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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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Watch Out For Anomalous Couplings In WW Production

Watch Out For Anomalous Couplings In WW Production

Sep 09 2009 | comment(s)

The CDF collaboration has recently released a study of the production of pairs of W bosons in a large bounty of proton-antiproton collisions produced by the Tevatron collider -3.6 inverse femtobarns of them, or roughly 300 trillions, give or take 6%.

The measurement of the production cross section of this clean and rare electroweak process (its absolute rate, that is) is the most precise ever obtained so far, and reaches down to a level of uncertainty which cannot be improved further significantly at the Tevatron, because it is now limited by the uncertainty in the overall integrated luminosity mentioned above.
Rubbia and the Brutalized Gorilla

Rubbia and the Brutalized Gorilla

Sep 08 2009 | comment(s)

Sometimes I come to think this blog is overextended: it happens when I realize it contains more things than I can remember, even ones I would really like to have at my fingertips. I was reminded yesterday of a very funny story which a reader left in the comments thread of a rather meaningless post, and decided I should make a separate post of it, since it made my day reading it and it might make yours too...

The story was told by Leon Lederman in an introduction to Carlo Rubbia in the proceedings of a conference held in 1984 in Santa Fe:

"... Now I have some interesting news, a story that is at the least apocryphal. It concerns the heroic contestant in one of those ancient trials by strength which are so natural for our "Carlo". This trial was
Improving Science Education

Improving Science Education

Sep 06 2009 | comment(s)

I received an interesting question today from an Alex Ziller in the comments thread of a recent post. Here it is:

Do you think blogging actually improves Science? (I know, one should first define what "improving Science" actually means).

I think this matter has been debated elsewhere not too long ago -where by "elsewhere" I mean "some site I sometimes visit, can't recall where". Nevertheless, I consider it a crucial question to ask, and one with several facets. Here is my short answer to Alex -of the kind of depth a comments thread is worth:
The Say of the Week

The Say of the Week

Sep 06 2009 | comment(s)

"It is better to treat p values as nothing more than useful exploratory tools or measures of surprise. In any search for new physics,  a small p value should only be seen as a first step in the interpretation of the data, to be followed by a serious investigation of an alternative hypothesis. Only by showing that the latter provides a better explanation of the observations than the null hypothesis can one make a convincing case for a discovery."

Luc Demortier, "p values and nuisance parameters", CERN-08-001, p.24.
A walk on the wild side

A walk on the wild side

Sep 05 2009 | comment(s)

Sometimes I forget that my time constraints force me to make a choice between writing on my blog and reading other people's, and so I start reading random stuff in physics blogs I am acquainted with, to then find myself listlessly drifting from a site to the next in a uninterrupted chain, often circular. It is a walk on the wild side, fortunately a typically short one.
The Worst Nightmare Scenario For CERN ? A 150 GeV Higgs.

The Worst Nightmare Scenario For CERN ? A 150 GeV Higgs.

Sep 04 2009 | comment(s)

A few days ago I produced a summary of a poster I presented at Physics in Collisions this week, which dealt with the searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson that CMS will undertake, and the results it can obtain in a scenario when a certain amount of data is collected at the full design energy of the LHC.

Here, instead, I wish to summarize the other poster I presented at the same venue, which concerned the combination of the most sensitive search channels, the sensitivity of CMS with a given amount of data, and the derating of its significance reach or observation power entailed by the running of LHC at a smaller-than-design beam energy. But I will do this only as a way of introducing a more interesting discussion, as you will see below.