Aaron Baker

Goal! and the global sports film

The 2005 film Goal! exemplifies what the Hollywood sports film does best: it offers an emotionally engaging, utopian story of a talented athlete whose hard work and determination make possible the overcoming of social disadvantage to achieve stardom. Goal! also follows the pattern for most sports films by offsetting the overly simplistic formula for such success by to some degree realistically portraying the business of professional football – as well as its protagonist Santiago Munezs experience of immigration – that make up the world in which the story takes place. Goal! exemplifies the increased influence of globalization on commercial sports and movies. Its globalized appeal may have helped with football fans who understand the game as an international sport, but it may have also limited its access to viewers in the USA where globalization represents a threat to the cultural exceptionalism that the most popular American sports have long helped to define.

PyCP: An Open-Source Conformal Predictions Toolkit

The Conformal Predictions framework is a new game-theoretic approach to reliable machine learning, which provides a methodology to obtain error calibration under classification and regression settings. The framework combines principles of transductive inference, algorithmic randomness and hypothesis testing to provide guaranteed error calibration in online settings (and calibration in offline settings supported by empirical studies). As the framework is being increasingly used in a variety of machine learning settings such as active learning, anomaly detection, feature selection, and change detection, there is a need to develop algorithmic implementations of the framework that can be used and further improved by researchers and practitioners. In this paper, we introduce PyCP, an open-source implementation of the Conformal Predictions framework that currently provides support for classification problems within transductive and Mondrian settings. PyCP is modular, extensible and intended for community sharing and development.