Tommaso Dorigo

final exam standings

I just got unofficial news about the standings in the admission test for the INFN research position.

After the final, oral examination, these are the standings:

Name         titles      written test scores     subtotal    oral      total

                 (/50)        (/60)      (/60)          (/170)    (/80)   (/250)

1. Dorigo         46            43          56             145         78      223
2-22 others                                                                       151.5 - 219.5

I should not, but I cannot help feeling proud about this... True, I should have won a position such as the one I am winning here three or four years ago, as far as my experience goes. But the situation of research in Italy is not rosy, particularly thanks to the lousy government we have had since 2001. Forza Prodi!

Citizen Prodi

I forgot to mention who I met last Monday, on my trip to Rome.

I was sitting in the first class cabin of the Eurostar train from Venice to Rome on Monday morning, when the train stopped in Bologna. Passengers got off and came in, and shortly after the departure from Bologna Centrale I raised my eyes from the book I was reading to find a familiar face sitting across my table, on the other side of the cabin. Not more than 3 meters away, Romano Prodi was sitting and chatting amiably with a collaborator.

Romano Prodi, former president of the European Union, is the leader of the center-left coalition that will challenge Silvio Berlusconi for the charge of italian Premier next spring.

Nothing strange in finding Prodi on the Eurostar. It is indeed the most comfortable way to travel from Bologna to Roma, if you do not mind blending in with ordinary people. And Prodi does not mind. A different kind of man from Berlusconi, who travels only in his private (or government) jets and cars. Berlusconi himself does not mind to walk amidst his subjects, but he is usually circled by four bodyguards. None appear to be needed by Prodi, who obviously does not think he may be the object of anger or hatred.

The living room

Piece by piece, I hope I will soon manage to post pictures of my new house. All in a single post would be nuts... Just think it takes this weblog interface about 3 minutes to process one of my nikon's images... I don't want to be stuck here for one day in a row!

Today, the living room. It is far from complete - I still need to mount the lights on the ceiling, and some paintings on the walls. But I managed to set a few of the paintings during the last weekend, so I am comfortable with inviting you: here we go on tour.

Here you can see the room from one corner - the opening which leads to the kitchen. In this picture the living room does not seem to be very spacious, because the pic has been taken with a 27mm-equivalent lens. The room is in fact 8 by 5 meters, trapezoidal. On one side there are windows and doors which lead to a balcony (you can see two on the left).

Here you see the two openings that lead to the kitchen - and the first step of the stairs that lead to the fourth floor. The painting on the left is a prova d'autore by Mario de Luigi, while the three on the right are by Daniele Bianchi, a very talented painter and a friend of mine. A bit of the kitchen can be seen in the background on the right.

Here are the two doors leading to the balcony, the table, and a smaller crystal-and-mahogany table hand-built in Peru. The painting is a view of a bay with some boats, by G.Morandi. The floor is "alla veneziana", quite typical of buildings in Venice. It is made by small stones flattened and polished.

Here you can see a nifty detail. I placed on the lower shelf of the crystal table a tray, on which I collected some of the gemstones from my collection. This way, the tray is protected by the upper crystal, and I can always enjoy the sight of the gemstones, instead of having to dig them out of the small boxes where I kept them. Moreover, in the daylight when the sun shines through the windows on the stones, the effect is marvelous.

It is a bit hard to see, but if you're curious, on the left there are several colored sapphires, then a couple of large kunzites, a hundred very small yellow sapphires and a dozen peridots in the center, plus a fluorite, a large orange spinel and several garnets, then a large blue sapphire, several alexandrites, a few topazes, a square diamond and a large citrine.

And here you can see the "less modern" corner of the living room. The small table is a wooden sculpture from the late 18th century. The painting on the right is by Emilio Vedova (1950).

That's it for tonight... To be continued.

I just quit smoking

Well, I have not been a smoker for more than 4 years now, but recently the stress of the coming exams, the move, the remodeling, and the rest, took its toll. I deliberately decided I was giving myself three months of free smoking, which were to finish as soon as the stress was over. It was a predetermined decision: I chose to start smoking, with the agreement that it would be only for a little time.

Be it known that I perfectly well know the risks of smoking, as well as the negative impact it would have on my kids to grow with a smoking father. On the other hand, I did not worry about the risks of not being able to quit once I started again. I know I can quit, and I am about to show it to everybody...

I smoked the last one yesterday evening. Today I felt some cigarette craving in the morning and again after lunch, but it was pretty manageable - it is as if the evil forces that try to get me to smoke again knew theirs is a lost battle, and they did not even try to fight it.

I will be out of it in a week, I think. And, by the way, today I restarted dieting as well! Along with the three months of free smoking which I allowed to myself (actually, it has only been two months), I also allowed myself free eating. So from the 70 kg I reached at the beginning of October, I regained two and a half kilos.... I am back to watching my weight again.

Won ?

I gave the oral exam for the INFN research scientist position this afternoon. The day was spent traveling to Rome, rushing to the University "La Sapienza", discussing my research plans and topics from selected papers I had presented for the exam, rushing back to the railway station, and traveling back to Venice.

All in all, a busy day! The examiners were fair, and they allowed me to explain in detail my research activities. I have no doubts that I have effectively won one position, so tomorrow is going to be party time at the lab in our headquarters in the physics department in Padova.

I have one single regret - I misled the commissaries when I reported on the number of W events with two b-tagged jets used to extract a limit to Higgs boson production using 300 inverse picobarns of Run II data by CDF. I quoted the number of single tags, which is close to 70, and thus led the commissaries to believe that the Higgs boson will never be found at the Tevatron, with such large backgrounds... In fact, the double tags are rather O(10) events, which still makes it tough but not impossible with the full statistics CDF and D0 will collect by 2009 if all goes well.

Despite this pitfall, I gave a good impression and I am happy of the outcome. So, with a position in the bag, tomorrow, I am back to work!

Another trip to Rome

This morning I am off to Rome again, for the last part of the exam to select 16 INFN research scientists. I am due there at 2.30 PM, and maybe I am relying too much on the italian railway system, because I am taking a Eurostar train that is expected to arrive in Rome at 1PM... It is not rare that trains accumulate a delay of 2 hours or more from Venice to Rome, but objectively Eurostars are more on time than others. I estimate a 3% chance that I will arrive late to the exam, but in that case I can probably alert the commissaries by phone - they would probably move my exam past that of somebody else.

In the evening, I will be back on another Eurostar, and if everything goes smoothly I should be home by midnight. 9 hours spent traveling today. I hope it's worth it! If you've read the previous posts, you know I have expressed some doubts about accepting a INFN position if offered. Most likely I will, however.

The ladder

The internal flight of stairs that connects the third and the fourth floor of my apartment is the last bit that needed to be completed, to finish the remodeling of our new house. This afternoon the painters finished the last layer of paint, and the outcome is for you to see in the pictures below.

 

Here you can see the ladder from a side. It is made up of thick steps lying on a structure that supports it and provides space for books and other objects. Part of the niches behind small doors, and part are in open view.

The nice thing about this design is its simplicity, and the trapezoidal base, which becomes narrower as the steps go up. You can see that in the following picture.

In this last picture you see the narrowing of the base of the steps.

Exam scores

This morning I called the INFN secretary in Frascati, to obtain the scores of the two written tests I took last week and the evaluation of my career titles. The scores of written tests and titles are summed together with the score of the final oral exam (which I will take next Monday) to give a total score which determines the ranking of the candidates.

There are 16 positions to fill, and after the written tests 24 candidates have been admitted to the oral examinations. I do not have the score of each of the other physicists who passed the written tests (in Italy a law forbids this, for the sake of privacy), but we are trying to reconstruct the ranking via e-mail... I only have scores for 10 others.

My career titles were rated 46/50, which is pretty high - but I believe it reflects the fact that at 39 years of age, and with 6 years of post-PhD research activity, I am objectively over-qualified for the position offered.

I got 43/60 on the first written test, the one with 42 nightmarish exercises to complete in 4 hours - again, more than I expected. The 42 questions were divided in four blocks (detectors, accelerators, statistics, particle physics) and the commissaries provided us with the total score available for each block, so post-mortem I had been able to compute, with fair approximation, that my total score should have been around 39/60. Evidently, they were forced to rescale the scores upwards a bit, to allow 24 candidates to surpass the minimum admission threshold of 36/60 per written test.

In the last written test, the one where I discussed the CDF calorimeter and its use for the top quark mass measurements, they gave me 56/60, again a high score.

The total, 145/170, will be summed to the xx/80 points allotted for the oral exam. So, in principle none of the 24 candidates (the 11 scores I managed to collect range from 104 to 145) is excluded from the competition. However, I am quite confident that I will remain in the top part of the list, and offering a drink to my colleagues is deferred to next week only as a formal measure.

It remains to be said that I am not yet sure I will accept the position! As I explained a few posts ago, I would rather win a University Research position - and two will open in a few months in Padova, where I would again have good chances. We'll see what happens: it not only depends on the result of my exam - which is not in doubt at this point - but on the result of other candidates who might concur for the University positions in Padova.

Passed

I just got news that I passed the written part of the exam.

Among about 200 candidates who sent in their CV and publications, and 110 who participated in the selection, the commission accepted 25 of us. A tight selection!

The score is thus divided: at most 60 points for each written test = 120 points, then 50 points maximum for the CV and the publications, and 80 for the oral exam, for a total of 250 points. Since the minimum score to pass the written part is 84, there is at most a spread of 36 points between all 25 candidates at this point, which can be easily regained by a good CV and/or oral exam. I do not yet know my score, I will tomorrow.

Regardless of the score of the written tests, which in my case I think is marginally positive - I failed several of the 42 questions, and my dissertation on the CDF calorimeter was rather plain - I believe I have a large probability of winning one of the 16 positions. That is because of my curriculum, which is certainly very good if compared with that of the majority of other participants, and because of the fact that from Padova there are 4 admitted candidates, and probably two of the 16 available positions will be assigned to Padova, if my evaluation is correct.

I am not disappointed - one is never happy to fail a written test - but since I would much rather win a University research position, and two will be available shortly in Padova - through yet as many other written and oral tests -, I am rather unsure of what I should do, if I am offered a INFN research position. There is no basic difference between the two jobs, but I want to teach, and so my natural career would pass through a University research position rather than with the INFN. A INFN researcher becomes a research director one day, while a University researcher becomes a full professor. I rather fancy the latter.

What will be decided in the end depends on too many factors yet. Next week we'll have the oral examinations, and then the picture will become more clear: things do not only depend on how well I do, but how do others who might want the University positions in Padova.

The second exam

...And yesterday we were asked to write about a detector which was critical in the measurement of a physical quantity, explain the physical processes at the basis of the detection process, the mechanical construction, the calibration procedures, the use of the detector for the data analysis, and the measurement of the physical quantity.

I talked about the CDF calorimeter and the measurement of the top quark mass.

I think I did well, although the three hours we were given were barely enough to write a first pass of what I wanted to say, and I did not have the time to make things look pretty nor give more detail than that I had given at the first pass.

All in all, I think I will not be among the first 16 after the written part of the exam. They give 60 points per each written test, then 50 points for the curriculum and the publications, and 80 points for the oral examination. However, they will pass people to the oral part only on the basis of how many positions they wish to fill. It seems they will select about 20-25 candidates for the 16 positions, which makes it tough to be among the ones who will pass the written part. If I were to evaluate my two tests, I would give myself 39 in the first one and 48 in the second, so not much more than the threshold of 84 they set to declare it sufficient.

I will have the results on the 22nd.... As I said, I do not want to be among the winners, but I would not mind being qualified for the oral part.