Gavin Wins Round 2

Contests are fun. We have them all the time here at Fermilab. I currently have a 12-back of goose island beer for my graduate student if he can produce a MC and Data plot for his analysis before Jan 1.

But Gavin, shown here, won a much bigger contest, set up by DZERO. Our experiment has undergone a major change in how we store our data (terabytes), process our Monte Carlo (ops! all your calibrations are different), and how our analysis is done (what do you mean this macro I've been using for the last 2 years won't work anymore! It's my liiiiife!). And while we are doing this change we aren't making much forward progress -- which sucks because... well, we have competition. Put all this together, and you end up with a huge amount of pressure to get everything new and shiny up and running and producing results. Gavin was the first person to put all the bits together into a real physics analysis (he measured the Z cross section and came out suspiciously close to the old value :-)). The next question is how many of the analysis that are close behind will make it out the door for the winter conferences (March/April time frame).

Congratulations to Gavin.

You'll note that the bottles Gavin is holding are rather large. This is because he isn't the only one that gets to drink. Many people had to put together the bits he used to measure the cross section. The list of names was shown at the collaboration meeting -- but I can't find it on the agenda server! Otherwise I would have written it in to demonstrate exactly how much work it was to get to this point!

I'd just like to point out that in no way, shape, or form is the amount of work required to win these things close to worth the prizes! I doubt people would rise to the occasion unless they were going to do it anyway (and, of course, the competition).

Culture-clash aside: The European that purchased the wine Gavin is holding said "I went for quantity rather than quality"... Tells you something about what Fermilab does to you if you hang out here too long...