth noting. First, statistically this is not a big deal. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2965"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2965\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2971,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2965\/revisions\/2971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}