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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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LHC Breaks Beam Energy Record!

LHC Breaks Beam Energy Record!

Nov 30 2009 | comment(s)

Last night the Large Hadron Collider at CERN has circulated the highest-energy beams of particles ever produced. The beam energy has been brought up from the injection energy of 450 GeV to 1.18 TeV, thus outperforming by 20% the flattop beam energy of the Tevatron collider, Fermilab's proton-antiproton collider, which operates at a beam energy of 980 GeV.
Watch Venice's Acqua Alta Tomorrow!

Watch Venice's Acqua Alta Tomorrow!

Nov 29 2009 | comment(s)

Tomorrow morning Venice will sink under a maximum tide predicted to reach 1.30 meters above average sea level. The event will occur at 8.35AM, a time when Venetian residents are in the streets trying to bring children to school or to reach their workplace. You can see the predicted evolution of the tide in the graph below, where the red curve shows the time variation of the season's average, and the blue one the actual prediction for tomorrow. The peak of 130 cm above average sea level is predicted to occur at 8.35AM -which is 2.35AM in New York, or 5.35PM in Tokyo.
The Say Of The Week

The Say Of The Week

Nov 28 2009 | comment(s)

"There is no such thing as a theoretical uncertainty. All there is is theoretical stupidity"

Guido Altarelli
Five Tips For Particle Physics Ph. D. Wannabes - Part II

Five Tips For Particle Physics Ph. D. Wannabes - Part II

Nov 24 2009 | comment(s)

This is the second part of a two-part collection of tips for particle physics graduate students. The first part is here.

Three: be a fool today if you want to be a guru tomorrow


The third advice I have in store for Jane is maybe the toughest to follow, at least at first. But I do believe it is of critical importance for her to grow, become knowledgeable, and distinguish herself from the rest of the pack.
First Proton-Proton Collisions In CMS!

First Proton-Proton Collisions In CMS!

Nov 23 2009 | comment(s)

My blog is not a place for hot-off-the-press news - in it you are more likely to find discussions on material well digested and thought over. Nevertheless, I do not have the guts to sit on today's news. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has produced its first high-energy proton-proton collisions, in the core of the experiments instrumenting its underground caverns.

It has been a long way since the first design of this extraordinary machine. I was reminded of just how much effort the construction and commissioning took by a slide shown by Ives Sirois at a workshop in Turin today: it is a schedule of the construction of the LHC dated 1989!

Five Tips For Particle Physics Ph. D. Wannabes

Five Tips For Particle Physics Ph. D. Wannabes

Nov 23 2009 | comment(s)

Being a graduate student in particle physics is a tough, stressful job. I know it because I once was one, and I still remember the burden of giving exams, carrying on single-handedly a difficult analysis, and desperately struggling to learn the job of particle physicist, all the while trying to prove my worth to my colleagues. On the personal side, further trouble compounds the situation: one is usually fighting with tight money, stranded away from her family and boyfriend, and finds herself in the company of people whose similar priorities make the otherwise natural impulse of "having fun whenever possible" the last of their thoughts.