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Por acaso tem 30, e lesoes nao devem ser tantas assim, esteve no euro, e nas ultimas epocas, tem um numero consideravel de jogos.
Cheira-me que estao a preparar a venda do Insua, um dos jogadores com mais mercado, mas espero estar enganado.

30 anos e 7 meses 

O Emiliano Adrián Insúa Zapata (Zapata: aí está um central que cumpre os mínimos), deve sair por causa do (dizem) elevado salário.

A estatura por si só não é suficiente. Mas, sendo tudo o resto similar, o mais forte (maior) ganha vantagem.
O SCP precisa de aumentar a estatura da equipa, basta comparar com os adversários directos, para central este meio-holandês é baixote e, pior, tecnicamente fraco.

espanha=barcelona é a excepção que confirma a regra.

FCB= 178cm;
SCP= 180cm;
SLB= 181cm;
SCB= 182cm;
FCP= 183cm;

O internacional holandês Boulahrouz, defesa-central de 30 anos  (com estatura inferior aos mínimos),  um jogador duro, chega ao SCP a custo zero depois de ter terminado contrato com o Estugarda, dois anos com mais um de opção.

Ou seja mais um tiro no pé. 

HEDGE-FUND bosses rarely double as cult authors. But an out-of-print book by Seth Klarman, the boss of the Baupost Group, sells for as much as $2,499 on Amazon. A scanned version of “Margin of Safety: Risk-Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor” has been circulating around trading floors. One hedgie likens Mr Klarman’s book to the movie “Casablanca”: it has become a classic.

Why are Wall Street traders such avid readers of Mr Klarman? Baupost, which manages $25 billion, is the ninth-largest hedge fund in the world. Since 2007 its assets have more than tripled, as other funds have wobbled. Baupost has had only two negative years (in 1998 and 2008) since it launched in 1982, and is among the five most successful funds in terms of lifetime returns (see chart), a particularly striking record given its risk aversion. Long closed to new investors, Baupost counts elite endowments like those of Yale, Harvard and Stanford among its clients.

Soft-spoken and based in Boston, a safe distance from the Wall Street mêlée, Mr Klarman keeps a low profile and rarely speaks at industry shindigs. He is probably the most successful long-term performer in the hedge-fund industry who has managed to stay out of the spotlight.

Mr Klarman is a devotee of “value investing”, a discipline forged by Benjamin Graham (see article) and popularised by Warren Buffett, which involves buying stocks at a discount to their intrinsic value. He will look beyond equities for bargains—a good example is Lehman Brothers, which at the end of last year was Baupost’s largest distressed-debt position. But in every investment he insists on a “margin of safety”, the buffer between what investors pay for the stock and what they think it is worth, so they are protected against unforeseen events or miscalculations.

Mr Klarman first became an acolyte of value investing when he worked at Mutual Shares, a value-investing mutual fund, as an intern and again after he finished Harvard Business School. One of his former Harvard professors then recruited him to run a family office for him and three other families, with an investment pot of $27m (Baupost is an acronym for these families’ surnames). Although the fund is significantly larger today, Mr Klarman still runs Baupost like a family office. He is extremely risk averse; his primary goal is not stellar returns but preservation of capital.

In other ways, too, Baupost is not a typical hedge fund. It uses no leverage, which is partly why Mr Klarman is not famous for one stunningly profitable trade, like George Soros’s bet against sterling or John Paulson’s against the housing bubble. Baupost has few short positions and often holds its positions for years, rather than days or months. Mr Klarman is patient and confident enough to do nothing. He currently has around 30%—and has been known to have as much as 50%—of his portfolio in cash. In 2008 Baupost was one of the few firms that had the scale and the available capital to buy up lots of assets from distressed sellers. “The ability to be one-stop shopping for an urgent seller is very advantageous,” he says.

Given Baupost’s allure, it could easily make a killing on fees. But Mr Klarman eschews the generous “2 and 20” compensation structure typical of most hedge funds, which take 2% of capital as a management fee and 20% of gains. Instead, old investors pay “1 and 20”, and newer ones (he has let them in twice, in the early 2000s and 2008) no more than “1.5% and 20”.

That is not the only way Mr Klarman has positioned Baupost in contrast to other funds. He thinks one of investors’ greatest mistakes is chasing short-term performance and obsessively comparing returns with those of competitors and with benchmarks. In the year to April, Baupost was up by around 2%, trailing the S&P 500 (which was up by 11.9%) and the average hedge fund (4.4%). He is probably the only hedge-fund manager ever to tell investors that he does not want to be their best-performing fund in a given year, as he did in a recent letter. He has deliberately maintained a sticky investor base composed almost entirely of endowments, foundations and families, which understand his investment philosophy and will not redeem after a few negative quarters.

Some have nonetheless expressed concern about Baupost becoming a behemoth. The bigger a hedge fund, the more its investments become restricted to bigger companies and the harder it is to generate profits. Returns could flag. “He’s pretty damn big. That doesn’t excite me,” says the chief investment officer of a large American endowment with money in Baupost. Mr Klarman himself says he remains “convinced that unlimited size is a bad idea.” Two-thirds of the firm’s approximately $17.6 billion in growth over the past five years comes from compounded profits, as opposed to new money coming in. In 2010 Baupost returned 5% of investors’ capital, because he did not think there were enough ways to put it to work.

Hedge funds are notoriously monotheistic and usually suffer if the founder leaves. Mr Klarman, who is 55, has already started working with his team on succession planning. Last year he promoted someone to serve alongside him as manager of the portfolio. Mr Klarman has also hired coaches to work with him and some of his team on devising strategy and maintaining the firm’s culture.

In 2011 Baupost opened a London office, its first outside Boston in its 30-year history, to buy assets as European banks deleverage. That has happened more slowly than expected. Mr Klarman has been critical of governments propping up markets through stimulus and keeping interest rates low, all of which has perverted markets. But this is the type of environment where bargains will eventually surface. “Whatever investment success we achieve will take place against a troubled backdrop,” he wrote in January. Last year “felt like we were playing a great hand of cards in the basement of a condemned building filled with explosives during an earthquake.” He did not get where he is now by being an optimist.

http://www.economist.com/node/21558274

By Robert Frank

One of the most controversial issues surrounding inequality is work effort. Some on the right argue that top earners are successful in part because they work harder than others. Many on the left argue that the middle class and poor work just as hard – maybe even harder, with multiple jobs — but that the economic deck is stacked against them.


A new study offers evidence that higher-educated (and therefore higher-earning) Americans do indeed spend more time working and less time on leisure than poorer income groups. In fact, while income inequality may be growing, “leisure inequality” – time spent on enjoyment – is growing as a mirror image, with the low earners gaining leisure and the high earners losing.

The paper, by Orazio Attanasio, Erik Hurst and Luigi Pistaferri, finds that both income inequality and consumption inequality (the stuff that people buy) have increased over the past 20 years.

The more surprising discovery, however, is a corresponding leisure gap has opened up between the highly-educated and less-educated. Low-educated men saw their leisure hours grow to 39.1 hours in 2003-2007, from 36.6 hours in 1985. Highly-educated men saw their leisure hours shrink to 33.2 hours from 34.4 hours. (Mr. Hurst says that education levels are a “proxy” for incomes, since they tend to correspond).

A similar pattern emerged for women. Low-educated women saw their leisure time grow to 35.2 hours a week from 35 hours. High-educated women saw their leisure time decrease to 30.3 hours from 32.2 hours. Educated women, in other words, had the largest decline in leisure time of the four groups.

(The study defines leisure as time spend watching TV, socializing, playing games, talking on the phone, reading personal email, enjoying entertainment and hobbies and other activities.)

Of course, some of the decline is due to non-educated people being unemployed or under-employed. Some of their leisure time is simply “not being able to work” time.

Yet the research shows that up to half the gap is due to unemployment. Mr. Hurst says the leisure gap still remains between employed high-educated workers and employed low-educated workers. It also persists among unemployed high-education people and unemployed low-education people.

While the study doesn’t seek to prove that the high earners work harder “that story would be consistent with the data,” said Mr. Hurst.

Do you think higher earners work harder?

http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/

Which countries think that the rich deserve their fortune?

SOME 39% of adults think that the rich in their country deserve their wealth according to GlobeScan, a market-research company which polled 12,000 people in 23 countries. Top earners have attracted more opprobium as their salaries and the performance of the economy have headed in opposite directions. Europeans and Latin Americans tend to have similar attitudes to the rich; the Anglo-Saxon world is a bit more forgiving. The biggest contrast, though, is between emerging economies (a group in which Russia sits, rather awkwardly). In China, where 600m people were lifted out of poverty between 1985 and 2005, about half the adults think their rich are rightfully so. But in Russia, an economy dominated by oligarchs who extract large windfall rents, only 16% do.

Um sistema baseado na inteligência artificial que prevê, mediante certas condições, a localização de uma pessoa com a antecedência de vários anos, foi criado por Adam Sadilek, investigador do Departamento de Ciências da Computação da Universidade de Rochester (Nova Iorque).

O funcionamento deste sistema - chamado "Far Out" - deve-se, em parte, à crescente utilização de sistemas GPS nos telemóveis (smartphones). Com efeito, quase 50% da população americana, por exemplo, transporta um equipamento portátil com um sistema de GPS durante as suas deslocações, segundo um estudo do Pew Research Center (EUA).

O "Far Out" poderá ser usado para mapear fenómenos do futuro tão diversos como o congestionamento do trânsito numa cidade, a progressão de uma epidemia ou a procura de electricidade.
Localizar com elevada precisão

Sadilek e a sua equipa analisaram os dados de 703 pessoas (que transportavam sistemas de GPS) relativos a uma grande variedade de períodos de tempo. E recolheram 32 mil amostras diárias da localização dessas pessoas.

A partir daqui conseguiram demonstrar que o modelo de previsão utilizado "prevê a localização de uma grande variedade de pessoas com elevada precisão, mesmo a anos de distância no futuro".

"Vemos a previsão a longo prazo como um processo que identifica motivos e regularidades fortes nos dados históricos das pessoas, que modela a sua evolução através do tempo e que estima as localizações futuras através da projeção dos padrões de comportamento dessas pessoas no futuro", afirmou o cientista checo à publicação online "Futurist Update", da World Future Society (EUA), uma organização com 25 mil membros em mais de 80 países.

Num artigo assinado por Adam Sadilek e John Krumm, da Microsoft Research, que vai ser apresentado na 26ª Conferência sobre Inteligência Artificial organizada pela Associação para o Avanço da Inteligência Artificial, que decorrerá de 22 a 26 de julho em Toronto (Canadá), os dois cientistas recordam que "já foi feito muito trabalho de investigação para prever onde poderá estar cada um de nós no futuro imediato, isto é, na próxima hora".

Há de facto muitos modelos de mobilidade a curto prazo, tanto descritivos como preditivos, seja a nível de uma pessoa ou de grupos de pessoas. "Mas há uma lacuna na modelação e previsão da mobilidade a longo prazo, e mesmo os modelos focados no longo prazo consideram apenas previsões para as próximas horas".   
Identificar padrões de comportamento

Por isso, o que estes investigadores querem fazer é inédito e muito ambicioso. "Pretendemos prever a mobilidade humana no futuro a longo prazo, numa escala de meses e anos", afirmam Sadilek e Krumm.

Assim, propõem "um método eficiente que identifica padrões robustos e significativos a partir dos dados históricos de localização de uma pessoa,  assinala as suas associações com características de contexto (como por exemplo um determinado dia da semana), e depois usa esta informação para prever a localização mais provável numa certa data no futuro".

Por outro lado, o modelo geral definido pelos dois cientistas faz previsões tanto a curto prazo (horas ou dias) como a longo prazo (meses ou anos), ou seja, "é capaz de trabalhar com os dois tipos de representação de dados". O mais surpreendente é que Sadilek e Krumm demonstraram que "o desempenho do "Far Out" não é significativamente afectado pelas distâncias temporais".
Publicitar serviços, reunir amigos, planear cidades

"Precisa de cortar o cabelo? Dentro de quatro dias você vai estar a 100 metros do cabeleireiro Hair Dream que faz descontos de 20%". Esta mensagem recebida no telemóvel poderá ser uma das muitas aplicações, a nível individual, do "Far Out", tal como todo o tipo de spots publicitários, lembretes ou resultados de uma pesquisa pessoal. No fundo, são mensagens que consideram todas as localizações prováveis de uma pessoa em datas específicas no futuro.

Para além da escala individual, o "Far Out" poderá ser aplicado a uma escala social, envolvendo as pessoas que nós conhecemos, como sugerir um local, dia e hora conveniente para nos encontrarmos com um grupo de amigos, mesmo quando eles estão espalhados pelo mundo; ou sustentar um sistema de entrega de encomendas em qualquer local onde o cliente se encontre.

À escala de uma população, o "Far Out" poderá ser uma ferramenta decisiva para o planeamento urbano, para modelar a evolução de uma área metropolitana ou de uma região, em realidades tão diversificadas como o trânsito automóvel, o consumo de energia e de água, a qualidade do ar, a procura de habitação, ou a construção de infraestruturas de telecomunicações. Tudo porque identifica os padrões da actividade das pessoas e pode também detetar comportamentos pouco habituais.

Ler mais: http://expresso.sapo.pt/cientista-descobre-como-prever-o-futuro=f738911#ixzz20L4zEMnT