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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]...

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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 a number of exxperiments in physics and astrophysics, including the... Read More »

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The web site of the Cornell preprint archive, arxiv.org, says it best: successful submissions to the preprint archive are a source of considerable pride (darn it, the page with the exact statement is only available just after you submit a paper, so I cannot quote it literally here since my browser has by now forgotten it!).
Ah, the pleasure of study! I had forgotten the immense intellectual pleasure one may derive by reading a stimulating, informative book. And if half a lifetime has passed from the last time you studied something, and what is left in your brain of it is just Culture, then reading it back again combines the pleasure of the discovery (a rediscovery, in this case) with the one of putting things in perspective, combining the bits of information you recollect with all the knowledge you have acquired since the last time you put the book down.
"It turns out that any optimal classical decision rule is also some Bayesian rule. In other words, even if the decision maker is not a Bayesian, he will behave as if he were!"

Frederick James, Statistical Methods in Experimental Physics
Carl Brannen is well known to the regulars of this blog. He is an independent researcher and my favourite non-professional theorist, because he gives me the hope that brilliant minds, who were diverted from the natural path of doing basic research, may return to it for good. And Carl provides us with another important proof: that institutionalized science does sometimes listen to the voice of those who have something to say regardless of who signs their monthly paycheck.
This just in: Berlusconi is not above the law. In a reassuring sentence the judges of the Italian "Consulta" of the constitutional court have ruled today that the "Lodo Alfano", a law strongly wanted by Berlusconi himself, is in conflict with the Italian Constitution where the latter says that citizens are equal in their rights and for the Law. 
Do you remember the "e-e-gamma-gamma-met"  event ? I am sure you do not. It is an incredibly striking event that appeared toward the end of the Tevatron Run I in the CDF data. One event that was so incredibly striking, so impossible to produce through standard model processes, that many in my experiment felt sure that it was going to be the portal through which we would enter the realm of Supersymmetry, or other fancy new physics scenarios.