Unfortunately I was right: at least in predicting that the INFN exam dubbed "R5" would not go deserted. The R5 exam, which in exchange for a stressful pair of written tests (which I am trying to get…

"The INFN directorate may have invented the Identity operator in the space of qualifying exams" Guido Volpi (commenting on FB on the very offensive R5 exam held today by INFN post-docs).

The 2009 World Conference on Science Journalism took place last week in heat-wave-struck London, at the convenient location of Westminster Central Hall (see below). More than 900 delegates got…

As I promised a week ago, I am posting answers to a few of the 42 questions which constituted the first part of an the exam selecting experimental particle physicists for the INFN (the italian…

In a few days, scores of Italian post-doctoral researchers in experimental particle physics will get tested on their knowledge of the matter, without any promise of a position, but just to get one…

From Prof. Chad Orzel's Graduation Speech: Science isn't a body of facts, science is a process for figuring out how the world works: you see something interesting, come up with an idea of why that…

If you have followed this blog for long enough, dear readers, the words "multi-muons", "anomalous muons", or even "lepton jets" are not foreign to you. They all refer to a paper appeared on the ArXiv…

In a few days italian post-docs working in high-energy physics will be asked to gather for a nasty exam, held by the INFN -the italian institute for nuclear physics- to qualify valiant researchers…

PrologueSome of you might remember the ripples caused in the blogosphere by the two-standard-deviation excess found by the CDF collaboration in their data in January 2007, while searching for a Higgs…

Below I offer a preview of the slides I will show tomorrow at an invited seminar on the rather technical topic of  "The b-jet energy calibration with Z-->bb decays", which I have come to CERN…