"The most important task at hand is experimental. Based on our considerations of dynamical symmetry breaking through preons and the assumption of universal size for all quarks and leptons, we are led to predict that quarks and leptons have an inverse size of the order of 2-3 TeV. This can be tested by high-luminosity 5-10 TeV machines in the near future by looking for form factors for quarks and leptons and for excess production of lepton pairs in pp or ppbar collisions."

Jogesh Pati, "Preons and their implications for the next-generation accelerators", Proceedings of  the third annual workshop of the ICTP Summer Workshop on Particle Physics, Trieste 1983, p. 399-459.

I must say I feel proud of myself tonight.

In Italy a unified procedure to rank candidates to the position of associate or full professor has been launched last year, and I of course participated to the qualification by sending a documentation of the work I performed and the articles I wrote in the course of my scientific career. With me, thousands of other candidates did the same.

Note that as a researcher for the Italian Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) I am presently following a career parallel to the one existing in the University. Despite that, in Italy everybody knows that titles such as the one granted by the selection mentioned above are important for one's career.

"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]

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.

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.