Picking the Upsets in NCAA March Madness: ESPN has the Methodology

March Madness is beginning and every pundit worth his dunks will be prognosticating winners and losers of the upcoming college basketball games.

In this regard, Peter Keating of ESPN The Magazine has a landmark article in which he explains the methodology of picking upsets based on past NCAA tournaments, and they will be using this methodology this year in future reports.

Take a look at The return of Giant Killers: The secret to selecting NCAA tournament upsets....

One aspect about the play of underdogs beating much higher seeded teams is their willingness to take risks under the philosophy of high risks can equal high rewards. On the other hand, it can also lead to a team being blown out which ordinarily might be able to stay close, but not necessarily win with that conservative strategy.

Also of great interest in terms of being able to upset a higher seeded team is the criteria of team stats, e.g. the ability of a team to achieve "high 3-point scoring as a proportion of all points scored" and similar factors, which you can read about at the original article.

Google Denies Imminent Launch of the Social Network Google Circles According to Network Effect

Liz Gannes at Network Effect writes that Google Denies Social Network Called Circles Will Debut Today despite the report at ReadWriteWeb.

Google Circles as a Social Network to Compete with Facebook May Be Launched Soon

At ReadWriteWeb, Marshall Kirkpatrick writes that Google to Launch Major New Social Network Called Circles, Possibly Today, a service which is to permit social networking while respecting the rights of privacy better than is done at Facebook.

We would definitely welcome such a service, as the privacy settings for Facebook are not set up in such a manner as to permit privacy to be adequately protected while still engaging in social networking.

Whether a competitor to Facebook can counter the massive head-start that Facebook already has globally on social networking membership is another matter.

New EU Cookie Rules Come Into Force in the European Union Starting May 25, 2011

BBC News reports in New net rules set to make cookies crumble, that:

"From 25 May, European laws dictate that 'explicit consent' must be gathered from web users who are being tracked via text files called 'cookies'....

The changes are demanded by the European e-Privacy directive which comes into force in the UK in late May."

As written by Miya Knights at EWeekEurope.co.uk in ICO Warns On New EU Cookie Rules:

"The new law, which will come into force on 25 May 2011, is an amendment to the EU’s Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive [The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003] designed to keep pace with the constant evolution of online fraud."