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Enrico Stomeo - A Lifelong Passion For Meteor Studies

I was reached this evening by the news of the passing of a dear friend, Enrico Stomeo. Enrico was...

Surviving Queues: 1 - At The Airport

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Choosing Your Bets: The Selection Bias

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Have A Master In Science, Want A Post-Doc Position Directly?

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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 the CMS and the SWGO experiments. He is the president of the Read More »

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Correlation, Causation, Independence

Correlation, Causation, Independence

Dec 13 2012 | comment(s)

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.
Should Spokespersons Keep The Money ?

Should Spokespersons Keep The Money ?

Dec 11 2012 | comment(s)

The news of the prizes to theorists and experimentalists are going to receive million-dollar prizes ($3M and $1M, details everywhere else -but see Peter's blog for insightful comment and discussion) are shaking the CERN experiments. While arguable (as in any case of a prize) whether they deserve the prizes for their work, nobody really ventures to discuss what they should or shouldn't do with the money. In the case of ATLAS and CMS spokespersons and past spokespersons, however, opinions vary widely.
On Combining Probabilities And A-Posterioriness

On Combining Probabilities And A-Posterioriness

Dec 10 2012 | comment(s)

In High-Energy Physics the small p-value of an observation may be the first hint of a discovery about to be made. Here by p-value I just mean the probability, just to be fancy (or brief). Because we rely on the assessment of the rarity of observations to decide whether we have discovered something or not, we physicists are (or should be) really careful with p-values. Today's article aims at demonstrating how easy it is to be carried away into giving more relevance to an observation than we should.
Opera's Final Word On Opera's Superluminal Neutrinos

Opera's Final Word On Opera's Superluminal Neutrinos

Dec 07 2012 | comment(s)

A new preprint is out in the arxiv today, detailing the results of a new analysis of neutrino speeds performed by the OPERA collaboration using proton spills of the CNGS beam produced during dedicated runs in May this year.
Chess News

Chess News

Dec 06 2012 | comment(s)

About one year ago I started playing competitive chess again, after a hiatus of almost a decade. Because of the hiatus and some change in the organization of chess in Italy, my status from that of candidate master (with an Elo rating of about 2120, which however would correspond to something like 2020-2050 in fide rating) was taken back to the status of a first national category, with an Elo in the lower 1800's.
House Move in Venice

House Move in Venice

Dec 06 2012 | comment(s)

Venice is a wonderful place to visit, if you have a week or even a weekend to spend immersed in art and history, or just to get lost in it and enjoy the romanticism of the place. However, if you live there you tend to hate the town as much as you love it.

Take a house move for instance: nowhere is a house move a kid's game -it is in fact a well-known cause of stress in any circumstance. But in Venice it may become a real trauma. The problem is multi-fold: houses do not usually have an elevator; stairs are usually too narrow for any piece of furniture; space in front of one's windows may be too limited for any manouver.