ITK Daily | October 3

Happy Monday.

To be ITK, know this:

Brazil votes: Former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva failed to secure the simple majority needed for victory in the first round and will face current President Jair Bolsonaro in the run-off on October 30.

Favorite place to get cocktails in Brazil = Baretto @ The Fasano Hotel

+ Sydney house prices fall for the eighth straight month.

This morning's U-turn by the UK government is a reminder that...

Good politics rarely makes good economics.

Good economics rarely makes good politics.

Politics is the art of what's possible. Few have been a better artist than Liz Truss.

+ @nytimes: Breaking News: In a striking reversal, Prime Minister Liz Truss of Britain scrapped a plan to cut taxes on high earners, part of a widely criticized proposal.

India is creating a digital platform that combines 16 ministries in a $1.2 trillion bid to snatch factories away from China. The mega project, called PM Gati Shakti, will offer investors and companies a one-stop solution for the design of projects, seamless approvals, and easier estimation of costs.

Moderna refused China request to reveal vaccine technology: Pharma company still ‘eager’ to collaborate with Beijing, despite the collapse of initial talks. FT

+ The Massachusetts-based pharmaceutical company turned down Beijing’s request to hand over the recipe for its messenger RNA vaccine because of commercial and safety concerns.

+ The Moderna leadership did not want to hand over the vaccine recipe to a Chinese partner because of the reputational damage if the local partner botched the manufacturing.

Global leader approval:

Modi: 77%

López Obrador: 70%

Draghi: 55%

Biden: 43%

Trudeau: 43%

Bolsonaro: 41%

Macron: 32%

Scholz: 28%

Kishida: 27%

Truss:25%

HT Morning Consult | *Among all adults

The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Svante P??bo “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.”

If a Google billionaire can’t make flying cars happen, can anyone? Kittyhawk, a secretive air-taxi startup backed by Google co-founder Larry Page, winds down. It underscores how difficult it will be to get electric-powered flying cars and planes. Pranshu Verma

+ “Even Elon Musk has said: everything works in PowerPoint,” said Peter Rez, an emeritus physics professor from Arizona State University, but “things are never going to work as advertised.”

What is your communications doctrine? Full post here.

Oregonian: Dan Wieden, the ad legend behind Wieden+Kennedy, Nike’s ‘Just Do It,’ dies at age 77

+ “The reason it lasted so long was that he didn’t build an ad agency, he built a culture. Curious, driven, welcoming, and lacking deference … it’s a place that in a lot of ways reflects him.”

+ “One of Dan’s great lines, part of his ethos, was that if you’re going to do something memorable and worthwhile, it should have an edge. But if it has an edge, someone will get cut. So be it, as long as it’s authentic and true.”

+ Since its adoption of the “Just Do It” slogan, Nike’s annual sales have increased from $877 million to about $46 billion.

Detroit motor show fades as Asian, European automakers pull out: Nikkei reports pre-pandemic, the annual Motor City event was one of the world's most important auto shows. But, to listen to critics, it is now fighting for survival, with organizers struggling to avoid the fate faced by shows like those in Frankfurt, Geneva, and Tokyo, which have either been sharply scaled back or shuttered entirely.

+ This year, however, prominent brands like Nissan, Honda, Volkswagen, Hyundai, Kia, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, and BMW went missing.

Global Great Lakes: The future of the global economy is the Great Lakes. Learn more here.

+ @matthieurouif: It’s crazy that BeReal, a social network made in Paris:

- [No. 1] app/social network in the US for six months

- Written about by the NYT, the Washington Post and SNL

- copied by tiktok, snap and Facebook

And is mostly ignored by media in France. @lemondefr hardly wrote about it.

Why one woman tackled seven continents in a vintage Porsche Hagerty

Liquid Death is now valued at $700 million.

The Lions lead the NFL with 35.0 points per game. No other team has crossed the 30 PPG mark.

They are 1-3.

Touchdown Jesus: Nearly 3 in 10 US adults say they believe prayer can play a role in determining who wins a sporting event, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

The art and science of picking winning teams: In a world of performance data, human judgment is more vital than ever, says former England cricket selector Ed Smith. FT

+ Selection and decision-making are often framed in terms of “art versus science”, with the assumption that, in our digital age, “science” is increasingly marginalizing the human factor.

+ In the age of data, the question remains: Where does the human dimension fit in?

+ Yes, sport is in the midst of a data revolution, and you’d be insane not to seek better information to inform decisions. But rather than using data instead of human intelligence, the challenge is using data in tandem with the human dimension.

+ “Creative solutions, please — but nothing that’s too clever by half!”

+ “Choose the best player for every position,” argued Johan Cruyff, “and you’ll end up not with a strong XI, but with XI strong I’s.”

Football’s data delusion: A new book by Rory Smith looks at why the English Premier League is still searching for its Moneyball moment. Simon Kuper

+ Liverpool FC’s research department has featured an astrophysicist, a chess champion, and an alumnus of the Large Hadron Collider at Cern near Geneva, all led by a polymer physicist from Cambridge.

+ Analytics has made a historically stupid game more intelligent.

+ Rather than transforming the game, analytics has so far only improved it marginally.

+ Michael Lewis’s 2003 book Moneyball, which showed how analytics had transformed American baseball, inspired many in football, especially in England.

+ An iron rule of football is that people from outside the sport are cleverer than insiders.

+ Most clubs today use data primitively and only as a plug-in extra.

+ In an urgent industry, they lack time and expertise: often, nobody on staff has a maths degree.

+ Football’s most influential coach, Pep Guardiola, spends much more time watching videos than studying spreadsheets.

Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.

-Marc

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