France-Italy next Sunday July 5, 2006
Posted by dorigo in games, news.1 comment so far
Ok, France-Portugal went according to predictions, and France will meet Italy in Berlin next Sunday, for the final match of the 2006 World Championship.
A penalty kick converted by Zidane after half hour of play brought France to 1-0, and then it was a nervous attempt by Portugal to get back in the game, which failed in the end; not by much, however, since in one occasion the french goalkeeper blundered badly on a very easy catch, and it was sheer luck that prevented the 1-1 goal.
It is always a pleasure to see Zidane play… And it is a pity to know he is going to leave soccer for good after the World Championship. Zidane is a fantastic player, elegance and class with a deadly mix of speed and power. I hope he will not show too much of it against Italy next Sunday!
In any case, at this point both France and Italy deserve the title, so I am not too concerned about the verdict - I have nothing against the french team. I just hope it will be a correct game, and please, finish it in 90 minutes! Not the penalty kicks for god’s sake…
Background and signal in MAGIC telescope data - and me July 5, 2006
Posted by dorigo in astronomy, news, personal, physics, science.2 comments
Understanding the high- and very high-energy range of the spectrum of gamma rays from galactic and extra-galactic sources is a very important issue -maybe one of the most important- in astroparticle physics today. It has an impact on our understanding of active galactic nuclei, black holes, and neutron stars, but it also retains sensitivity to possible explanations to the problem of missing matter in the universe, which involve supersymmetric particles such as the neutralino or other WIMPs.
The MAGIC telescope, which detects cosmic ray showers through the detection of Cherenkov radiation in the atmosphere, is a telescope composed of almost 1000 0.5 square meter mirrors. It operates in the Canary islands, and is designed to be able to orient itself in less than a minute towards gamma ray burst sources. In Padova we have a group, led by Antonio Saggion and Mosè Mariotti, which helped construction and is now analyzing the data from the detector.
So what is my involvement in the whole thing ?
None other than my personal interest until today. But this afternoon, when I participated in a first meeting to organize and discuss the future graduations in my university (Mia Tosi, the student working with me, is graduating on the 20th), I was taken aback by the offer from the president of the graduation commission to be the internal referee of a thesis on the analysis of data from the MAGIC telescope.
I gladly accepted the offer, of which I feel honored. It remains to be said that I will have to study the matter a bit, because despite my experience with data analysis and signal discrimination techniques, I am not up-to-date with the latest rage on astroparticle physics. Exciting! I am forced to learn stuff.
Boy, do I love my job.
Mia’s abstract July 5, 2006
Posted by dorigo in news, personal, physics, science.add a comment
Mia’s Masters thesis was delivered yesterday, after two sleepless nights. I think the quality of her work is high, although she wrote too much! About 150 pages overall. I had warned her that too long a thesis runs the risk of annoying the commissaries and thwarting potential readers, but she lacked the time to make it shorter…
Anyway, here are title and abstract:
A new multivariate approach to the b-jet energy measurement at the CDF-II experiment
Abstract:
A precise measurement of the energy of b-quark-originated jets is
of the utmost importance for the high-p_T physics program of the Tevatron experiments, since their two main goals are deeply affected by it: first, a precise measurement of the top quark mass mandates a unbiased estimate of the energy of b-jets, or a determination of the so-called b-jet energy scale; second, all chances of a light Higgs boson discovery rest in obtaining the highest possible resolution in the energy measurement of the two b-jets originated from a H –> b anti b decay.In this thesis, we describe and test a new –and until recently, the first– method to specifically correct the energy measured in jets originated from the fragmentation of b quarks at the Collider Detector at Fermilab. The corrections, performed through an algorithm which uses information from the calorimeter and also quantities derived from tracking, b-tagging, and charged lepton identification, are optimized to improve the reconstructed mass of the Z boson in the b anti-b channel. The method exploits the intercorrelation between the energy mismeasurement and some of the jet observables, which represent a configuration space for b-jets.
The corrections obtained by the algorithm improve the b-jet resolution by 25% for jets in the energy range characteristic of Z –> b anti b decay taken in Run II with the CDF experiment, thus sizably improving the extraction of the Z signal and the determination of the b-jet energy scale. When applied to the search of a light Higgs boson, the effect of the same performance will equate to a 20% increase in the integrated luminosity.
More media coverage July 5, 2006
Posted by dorigo in news, personal, politics.add a comment
Today’s local newspapers cover the civil ceremony that took place yesterday in Ca’Foscari, the main building of the university of Venice, to commemorate my father, Wladimiro Dorigo.
La Nuova Venezia:
[...] “A great protagonist of the cultural and political life of Venice, a man who always had the courage to say and do what he thought, paying the consequences”. Massimo Cacciari [major of Venice] uses no words of circumstance “because they do not suit to the work of this man”. [...] “A man incapable of compromises and who could innovate and experiment personally, as he did politically in that first pioneering season of the center-left in Venice”. [...]
Il Gazzettino:
Academic honors to Wladimiro Dorigo, venetian professor, researcher, political figure, passed away a few days ago at the age of 79 years. According to his will, the rich private library, composed of about 10 thoursand volumes, plus letters, written documents and archives, will be donated to the department of History of the Arts. [...] The characterial rigor of Dorigo and his disillusioned attitute towards the situation of our country have been highlighted also by Paolo Puppa, director of the department of History of Art, and from the professor of contemporary history Mario Isnenghi, who concluded “Dorigo lived a grandly conceived life”.
Il Gazzettino also features a full-page memory by Tullio Campostrini:
The modernity of Wladimiro Dorigo’s urbanistic choices in the fifties
Authoritative figures of the cultural world will certainly remember in the forthcoming days the figure of Wladimiro Dorigo, considering it under different aspects since he was not only a studious of art, but a person of wide interests with a great capacity to mark concretely in terms all deserving to be remembered and deepened. Waiting this to happen in a proper way, I wish to anticipate a personal testimony of the extraordinary brief adventure of Wladimiro Dorigo as city administrator in Venice, which is probably insufficiently known to many.
Such a brief season was in fact significative and knowing it helps also to understand how the studious of ancient Venice was not founded only on personal intellectual convinctions, but also on the love for his city, which he wanted alive in modernity without ripudiating the ancient tradition. His interests as a studious and as an administrator were aspects of his fundamental involvement for the polis, and close were the ties between the two levels.
Towards the end of the fifties (he was barely thirty) Dorigo was assessore all’Urbanistica of the Comune of Venice in the first center-left administration of our country, and as such invested almost exclusively of the task of providing the layout of a plan for the comunal territory. [...]
For the full article see www.gazzettino.it
