Marlies ????????????

Dear Friends !!!
we should not agree about what Marlies is just decided !!!!
Please I ask everyone of you to speak with her.
Ph.D is very important, one year and she will finish.
We all succeed the first year which was very difficult.
Please tell her to be more patient.
Please !!!!!!!!!!!!!

After all this pessimism and sadness...

...something nice: United States of America National Parks!

Last week I finished the first part of the thesis and written in a paper form I've submitted it to JASA T&M. Right moment to take a short break!

Taking a camping tent, two sleepingbags and one cheap flight to Las Vegas and renting a small car there can bring you to some of the most wonderful landscape in the world! We all know that Europe is better that USA for almost everything: art, culture, history, people, food, wine, way of living the city... but we don't have something so spectacular as Bryce Canyon, Arches park or the famous Grand Canyon!

It's wonderful to imagine that millenia of geology, plate tectonic and erosion, everything moved by natural mechanisms and a big amount of randomness, can lead to spectacular landscape like those!

Really recommended to Maestro (you are so close to Utah and Arizona!) and Riccardo but actually to everyone!

And also this is Don Milani

this is what i call a Professor, a man who join and cares about his students, their lives their sorrows. You are my friends, please if a day you will have the opportunity to become a teacher, remember that the teacher has most of all an ethical responsability, s/he has to believe in the capacity of the students and MUST not lye to them.

One day I will make explicit all this stuff

ooooooooohh: some phd students

Lucièn Le Cam: an honest man

He spent his life studying likelihood asymptotics, but read what he wrote in the first pages of his book:


Of course nobody has been able to prove that maximum likelihood estimates are
‘‘best’’ under all circumstances. The lack of any such proof is not sufficient by itself
to invalidate Fisher’s claims.


This is a man to respect because his view is not biased.

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...