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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,...

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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 »

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The Quote of the Week: Cohen on the NIL Hypothesis

The Quote of the Week: Cohen on the NIL Hypothesis

Nov 20 2012 | comment(s)

"[...] Given the fact that the nil hypothesis is always false, the rate of Type-I errors is 0%, not 5%, and [...] only Type-II errors can be made, which run typically at about 50% [...] [T]ypically, the sample effect size necessary for significance is notably larger than the actual population effect size and [...] the average of the statistically significant effects is much larger than the actual effect size. The result is that people who do focus on effect sizes end up with a substantial positive bias in their effect size estimation.
Chocolate Makes You Smarter, So You Stop Reading BBC News

Chocolate Makes You Smarter, So You Stop Reading BBC News

Nov 19 2012 | comment(s)

UPDATE: BBC radio contacted me to let me know they corrected their mistake. I am very glad to hear that! So you can continue reading BBC after all!

Probability inversion is one of the nastiest mistakes one can do handling the results of a statistical analysis, invalidating to the roots the interpretation of the data to the point that the whole work effectively becomes useless. Unfortunately, it is a very common entertainment for journalists reporting scientific results, and oftentimes scientists themselves fall in the trap.
CMS And ATLAS: Higgs To Tau Pairs!

CMS And ATLAS: Higgs To Tau Pairs!

Nov 14 2012 | comment(s)

Maybe more interesting than the just reported result of searches for the Higgs boson into four-lepton final states (ee, eμ, μμ) are the result presented by CMS and ATLAS on the searches for the Higgs decay into tau-lepton pairs. The reason for the interest comes from the fact that last July the rather high rates of Higgs decays to photon pairs had suggested to some that this new particle might have reduced couplings to fermions, and could thus be a non-Standard Model particle after all.
Higgs: New ATLAS And CMS Results

Higgs: New ATLAS And CMS Results

Nov 14 2012 | comment(s)

Today new results of Higgs searches have first been shown in Kyoto, at the Hadron Collider Physics conference. Let us see the CMS and ATLAS updates of their measurements in the ZZ-> 4 leptons final state, which constitutes the best signal-to-noise channel to study Higgs properties cleanly and measure mass and spin-parity of the new found particle.
Top Quark Results At HCP: Asymmetries

Top Quark Results At HCP: Asymmetries

Nov 13 2012 | comment(s)

The Hadron Collider Physics symposium opened yesterday in Kyoto. I am not following the works very closely, but I did give a peek at today's talks, which were on the topic of top quark physics.
LHCb: Evidence For Rare Decay Bs To Dimuons

LHCb: Evidence For Rare Decay Bs To Dimuons

Nov 12 2012 | comment(s)

It has taken a while, but the rare decay of B_s mesons (particles composed of a bottom and an anti-strange quark) to muon pairs has finally been seen. The authors of the find -we cannot yet call it an observation given the scarce statistical significance of the signal- are the members of the LHCb collaboration, one of the four experiments working with the proton-proton collisions delivered by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.