Another example of science pursuing the bleeding obvious:
Physicists uncover Eurovision biases
"This is arguably the only major international forum in which a given country can express its opinion about another, free of economic or governmental bias," the researchers say. They argue that a systematic pattern in voting can be revealing and have analysed vote networks between 1992 and 2003. Each country represents a point in the network, and links between them are forged when one country awards points to another.
Statistically, these networks turn out to be far from random: some countries form cliques that tend to vote in the same way and for each other. This is most evident for Greece and Cyprus, but the Nordic countries also tend to operate a block vote.
Personally I find the occasional aberrations more amusing. Ukraine's attempt to make this year's contest a celebration of the Orange Revolution cost them the nine or eleven votes they'd usually expect to get from Russia - what I liked was how the Russians managed to give Ukraine
one vote, just to rub it in.
