Quest for the Hidden Sky-Walk

Today I finally did something I'd been meaning to get around to for some weeks. I hunted down the sky-walk between the library and St Clement's building. From the ground, you can see that it has a row of stools and a counter facing out across the space outside the library, and looks like a great place to eat lunch (especially when it's cold or wet)- seats in the warm with a view, and they're never all taken. But it's not immediately obvious how to get to it. I'd had a vague hunt around at the library end but couldn't seem to find it. Today, I was thinking about sitting and reading the Beaver over a bit of chocolate before heading home (to recuperate from the lecture with the boring voice...), when it suddenly occurred to me that, being in St Clement's already, I was ideally placed to have a stab at locating it.

It wasn't easy- I kept on finding the multistory bridge between St Clement's and Clare Market which is not nearly so good though very persistent, but I did eventually track it down on the fourth floor (I think). And it lived up to its image- it was indeed very nice to sit at the counter with my newspaper and my bar of chocolate and watch the crowds far below. Only this morning (well, afternoon really) I was feeling cold while eating lunch outside the library (no room in the Quad Cafe)- in future, I'll know where to go!

We got the first taste of working in groups in Computational Statistics today. Not on the project- this week's excercise was to be done in the same groups. As I thought, it wasn't great. Things I could have just type in if working by myself were (a) harder to think of somehow when not in front of a keyboard (another member of the group was typing) (b) hard to communicate to the others verbally (makes so much more sense written down) and (c) you don't always want to have the same person shouting out the answer, but if one person thinks quicker than the rest you either have that or you have them artificially waiting to give the rest a chance to catch up. (b) can be combatted by having a pad to write stuff down on- at least I learned that'll be usefull to bring when we work on the project- but it's still more of a fag than just typing it in. There was also one group member who seemed not to get it as much as the rest of us so we had to try and keep him up to speed without patronising him- at least he wasn't afraid to ask if he didn't understand, otherwise it could have been really awkward. And there were some disagreements about whether certain things would work- of course you can just type it in, try it and see, but in a group there's a reluctance to type untill everyone's happy with what you're doing. I'm not looking forward to the presentation either- what with all the groups working on the same problem, it's going to seem like what we're saying is really obvious (I'm going to feel like Lecturer With The Boring Voice in the first week...)

Talking of Principals and Methods, I put in an hour or so in the library before the class (I freely admit I haven't spent as much time on the excercises for that or for Time Series as I should have- not nearly as much. I keep meaning to do more...). I was pleasantly surprised to find that of the three questions I attempted, I basically got two right, except for rearranging at the end. That's three out of 14 though... the lecturer said at the end of the class "More on Friday, probably. [with a sigh, half to himself] Excercise 4 does go on a bit, doesn't it?" Excuse me, who set it? I thought- before realising that he may possibly be using someone else's course notes...

I came out of the library feeling slightly fuzzy in the head (I may not be 100% well*) and with the conviction that any problem could be solved by collecting up the factors into a probability density function which would then integrate to 1. Which may be true in the limited context of Moment Generating Functions or Joint Densities, but is probably not so applicable to problems such as "How can we persuade everyone to vote for the Green Party candidates?" or "Help, I need some questions for the Climate Change Awareness Week Quiz!"...

*It was certainly hard getting up this morning- but that doesn't necessarily mean anything :) I'd planned to leave an hour early (and get some work done at LSE) as the front door was going to be unusable (maintenance) from 8am- but I overslept by about 2 hours. I was still on time for my lecture, but I had to take my bike downstairs, across the courtyard, and up again- and I didn't have time for breakfast!