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Living At The Polar Circle

Since 2022, when I got invited for a keynote talk at a Deep Learning school, I have been visiting...

Conferences Good And Bad, In A Profit-Driven Society

Nowadays researchers and scholars of all ages and specialization find themselves struggling with...

USERN: 10 Years Of Non-Profit Action Supporting Science Education And Research

The 10th congress of the USERN organization was held on November 8-10 in Campinas, Brazil. Some...

Baby Steps In The Reinforcement Learning World

I am moving some baby steps in the direction of Reinforcement Learning (RL) these days. In machine...

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 »

The Quote Of The Week

Jan 20 2014 | comment(s)

"Statistical power does not corrupt"

Leland Wilkinson, "Statistical Methods in Psychology Journals", in American Psychologist, August 1999.

[Note: "power" in the context of statistical tests measures the probability that a test rejects the null hypothesis when the alternate hypothesis is true). Thanks to Michael Schmitt for pointing out the quote]

Are Tetraquarks Real ?

Jan 18 2014 | comment(s)

Tetraquarks are hypothetical particles made up by four quarks (two quarks and two antiquarks). Unlike mesons (quark-antiquark pairs) and baryons (three-quark or three-antiquark systems), the quarks in a tetraquark are quite loosely bound within their confinement volume by strong interactions, as can be calculated with the help of quantum chromodynamics. Their tendence to separate into two quark-antiquark systems should yield a very short lifetime, making their observation quite difficult. However, some tentative evidence for their existence exists.

One more view at Italy's escape of brains

Jan 15 2014 | comment(s)

In Italy the debate over the escape of brilliant young scientists to foreign countries has been going on for decades now. Italians like to debate, much less to solve their own problems. So although the problem is clearly identified and a recipe to solve it is evident, nobody does anything to implement the solution. Which, of course, would be to raise salaries to researchers and allow for quicker and easier ways to access a career for young post-docs.

Aitzaz, 14 Years, Hero

Jan 10 2014 | comment(s)

The 14 year old kid in the picture on the right was named Aitzaz Hasan Bangash. His name is a difficult one to remember for westerners, but that is a pity, because he ended his life as a true hero.

Last Monday Aitzaz was lingering out of school with two friends in the small shiite town of Ibrahimzai, near the Pakistani capital Islamabad. Just before getting in they were approached by a 20-year-old who claimed he wanted to enrol to the school. The students realized that he was concealing a bomb and planned to blow up the school.

The Quote Of The Week - The Nonsensical Hypothesis Of Quarks

Jan 09 2014 | comment(s)

At the 1962 Rochester conference in Geneva, the prediction that a particle later called the Omega minus should exist, already proposed in a paper by Glashow and Sakurai, was not considered important enough to be mentioned in any invited or contributed talk. It was mentioned in a comment from the floor by Gell-Mann. The paper proposing the existence of quarks was accepted by Physics Letters only because it had Gell-Mann's name on it. The editor said, "The paper looks crazy, but if I accept it and it is nonsense, everyone will blame Gell-Mann and not Physics Letters. If I reject it and it turns out to be right, I will be ridiculed."

Harry Lipkin, "Quark Models and Quark Phenomenology", in "The Rise of the Standard Model", Cambridge UP 1997

The Sacred Sword - Radioactive Contamination At Fermilab In 1986

Jan 07 2014 | comment(s)

In a guest post written three years ago Giorgio Chiarelli told us the story of how the CDF detector saw its first proton-antiproton collisions, during the night of October 13th 1985. It was a very important moment for the history of the collaboration, the start of a data collection campaign that would last over a quarter of a century. Below I wish to tell you the story of one of the worst radiological incidents in the history of the experiment, which happened a few months after those first collisions were recorded.

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