Recentemente l’Italia ha eletto il suo nuovo Presidente della Repubblica. Insieme ad essere il primo Presidente al secondo mandato, l’altra novità è stata la richiesta di uno dei partiti coinvolti di fornire una preferenza per il nome da votare in Parlamento. Questa scelta è stata lodata da alcuni e criticata da altri, in particolare perché i parlamentari del Movimento 5 Stelle professano di essere portavoce dei loro elettori, ma gli ammessi al voto erano non più di 50 mila persone, a fronte di 8,5 milioni di votanti per il Movimento 5 Stelle alle scorse elezioni.
Continued…
Posted in Politics, Statistics.
Tagged with Italian, Italy, M5S, Politics, Statistics.
By Stefano
– April 24, 2013
In uno dei suoi post post-elettorali, Beppe Grillo presenta alcuni numeri per indicare il miglioramento del livello dei parlamentari tra la scorsa legislatura e la presente. Tra questi numeri, la percentuale di donne, l’età media e la percentuale di laureati. Il problema è che queste distribuzioni (sesso, età, educazione) sono correlate nella popolazione italiana; in particolare, non è un mistero che ci siano più laureati tra i giovani che non tra gli anziani. Quindi sorge la domanda: il primato del Movimento 5 Stelle per percentuale di laureati è un effettivo merito o è possibile giustificarlo semplicemente grazie alla distribuzione delle età dei loro eletti?
Continued…
Posted in Politics, Statistics.
Tagged with Age, Binomial distribution, Education, Elections, Italian, Italy, M5S, Normal distribution, Politics, Statistics.
By Stefano
– February 28, 2013
Suppose that you have a very nice shared coffee machine (the espresso one of course!), but the normal behavior is to leave the portafilter on after making a coffee. This implies that before making the coffee one has to remove the portafilter, clean it with water, drop water everywhere while going from the tap to the grinder. It could be better.
Thus, you start cleaning the portafilter after making your coffee, hoping that people starting with a clean portafilter would feel inspired to clean it afterwards. But is it worth it?
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Posted in Math, Statistics.
Tagged with Basic, Coffee, Math, Probability, Statistics.
By Stefano
– February 24, 2013
In the second post we saw the workflow we had in mind. Here I will show you the solution we had found in order to implement the workflow, and discuss why other possible solutions could not be implemented.
Continued…
Posted in Typography.
Tagged with IOI, IOI2012, LaTeX, MediaWiki, Translation, wkhtmltopdf.
By Stefano
– October 24, 2012
In this second post of the series, I will present the idea we had in mind when we proposed the new software used to handle translations at IOI 2012.
Continued…
Posted in Typography.
Tagged with IOI, IOI2012, Translation.
By Stefano
– October 15, 2012
As said in the previous post, during the IOI 2012 we introduced a novelty also in the way the delegation leaders handle the translations of the task statements. This is the first of a small series of posts dedicated to this issue, that “surprisingly” took away a lot of time from other parts of the contest preparation. In this first post I will present some of the approaches tried in the past and introduce the rationale for the one we introduced this year.
Continued…
Posted in Typography.
Tagged with IOI, IOI2012, LaTeX, Translation, Word.
By Stefano
– October 9, 2012
IOI 2012‘s closing ceremony was last Saturday, and I feel the need to summing up my experience, thank a lot of people, and try to understand how this “very Italian” edition of IOI did really went (at least looking at the aspect under the control of the team I was in: technical and scientific matters).
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Posted in Personal.
Tagged with CMS, IOI, IOI2012, Translation.
By Stefano
– October 1, 2012
I will present here a small program to compute (a superset of) all possible faithful actions of a cyclic group on a smooth algebraic curve (Riemann surface) of genus g, given the information on a part of the ramification. In other words, the program computes all possible cyclic subgroups of Aut(F) for some curve F of genus g. The actual possibilities may be fewer than the ones computed, because in this first version of the program the only ingredient is Riemann-Hurwitz formula, that is a necessary condition, but not sufficient.
The code is hosted on github.
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Posted in Math.
Tagged with Actions, Algebraic geometry, Curves, Cyclic, Group, Math, Software.
By Stefano
– May 24, 2012
Unlike many other countries (like the US) where the majority of towns was funded in recent times (less than three or four hundreds of year ago), most towns in Italy have more than a thousand years, and many a lot more. For example, according to the legend, Rome has 2765 years.
This simple difference leads to two very dissimilar naming scheme for, e.g., US and Italy: for example, many cities in the US are named using variations of pre-existing cities names, often from all around the world (there are at least four Venice in the US); whereas, in Italy, the names of cities often comes from cultures that are nowadays lost in legends, but more important from cultures that were very local.
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Posted in Software, Statistics.
Tagged with History, Italy, Software, Statistics, Towns.
By Stefano
– May 14, 2012
I have been lucky enough to have tried these two occupations, in different ways, often mixed but also on their own. Nonetheless, the discover the title is referring to is quite recent, and coincides with the broadening of a software project I am very proud to have started and contributed to: CMS, the contest system that is going to be used at the 2012 edition of the International Olympiads in Informatics (which, and it is not by chance, are going to be in Italy).
Continued…
Posted in Math, Software.
Tagged with Category theory, Design patterns, Math, Software.
By Stefano
– March 29, 2012
