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Choosing Your Bets: The Selection Bias

As some of the long-time readers of this blog know, in this column I have occasionally discussed...

Have A Master In Science, Want A Post-Doc Position Directly?

Do you have a master in Science, and want to start a Post-Doc position directly? You can have it...

A Chess Study Requiring Backpropagation

The following position is a win for white. But how?It seems like white is able to grab a knight...

Co-Design Of Scientific Experiments

Next Monday, or Tuesday at the latest, you will find a new bulky paper in the arXiv. Titled "On...

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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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Naturalness Explained With The Roulette

Naturalness Explained With The Roulette

Oct 09 2012 | comment(s)

Five years ago I was fascinated by an analogy used by my friend Michelangelo Mangano to explain the problem of naturalness, a crucial issue in fundamental physics, and maybe the biggest single indicium we have that new physics beyond the standard model of particle physics should exist, and be not too far away from our current experimental reach.
Significance In Presence Of Systematics, And The LHCb Observation Of Bs Decays To Pion Pairs

Significance In Presence Of Systematics, And The LHCb Observation Of Bs Decays To Pion Pairs

Oct 07 2012 | comment(s)

In particle physics searches (and elsewhere) the word "significance" is associated with the quantitative measure of how discrepant is one observation with a so-called "null hypothesis". That is, one searches for a new effect in some dataset, and defines what one expects to see in the absence of anything discrepant from theoretical predictions: that is the null hypothesis. A new particle in the data will usually manifest itself as an excess of events, and this will cause the data to deviate from expectations.
The Quote of the Week

The Quote of the Week

Oct 05 2012 | comment(s)

"A good speech should be like a woman's skirt: long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest."

W. Churchill
Do you recycle your texts ?

Do you recycle your texts ?

Oct 01 2012 | comment(s)

As my twenty three affectionate readers will probably remember, I enjoyed a very pleasant week in Kolymbari (Crete) last June, attending the first International Conference of Frontier Physics. Now, after you attend a conference and give there a presentation, you are supposed to produce a writeup of your talk for the proceedings book. So while October arrives unannounced with critically important errands to attend to, I find myself in the need to produce a 12-page document describing the most recent and important results of the CMS experiment. 
Top Quark Mass: The Status

Top Quark Mass: The Status

Sep 27 2012 | comment(s)

UPDATE: what a difference a small typo makes! In the report below I claimed that the CDF top mass measurement was yet to be stripped of the record of being the most precise in the world, given that the total uncertainty on the mass was 1.01 GeV, while the newest CMS result has a total error of 1.07 GeV... I however realized this morning that the total CDF uncertainty of the quoted measurement is 1.10, not 1.01 ! So the CMS result mentioned at the bottom of this article is indeed the most precise single measurement in the world of the top quark mass !

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The Analogy In Physics: Help Me Collect Examples

The Analogy In Physics: Help Me Collect Examples

Sep 23 2012 | comment(s)

In a few weeks I will speak in Torino, Italy at Comunicare Fisica 2012, a conference devoted to the communication of Physics in the media, in schools, through web sites, etcetera. And I need your help !

Let me explain. I have submitted an abstract which reads as follows: