It is with some delay that I decide to write about Aldo here. The reason is simply that after a house move I still have not been reconnected to the internet at home, and my absence from work for christmas holidays makes things even harder, and my presence online a sporadic break rather than a constant of motion.

Last week I spent my time playing in a strong chess tournament in Padova. The tournament had 50 participants, among which 11 grandmasters and 10 international masters, and was definitely the strongest event I took part in during my amateur chess career.

UPDATE: for more on this, I only now realize that my friend at Resonaances had written about it yesterday... It is nice to see that he agrees with my conclusions, anyway. Also Peter has news on it, and as usual additional links...

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My ATLAS colleagues will have to pardon me for the slightly sensationalistic title of this article, but indeed the question is one which many inside and outside CERN are asking themselves upon looking into the new public material of ATLAS Higgs boson searches using the 2011 dataset in conjunction with the first part of 2012 data.

This is a post about basics. That's because I think a point needs to be made which is surprisingly not as well-known as its elementary nature would have you guess.

Correlation -in its most used version, due to Pearson- is a measure of how two quantities can be observed to be in linear dependence on one another. It is a very common quantity to report the results of scientific studies, particularly but not exclusively in the social sciences. Researchers try to evidence the presence of a correlation between two phenomena as a preliminary step to investigating whether one can be the cause of the other.