Fake Banner
The Problem With Peer Review

In a world where misinformation, voluntary or accidental, reigns supreme; in a world where lies...

Interna

In the past few years my activities on this site - but I would say more in general, as the same...

The Probability Density Function: A Known Unknown

Perhaps the most important thing to get right from the start, in most statistical problems, is...

Summer Lectures In AI

Winter is not over yet, but I am already busy fixing the details of some conferences, schools,...

User picture.
picture for Hank Campbellpicture for Heidi Hendersonpicture for Bente Lilja Byepicture for Sascha Vongehrpicture for Patrick Lockerbypicture for Johannes Koelman
Tommaso DorigoRSS Feed of this column.

Tommaso Dorigo is an experimental particle physicist, who works for the INFN at the University of Padova, and collaborates with the CMS and the SWGO experiments. He is the president of the Read More »

Blogroll
"Fermilab has very actively tried to scoop us by press release, even though their uncertainties are under serious challenge and they knew our measurements even before they released theirs."

Michael Riordan, a member to the Mark II collaboration, in an interview by David Perlman on the San Francisco Chronicle, July 21st 1989
At the workshop I attended last week ("Publish, blog, tweet - furthering one's career in science") I discussed blogging for a researcher. One of the points I made was that through a blog a researcher may sometimes ask for the help of his or her readers, with usually great results.

Today I would like to put my own creed to the test, because I am searching for an article and I have no idea how to do it - usual searches with Google are insuccessful in this case. It is a newspaper article of 1989, which I need as it has relevance for a chapter of the book I have been writing.
Last Thursday and Friday I attended a workshop aimed at students of science communication and researchers who want to use the web tools to improve their collaboration networks and the visibility of their scientific output.

I gave a talk discussing the good and the bad sides of blogging about one's research. My contribution was very well received and I received great feedback from the organizers. You can find a live streaming (with the slides I am discussing also shown) at the workshop site, here: http://www.scicomm.it/p/blog-page_1.html . To see my talk go to h.mm.ss 1.17.00 .

UPDATE: the raw videos are now here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBmlEGOgCPEhQFRFw-cwf2qZG7oTsia-r
Today and tomorrow I am attending a workshop in Padova titled as per the title above (but it is in Italian). If you know the language and are interested in the topic, there is available live streaming at the workshop's site, here: http://www.scicomm.it/p/pbt-2014.html

My contribution will be titled "The researcher who blogs: social value, opportunities, challenges, anathemas". I am speaking tomorrow at 10AM (Rome time zone - it's 1AM in California!). I will post some extract of my slides in the blog later on...

The workshop should be interesting, as many reknowned science popularization operators are present, and the topics in the agenda are attractive. Give it a look if you like...
I wonder how interesting can be to an outsider to learn that the mass of the sixth quark is now known to 0.38% accuracy, thanks to the combination of measurements of that quantity performed by the CMS experiment at CERN. In fact, the previously best measurement was the one recently published by the DZERO collaboration at Fermilab, which has a relative 0.43% accuracy. "So what" - you might say - "this 14% improvement does not change my life". That's undeniably true.
Sense About Science is a non-profit organization that campaigns in favour of more correct diffusion and use of scientific information. It is a great attempt at increasing the quality of the scientific information in circulation, focusing on evidence and debunking false claims. The web site of the organization explains: