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Conferences Good And Bad, In A Profit-Driven Society

Nowadays researchers and scholars of all ages and specialization find themselves struggling with...

USERN: 10 Years Of Non-Profit Action Supporting Science Education And Research

The 10th congress of the USERN organization was held on November 8-10 in Campinas, Brazil. Some...

Baby Steps In The Reinforcement Learning World

I am moving some baby steps in the direction of Reinforcement Learning (RL) these days. In machine...

Restoring The Value Of Truth

Truth is under attack. It has always been, of course, because truth has always been a mortal enemy...

Tommaso Dorigo

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 »

Dark Energy Puzzle: Solved ?

Apr 15 2010 | comment(s)

I read with interest and excitement a very lightweight preprint on the Cornell preprint arxiv this afternoon. Although I usually skip reading papers on subjects I know little about (Cosmology), the title startled me enough to plunge into it:

"Solution to the Dark Energy Problem".

Single author, Paul Howard Frampton. Hmmm. A thought crossed my mind at the very start. Was this the work of a crackpot, sneaked into the arxiv while nobody was looking ?

One Year Ago I Moved Here

Apr 15 2010 | comment(s)

This is just to mention that I have been blogging for this site for exactly one year.

During the last twelve months here I have observed a few changes from the old blog which I ran at wordpress. First of all, being hosted in Scientific Blogging extended my readership. However, I also lost some regular readers, probably ones who deem a site running commercial ads not worth reading. I specifically remember some of them, who contributed frequently to the comments threads in the old site - Fred, Guess Who, Tripitaka, Jeff ... The list is long. Too bad, it's life. Growth, I am convinced, only happens through change.

When Do People Read Blogs ?

Apr 15 2010 | comment(s)

Have a look at the figure on the left. It shows the number of visits to this site broken down in hours of the day -the time of the server used by the visitor. The statistics of each bar is sufficient that the uncertainty on their height is of the order of 2%, so almost indistinguishable by eye. What you can see, therefore, are real variations with time of the traffic to this site, and not random fluctuations up and down.

My Poster For CF 2010

Apr 14 2010 | comment(s)

I was invited to give a talk and participate in a round table, at a conference on Physics communication in Frascati, a small town near Rome where the Italian Institute of Nuclear Physics has its headquarters. The conference also has a poster session, so I produced a simple poster to advertise this site.

Here is the poster (in italian -sorry). The full-sized version is 10 Mbytes so I will avoid posting it here.

Below is a quick-and-dirty translation of what I write in a few of the frames:

Moderated moderators

Apr 12 2010 | comment(s)

Lesson of the day: if the moderator falls asleep, the loquacious speaker will take advantage of it and will not stop talking. Net result: the coffee break remains a chimeric dream.

Google Searches I Top

Apr 12 2010 | comment(s)

Today I am attending a conference on the communication of Physics, at Frascati. They invited me there to present this blog, and discuss my experience with it. I spent last night trying to put together something meaningful, and I am now approximately satisfied with the result.

While I was preparing my slides (which include a online navigation in the site), it occurred to me that it has been a long time since I last played the "top searches" game. If you own a web site, you can play it too: it consists in finding combinations of words that, input in the google search window, will get one of your pages as the first hit.