Free Nonsense

World Championship

By Francisco Maia*

I woke up today and I read the papers. It is confirmed that we have lost the first game of the World Cup with Germany: 4-0. I was hoping this had been a nightmare…

I’m glad I’m supposed to be writing nonsense because there’s no way I could write about the game.

What happened in Salvador da Baía is similar to what happens to us when we submit a paper for revision and we get it back with the sentence “the author should revise the entire research strategy and find new approaches to the problem.”

 I feel like saying that the referee is to blame as I can find severe and continuous errors in his performance. For example, the referee should not have awarded a penalty to Germany because of João Pereira’s foul since seconds before he also suffered a foul before desperately grabbing the German player’s jersey. However, just like in scientific research, we can’t just blame the referees.

We need to redo, restructure, rewrite, reinvent, and above all persevere!

We are a small country. Apparently we depend on all others; apparently, we cannot bring our game to all “championships.”

However, the truth is that we have all the conditions to raise cups.

We have the quality – look at INESC TEC and Cristiano Ronaldo!

But we have to do, structure, invent and persevere!

By analysing the first game with Germany and our daily game, it seems to me that sometimes what’s lacking is the team.

Teamwork, team cohesion and organised attack. Selecting the problems to tackle, attacking according to each one’s qualities, managing efforts and being aware that together we can.

Sometimes we waste too much time finding someone to point fingers at. Oftentimes we forget to start with ourselves. Weeks ago, I participated in a discussion panel on ethics in research, and the panel also included Professor Luís Amaral from the Faculty of Letters. Among several important notes, there was this one image that he used that stuck to me. Many times we forget to use our mirrors properly. We just quickly check our appearance to see if our shirt is straight, and yet we don’t actually see ourselves. We don’t stop to think about who we are and what are our qualities and limitations. This exercise is important. It’s important that we don’t live deluded by what we are not, and that we don’t live disillusioned by what we don’t believe we are. In this continuous exercise we will be evermore capable of playing to win. We will be playing the right game, with the proper tactic.

Portugal is playing in the World Cup** and INESC TEC is playing in different world championships at the same time. Let us persevere, believe and continue fighting for our cups! We are aware of our limitations, but we also know what we are capable of and we can work as a team!

See you!

*Collaborator at the High-Assurance Software Laboratory (HASLab)

**At the time this text was written, the Portugal national team was still playing in the World Cup. The team was eliminated shortly after.