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Holiday Chess Riddle

During Christmas holidays I tend to indulge in online chess playing a bit too much, wasting several...

Why Measure The Top Quark Production Cross Section?

As part of my self-celebrations for XX years of blogging activities, I am reposting here (very)...

The Buried Lottery

As part of my self-celebrations for having survived 20 years of blogging (the anniversary was a...

Twenty Years Blogging

Twenty years ago today I got access for the first time to the interface that allowed me to publish...

Tommaso Dorigo

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 »

Using Polls To Question Evidence

Dec 16 2011 | comment(s)

Particle physics experiments usually invest a considerable part of the time used to produce a measurement in the task of determining the corresponding uncertainty on the estimate, or -when a new effect is observed (say a quantity is measured away from zero, when zero would be the "null hypothesis", predicted by the current model)- estimating the statistical significance of the observation.

LHCb Confirms CDF Measurement Of Omega_B Mass

Dec 15 2011 | comment(s)

Another confirmation of correct evaluation of controversial HEP measurements awaited me just after the Higgs evidence was presented at CERN. I am sort of embarassed by this compulsory self-promotion, but this is my blog so I will excuse myself ;-)

So the story is the following... Some of you might still remember the controversy over the Omega b discovery, at the Tevatron a couple of years ago.

Eilam Gross: Higgs - The Best There Is, For Now

Dec 14 2011 | comment(s)

Eilam Gross is a professor of Physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science of Rehovot, Israel, and a distinguished member of the ATLAS collaboration. That makes him a competitor, since I work for the other experiment around the ring, CMS. But Eilam is also a colleague, especially since we are members of the Statistics Committees of our respective experiments and we cooperate in a joint group to try and converge on common practices for statistical procedures in data analysis at the LHC. Ah, and- I forgot to mention he is the convener of the ATLAS Higgs group| So I am very pleased to feature his own take on the LHC results on Higgs searches...

Firm Evidence Of A Higgs Boson At Last!

Dec 13 2011 | comment(s)

Updates:

- Philip Gibbs does a great job, as always, at combining -albeit approximately- the results of different experiments in the Higgs search. He now has even a full combination of LEP II + Tevatron + CMS + ATLAS, where the signal strength, in SM units, fits absolutely bang on for a Higgs mass of about 125 GeV. Please see his article at the link above; but I cannot resist from stealing his most intriguing picture (sorry Phil!):

J.Markovitch: Mixing Angles Numerology

Dec 12 2011 | comment(s)

I received the text below from Jim Markovitch, and decided it was fun enough to make a guest post entry with it. Markovitch worked for the world's largest supplier of corporate credit information, where he designed and implemented algorithms to estimate the probability of the equivalence, for credit purposes, of two name/address records. More recently he has adapted these algorithms to help identify unusually efficient approximations of fundamental constants. Let us see what this is about - TD

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How Wrong Can Lubos Be ?

Dec 09 2011 | comment(s)

Every once in a while Lubos pleases with one of his straight-leg tackles, as he deals with stuff he shouldn't be a-messing with (I am still giggling at an incident of a few years ago, when he publically apologized after a week of nonsense). Today it's one of those blessed moments.