Today I gave a talk to the entire collaboration about the performance of the Inner Detector, Tracking and B-tagging groups (don't worry about what that means). It was one of four talks given by 'young physicists' on the first 7 TeV results, roughly divided by subdetector and their related physics objects. I was presenting the work of a very large group of people and I was quite nervous that I would accidentally misrepresent someone's work or worse. As you might imagine it is hard to make that many people happy when you are presenting the results that they've worked very hard on! At some point this morning I realized that most of the people in my 3,000 strong collaboration don't know who I am, so in giving this talk I'm introducing myself to a significant subset of the people in my field....ack! Obviously only a small fraction of the 3,000 people were watching the talk and an even smaller fraction were in the room (it was webcast so people could watch it from the confort of their own institution or desk) but I still felt the pressure. In the end, despite me rushing through unrehearsed slides, the talk went over well. Luckily all the data and results looked so beautiful that the audience couldn't help but be happy!
I thought I'd share a few interesting recent articles:
Many of us grumbled at the trumped up Media Day the CERN management had scheduled for first collisions. We thought it was a bad idea because there was no guarantee that we would actually get collisions on that day and the LHC did not seem ready. Here is an alternative opinion on the subject and I must admit that the author has a point.
Last week the American Association of University Women published a report on the lack of women in science and engineering. The New York Times also reported on it. I haven't had the chance to read it, but it looks interesting.
Lastly, the BBC has a great LHC page full of information devoted to the project: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/bigbang/
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