And I come to this point..

In which I recognize that Hardy (the Hardy Weinberg model, teacher of mathematics at Cambridge) inspired all my Phd thesis, because he was used to say to his students that
"mathematics is beautiful precisely because it is useless"
so, my Phd thesis is the most beautiful work I ever see.

Baggage

Today morning I have bought my huge beggage: it is the colour of this cow:)

Wine and cheese...

...are wonderful expecially if they are for free!

North Face

I don't know if Riccardo knows it, but North Face is from Berkeley, and here it much cheaper than in Italy... So I will come back dressed like Riccardo... :)

"The North Face legend begins, ironically, on a beach. More precisely, San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood, at an altitude of only 150 feet above sea level. It was here in 1966 that two hiking enthusiasts resolved to follow their passions and founded a small mountaineering retail store.

In 1968, The North Face moved to the other side of San Francisco Bay, to the unbridled possibilities of the Berkeley area, and began designing and manufacturing its own brand of technical mountaineering apparel and equipment."

to become rich

you can win a nobel prize if you are able to prove that there are usually two numbers between two prime numbers...

cioè due numeri in mezzo a due numeri primi: Ex: 17 () () 19 () () 21 () () 23

this problem devasteted the life of a lot of mathematicians..so wonderful!!

Negativity

In my opinion there is too much pessimism all-around: in this week, when you leave me alone, I've been adopted by post-doc, who describe a gloomy future; Marlies came one times, saying that we both will feel bad in our visiting period; I spoke with a third year PhD student and he said he is in a bad situation... is there any favourable person in this f***ing Department?

If you really don't want to follow the optimism of your Presidente del Consiglio, at least think to Coles' words: "statistics is beautiful => life is beautiful!!!"

HELP!!!

Guys,
when I need you on skype or gmail for serious reasons (and not to talk about bullshit) you're never there...

Anyway... the question is the following: do you know how to compute the smoothness of a curve in R (and if this is possible)? I want to smooth a time series (I'm going to use loess) and then compute how much smooth is the curve that I ended up with; the idea is to compute some smoothness indicator, like, as an example, the penalty term that you consider while fitting a spline (\int |f^{''}(t)|^2 dt )... Any suggestion (I can't understand if the R loess function gives as output some usefull quantities or not...), have you ever dealt with this?


Thank you!!!


Ciao bei e bea


Checca


P.S.: please (toni) no comments about that fact that I permute, or at least find some new funny sentences, lately you were using always the same boring ones...

Dear all,
I really miss you !!
I just arrived from Saudi Arabia (Mecca and Medina) for doing what is called in my religion by Umrah. Here I show you some pictures.
Best Regards

This cat from there, this is a gift for Marlies, Enjoy !!!!
This is Prophet Mohammad Mosque in Medina. ...
this is too. ...
This is too ... with my family ...

First step for doing Umrah before moving to Mecca ...

The following photos from Mecca.
Many people there, you can not walk easily.
This is called Kaaba, the place where we pray ...


This is from outside ... Last step for doing Umrah is to cut our hair ..

From Berkeley

Ciao Ragazzi!
After my first week in Berkeley, I finally can write something on the blog!

Everithing is fine, I had a little trip in California with my girlfriend, and now I'm ready to start my project here!

My advisor here (Sandrine) already gave me a project to work on, even if I don't have access to the data for now... Here everything is pretty organized, I think I will have most of the day busy with classes, seminars and group meetings, so I'll have to work late I guess...

You cannot imagine how big is the University here, the campus is huge (with wifi connection everywhere!) and the Department of Statistics is a 10 floors building... I think there are something like 2,000 visiting phd students/postdoc for this semester... (not all in statistics... :) )

So it seems like a very exciting place to do research...
Ah! My project will be in collaboration with Stanford, so I guess I cannot complain... I hope to make some good contact too!

I don't know if you know it (i didn't) but the most important "monument" of the campus is The Campanile which is a (bad) copy of the Campanile di San Marco in Venice... but not all of the people know that... anyway, this is the comparison.. (and that awful building behind is the dept of stat!)

Hope to hear from you soon!
davide

I'M BACK IN BELGIUM

Ciao guys!

How're you? I'm back in belgium since monday, deep sadness, holydays are finished... I relaxed a lot during these 10 days, drove a lot as well (5 countries and almost 5000 Km in 10 days, poor ford focus...). I'm already back to work, trying to use in the best way my last 2 months here.

I have to admit, anyway, that I don't want to go back to Italy. Don't want to leave this place for many reasons, related both to work and social life... Tony is it the same for you too? I don't know... I'm seriously thinking about trying to find a postdoc position abroad after the phd, you Tony? Sorry guys, I ask tony because he's the only one among you who is living this experience abroad right now...

Ciao, I miss you all


Checca


P.S.: I confirm, kg gained since I'm in Belgium... 10... ups...

Ciao John

Last week died one of the greatest statistician, John Ashworth Nelder father (with the already gone, Wedderburn) of the GLM.

http://www.vsni.co.uk/featured/john-nelder/

Palestinian Conference on Modern Trends in Mathematics and Physics II

This is from Nablus, An-Najah National University, Palestinian Conference on Modern Trends in Mathematics and Physics II

"Basta Marlies"

Marlies, please, I remember you the title and the aim of this blog: "XXIV cycle in Statistics - To keep in touch about academic and personal life of the XXIV cycle PhD students".
Your last posts are totally useless and upsetting (that's why I used that bad language!). Image of "sweety-heart-on-sunset", of the Piave river, of trainers with stupid words, cats, Erman Hesse and 1957 Sanremo's hits are absolutely not allowed any more!

Please write about you, about your research, seminars and so on. Not about stupid stuff!

Te vojo ben, tranquia, ma moeghea!

Frase illuminante

L'uomo non è un animale razionale ma un animale che razionalizza.

Robert A.Heinlein


Non è una frase sconvolgente e illuminante?

Sorry monjed,

Man is not a rational animal, but an animal which rationalizes (I do not know if it is the right translation...)

Buone vacanze a tutti, vi voglio bene