There is more happening here than just the World Cup. Just take one example: This weekend was RoboCup, in which lots of little robots play, um, football.

Maybe that’s not so totally different. But it was a blast to watch. It turns out that cheering for two pairs of wobbly little two-foot-high robots as they totter down the field, look down at the ball, look up, look down, kick the ball, and promptly fall over is more fun than watching at least a third of the human games.

Was interesting to see how much just the rudiments of a human form — two legs, arms, and a head — elicited such a strong sense of identification from the audience. It’s pretty well established how the specific proportions of a baby’s head and eyes trigger a hard-wired “Aww, isn’t that cute” response. I’d love to see the same kind of study done on unsteady  child-like movement. These robots had none of the traditional bio-indicators of cute, but the crowd (myself included) absolutely felt as warmly towards them as we would towards young children.

My story on the event is here, at Wired News. For more football fun, here’s a piece I did for Cnet on why the World Cup doesn’t have any high-tech aids to help refs tell when a goal has been scored.

A European Comission-funded standards group has approved a standard for sending broadband data over power lines. Several German groups had experimented with the technology in the late 1990s, putting them ahead of U.S. efforts, but have abandoned the projects since, citing cost and efficiency concerns. Critics note that newer access technologies such as WiMax are better bets for reaching rural and other areas that lack broadband today.

Link:

• Europe approves powerline communications spec

The stats aren’t pretty. Europe used to win the lion’s share of Nobel Prizes (say what you will about parochial voting): 73 percent in the first half of the 20th century. That fell to 33 percent in the second half, and just 19 percent if you count from 1995 to 2005.

Or take patents. Between 1991 and 2001, the share of patents granted to European companies in the US and in Europe declined compared to American companies.

Euro politicians are rightfully fearful. They’re midway through the Lisbon strategy, a set of goals established in 2000 meant to make Europe “the world’s most dynamic and competitive economy” by 2010. It isn’t quite there yet.

Now come proposals for a European Institute of Technology, aimed at sparking new research, and at aiding the transfer of technology from research institutions to commercial applications. There’s no real outline yet — this week’s call for consultation is looking for advice from the business, academic, and scientific communities as to how it might work.

Answer: give the hungry Romanians and Estonians the chance to turn themselves into billionaires the way Larry and Sergey have, and there will be incentive enough.

Links:

• EUROPA - Education and Training - European Institute of Technology Consultation