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A Research Position In Neuromorphic Computing And Nanophotonics Open In Padova, Italy

Five days are left to apply to a 2-year research position at INFN-Padova, to work in the context...

Apply For The USERN Prize, Win Cash, And Get A Keynote Talk In Astana

Nowadays it has become exceedingly hard to distinguish legitimate academic endeavours from scam...

A Record Of Past Activities

Every now and then, for one reason or another, an academic will have to update one's own CV. This...

Surviving Queues: 2 - On The Road

[For the first part of this two-part post, see here]...

Tommaso Dorigo

Tommaso Dorigo is an experimental particle physicist, who works for the INFN at the University of Padova, and collaborates with a number of exxperiments in physics and astrophysics, including the... Read More »

Prayer to the Funding Agency Reviewer

Jul 15 2010 | comment(s)

Prayer to the Funding Agency Reviewer

(dedicated to those who worry about the detrimental effect of rumours)

Oh Funding Reviewer, on whose hands
Rests the destiny of full many an experiment:
Be true to yourself, and bias not
Thy sober judgement through the browsing
Of tricky sites or malicious magazines.

You were chosen, wise among the wise,
To distribute thy moneys to the worthy.
Human knowledge is at the stake:
Neglect the rumours, and listen not
To lesser souls. Let the Science be your guide.

The Rumored Rumor Had Been Rumored Before

Jul 13 2010 | comment(s)

Funny. While dozens of online media are abuzz with the (non)-news, and while Fermilab Today tweets that there is no Higgs in store for us and a blogger in search of fame is just spreading unconfirmed voices which have no foundation, Lubos Motl over at the Reference Frame gets more detailed rumors on the same thing, and that does make things a bit more interesting.

Status Of The "Find The Higgs" Plot

Jul 13 2010 | comment(s)

The CDF experiment has just released their new average of top quark mass measurements, obtained with analyses that use up to 5.6 inverse femtobarns of proton-antiproton collisions provided by the 2-TeV Tevatron collider: the new measurement is M(top) = 173.1 +- 0.7 (stat) +- 0.9 (syst) GeV, a measurement with a total uncertainty of 1.3 GeV, or 0.75%!

Have a look at the various measurements that enter the calculation in the graph below.

The Say Of The Week

Jul 12 2010 | comment(s)

"Eighty percent of success is showing up"

W.Allen

Muon Tomography: Who Is Leading The Research ?

Jul 10 2010 | comment(s)

Sometimes my sympathy for science magazines (in print and online), which try to keep intelligent readers informed on the progress in basic science, gets dampened by observing how they end up providing a narrow-sighted look at things. What is at stake is usually not science popularization: an article you read does not need to inform you of all what is going on in a field of research; rather, it is the correct acknowledgement of the different efforts. It sometimes happens that a group works hard on something, they believe they have made great progress and furthered everybody's knowledge in the field, and then an article appears that discusses somebody else's contribution, which came later, was less successful, and less valuable.

Rumors About A Light Higgs

Jul 08 2010 | comment(s)

UPDATE: if you came here to learn more details about the rumored Higgs signal, which media around the world are discussing and which Fermilab Today just dismiss-tweeted, please visit this other more recent post for more details. Below is the original post which apparently originated a lot of buzz.
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And for once, I feel totally free to speculate without the fear of being crucified. If you have followed my past blog adventures for long enough, you know that in at least a couple of occasions my posts have created some friction.