Tommaso Dorigo

Barcelona

I arrived in Barcelona airport on Monday afternoon with Mariarosa. We went straight to Sitges, left our luggage there, and then headed back to Barcelona, where we spent the evening amiably, eating pulpo a la gallega at "La cervesa d'or", a nice taparia close to Playa de Catalunya, and then just enjoying the city center.

Yesterday we visited a museum of contemporary art (the so-called MACBA), but were slightly disappointed to find almost nothing worth seeing there, no permanent collections, only the exposition of an interesting artist, barely worth the trip. But I found the building very interesting from an architectonic point of view. I hope you'll share my view on it, here are a couple pictures:

We also visited the city market, very colorful. Here is a place where they sell fruit, I liked the setting:

Collaboration Meeting in Barcelona!

This morning we're quickly packing and we will be on our way to Sitges (see picture on the right), near Barcelona (Spain), where the CDF Collaboration Meeting is held next week. Mariarosa is coming with me for the first three days, so we will be visiting a bit the surroundings as well.

The kids will stay at my mother's house, so we're bringing them there, then at noon the plane leaves from Venice and hopefully we'll be able to spend an afternoon in Barcelona before heading towards Sitges, where we're staying at Hotel Calipolis, the venue of the conference (left).

I am very happy to follow a Collaboration Meeting away from Fermilab once a year. We used to have Collaboration Meetings four times a year, all at Fermilab, until I proposed that since we were a collaboration from around the world, it was not fair to be so centered on the lab, and by having one general meeting away once a year we would be traveling to nice places as well. This started a heated debate, with most of Fermilab-based scientists arguing against the wastes of money, not realizing that it always costs a lot of money for italians, koreans, japanese, germans etc. to come to Fermilab, and that many graduate students from those countries are cut away from Collaboration Meeting weeks due to budget shortage. In the end it was decided to have one CM away each year, and this time we're going to Barcelona. I'm proud of myself.

The Say of the Week

"I envy University Professors. They are paid to question people who know nothing but try very hard to say something, while I have to question people who know everything but do their utmost to say nothing at all."

Piercamillo Davigo (italian judge investigating corrupt politicians)

A fax from three nobel laureates

Ok, so since the post I censored was deemed interesting, I will resubmit it - no comments allowed on this one though, as Helge suggested.

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Today I arrived in my office and found a fax waiting for me on my desk (the students in the adjoining lab, where we have the fax machine, are really nice and they deliver the documents to me).

The fax consisted of several sheets, of which I understood at once the source, but not the content. I have been the target of fax-bombing in the last few years, by a friend and a respected senior physicist from Berkeley, who collaborated with me for a paper I published two years ago. He is not a member of the CDF Collaboration, but he insisted with me a lot about his ideas of a possible signal for Higgs production with a unconventional decay mode to a weak boson and a Upsilon particle. I decided, in 2001, to search for this exotic signature in our data, and produced a limit of the associated production of the two objects - the Upsilon decaying to a pair of muons, and the weak boson in any of its final states - lepton pairs or jet pairs. The limit was the first ever placed on this process (of course: who else would look for that signature ?), and was well worth a publication to Physical Review Letters, a prestigious magazine.

The physicist from Berkeley was included in the author's list due to his sharing his ideas with us and for his encouragement in pursuing that signal. However, after we published the paper he insisted that according to him the signal of the very exotic process was indeed there. He analyzed the data by himself, and found evidence -according to him - of the decay X -> W/Z + Upsilon -> jjmm (j being a jet from weak boson decay, m a muon from Upsilon meson decay).

I tried to convince him it was not the case, but he has been very insistent. Now that Run II at the Tevatron has poured on us three times more statistics than the data our original paper was based upon, he came to visit me in Padova to basically force me to analyze the new data - and obtained a file from me, unofficially. Although the file was stripped of almost everything and only contained quadrimomenta of jets and muons, this in principle constitutes a violation of CDF rules for broadcasting of internal information. But I had to do it, the guy was just so insistent!

He analyzed the data himself (I had done it already, once more convincing myself there was nothing strange in the data, in any way one could look at it), and sure enough found a unbelievable signal of Z decays to jet pairs plus a Upsilon. He then started to bug me for getting this done officially and publishing the results, something I did not want to do - the signal simply isn't there. When it became clear that I did not want to, after sending me tons of faxes with his plots, and calling me on the phone several times from California to Padova, he finally started to talk to third parties about this new signal. He hit on several people who took him seriously, some of which came after me to check the story. I had a hard time explaining the whole thing. At one point, this got me in trouble because some physicist from Berkeley who is in CDF complained officially about the leak of internal information to non-members of CDF. I was able to sedate the thing, but decided I would cut it short from then on.

Faxes have continued to pour infrequently, as well as phone calls from physicists he had contacted. The one of today, though, was different. It consisted of several reference letters which were written by distinguished physicists (distinguished, if you read on, is a clear understatement, since these are Nobel Prize recipients) to support the career of my friend. I won't report here all the nice things contained in these letters, but it suffices to list the names of the writers of references:

- Chen Ning Yang, Stony Brook

- Samuel Ting, Cabot Institute

- T.D.Lee, Columbia University

Wellllll.... Who am I, to blow against the wind ? The guy has great references, no doubt about that.

... But the signal isn't there and I will not publish it, damn it!

Self censorship

So here am I, doing something I would not think I would ever do: fiddle with censorship.

Two days ago I posted an entry in my blog of which I was proud, a funny account of my receiving a fax containing three reference letters written in the past by three Nobel Laureates in Physics (Lee, Yang, Ting) to support a friend's career.

The post attracted some attention, in particular that of one of our most affectionate readers here. The fact is, in her comments she made some remarks that apparently sounded offensive to some other readers; the remarks were not offensive in my opinion, but admittedly one can have one's own opinion on such matters. Also, some noticed that she is only 14 years old, and found strange that she might be inviting me to a party through her comments to my posts. That was evidently a joke, but the web is full of people who lack sense of humor...

I like the Quantum Diaries site a lot, and I want it to succeed in raising the interest of Physics in young minds and in the general public. So, sensing the danger of raising frowns, I decided to remove the post together with all its comments. I could have edited the comments for content, but I just could not bring myself to doing that - I respect the intellectual property of people who are nice enough to leave comments to my posts.

The whole thing leaves me a bit sad, because I once more realize that as much as a public site can claim to be free and support freedom of speech, you cannot have it all. So there has to be a boundary after all. Maybe the boundary is best respected by self-containment ?

The Say of the Week

"Statistics is too delicate a matter for statisticians to handle"

T.D.

IPOD

Just been at a department store and bought an IPOD for a friend of mine who's just turned 40. Together with some friends, we decided this was the only gadget he did not have among those which he could find attractive.

We're going to celebrate his 40th birthday next Saturday at a nice restaurant near Treviso. Looking forward to spending an evening with all my old-time friends, for a change - some of them, I spent my twenties seeing them each and every evening, and since a few years I see them maybe twice a year! Life does change your habits...

So the IPOD. Caolionn will sure tell you it's a fantastic little thingy which she cannot live without. I personally don't travel with built-in music, my car CD changer is enough music for my day. I do, however, play my piano almost every night... I guess either you make music, or you listen to it. I prefer to be among those who make it. If this sounds swaggering, well, it does not mean to be, but I do take pride of my voice and music.

Party at the old mill

I had promised a post with lots of pictures about the party I attended with my family at an old mill, where my aunt lives. It is a lovely place not far from Venice (mid-way from Treviso if you know your way around here). Here are a few pictures of the mill from my aunt's garden:

The mill is not currently in use, although it has the potential of providing electric power to a small town.

Left: two young nephews of mine in front of the house.

Right: my mother, Mariarosa, and Ilaria are having lunch under wistaria flowers.

Below, left, my mother's husband Sergio is pushing Ilaria. Martina, my brother's daughter, is sitting next. Right: Ilaria plays on the grass.

Right: Martina watches as Tommaso, the nephew who's just had his first communion, opens his presents.

Left: my brother Martino and his son Enrico.

Right: Tommaso opens his presents amidst a host of envious friends.

Right: my mother and her granddaugther.

All in all, a very nice party! Nice weather, good food, great wines, and everybody cheerful.

Proofread by YOU

The most affectionate QD readers know Little Miss Demosthenes very well. She leaves witty comments to my blog as well as others. I got to know her a bit over the internet. Won't say much about her to avoid invading her privacy here, but she is 14 years old, she loves mathematics (and she's darn good at it) and she's definitely bright.

Last week, in the process of giving the finishing touches to my proceedings paper for the Moriond QCD conference, I decided to test her. I sent her my draft paper, and invited her to proofread it and send back any suggestions she might have had about how to improve the paper.  I offered to cite her in the Acknowledgements section if she ended up giving a sizeable contribution to the clarity of the paper.

After a few days, I was not surprised to get back a message with four scanned pages of my paper, and red pencil scribblings on it. Lo and behold, she had indeed found quite a few things to correct. The funny thing is, all her corrections were worth implementing, including a whole sentence she decided would sound better than my version, which was also a bit too apologetic. On the right is one of the scanned pages, just so you know I'm not making this up! :)

So I did implement her changes. You can find a copy of the paper at this link. I am going to send it to the Moriond QCD secretary tomorrow... The only thing still missing is Little Miss Demosthenes' real name for the Acknowledgements section!

Anyway, I decided I will hire her. She recently mentioned she'd like to be a Summer Student at Fermilab. It's going to happen some day.

Applying for a tenured position

Ok, here I am back again. These last few days have been hectic. First and foremost, I have been preparing the application to a position as a tenured Researcher for Padova University, but I have also had to deal with the little army of my undergrad and grad students, who take a lot of my time these days.

Applying to a tenured position as a researcher (or as a professor, for that matter) in italian Universities is a full time job for several days. I want to spare you the details, but it boils down to preparing a very detailed documentation of everything that you have been doing during your scientific activities since the Neolithic.

Therefore, you need to print a perfect replica of each and every scientific paper which you had the misfortune to sign; construct a database of all the papers, with date of issue, correct reference, publishing information. Same goes with the internal documents of your scientific collaboration. Same for all your proceeding papers and reports, whether you published them in print, online, or only as preprints.

Everything, then, needs to be cross-referenced in your curriculum, where you discuss what you did, what you published, when you published it, what presentation you gave, where, what proceeding paper ensued. You have to specify each and every seminar you gave, all the students who graduated with you as a referee, all the papers you were a referee of. All the courses you gave at the University, with details of number of hours of teaching and the like.

Nothing has to be spared, because you do not want to give your examiners a handle on which to base their choice of evaluating your titles less than those of your competitors (and most of the times they will look for anything!).

But most importantly, everything must be perfect, because even the tiniest blemish on your application - a missed signature here or there, a wrong reference to this or that paper, the lack of self-certification that all of the titles you claim you have are really possessed, really anything, may signify winning the position and then being stripped from it by a formal accusation to the committee by a competitor, followed by lawyers and judges scrutinizing everything under the magnifying lens! This is no science fiction, it really happened in quite a few cases in the past. I'm not being paranoid!

Of course, given the extreme scarcity of openings such as this one in Universities these days in Italy (our government keeps cutting funds to Universities, as I discussed here some time ago), you cannot waste a good chance. This only makes the whole job of putting together your application a bit more scary.

Then, in the process of printing the tons of papers that have to accompany your application form, you cannot help wondering why on earth you could not have just to produce a simple curriculum, with web links to the preprint servers, such that lots of trees could be saved and lots of ink spared. But bureaucracy is the contrary of efficiency, and a synonim for waste.

When I finally got over with printing, sorting, stapling, cataloging papers, I decided to take a picture or two of the result. You can see one on the right. There are four piles of printouts, amounting to roughly 2500 page of scientific blablah.

Tomorrow I will take the hefty load to the office where they accept the applications. They will give me that weird look (since most of other applicants for university positions have only a few papers, they are not too accustomed to handling parcels that heavy) which I now know well - this being my fourth attempt. In the past three attempts, the winner was already decided from the start. I mean from the start, in the sense that the opening was decided in order to give him or her the position. This time, things are much less clear, and I think I have a real chance, since there are two openings (I already applied to the other three months ago), and there are only two outstanding candidates from within Padova University -one of them being me. We'll see.