Comments from Lorenzo

Help: Forums, postings and threads

Forums, postings and threads

Click on the Forum title, e.g. on the "Forums by Category" page, to read a sequence of postings to the Forum and its threads all in one page. If you are only interested in one thread or the thread following a specific posting, click the thread or the posting, which takes you to a smaller page, which contains only the part you are interested in and may be easier to navigate.

Layout of the posting thread(s)

The posting threads can be shown with/without the text of the postings ("Inline depth"). In addition the depth of the thread can be controlled ("Outline depth"). For both cases several values are provided, which can be toggled. Note that the displayed values are those, which can be chosen, they do not correspond to the actual display status of the thread(s).

Add message

Add a new posting thread to this Forum

Show subscribers

Click "Show subscribers" to get the List of all subscribers, who receive e-mail from postings to this Forum, if they have not explictly unsubscribed from a posting thread. This includes:

Subscribers to the forum
Explicit subscribers to the posting or any of its ancestors
The author of the posting (if he has not unsubscribed)
The authors of any ancestor posting (if they have not unsubscribed)

Some browsers display old pages from the cache

Some browsers (e.g. Firefox) display a page from the cache even though the page has been updated. As a result, one may not get the latest messages in the forum's outline or the logon ID of the previous session appears on the upper right corner. If one suspects that he or she does not get the latest content of a page, try clearing up the personal data from the browser's cache as the following:

Tools -> Clear Private Data -> Clear Private Data (from browser Firefox)

Tools -> Delete Private Data (from browser Opera)

then reflesh the current page to get the latest content.

Details on "Inline depth" and "Outline depth"

Threads and the follow-up messages are numbered. There is one line per posting, normally starting with the posting number. The URLs of a posting and its responses reflect the depth of the follow-up postings. Watch the URLs to see how this is done. Depending on the chosen display options, the thread-display may be incomplete; the number of messages at the next level is, however, displayed, e.g. "…3 message(s)". You may not see all contributors unless you choose "All".

Messages are "chained" if there are only replies at the first level, i.e. 1/1.html, 1/1/1.html etc. In case of "chained" messages the message number is replaced by the icon and there is no indentation.

Inline: Display the subject line only or also the text of the posting(s); for the choice "All" the "Outline" choices are switched off.

Argument Default value Alternative Comment

1 0 1 no text / full text of posting

2 1 All text for level 1 only / text for All postings

Argument	Default value	Alternative		Comment
1	0	1		no text / full text of posting
2	1	All		text for level 1 only / text for All postings

Outline: Choose the depth of the posting thread, successive toggle controls provide increasing detail.

Argument Default value Alternative Comment

1 2 1 2 levels / 1 level (original posting)

2 3 2 3 levels / 2 levels

3 3 All 3 levels / all levels (all postings)

Argument	Default value	Alternative	Comment
1	2	1	2 levels / 1 level (original posting)
2	3	2	3 levels / 2 levels
3	3	All	3 levels / all levels (all postings)

Message from Lorenzo,
Ciao
Vera

PS  Please send your comments and/or let me know where and when I can reach you by phone!

-----Original Message-----
From: Lorenzo FOA [mailto:foa@cern.ch] 
Sent: Monday, April 11, 2005 2:07 AM
To: Luth, Vera G.
Subject: Re: Draft of Write-up 

Dear Vera,

I have taken some days to see if with time I could digest your proposal of 10f signatures for each physicist on the basis of consortia interested in 10 different physics subjects. I must tell you that I remain very skeptical and strongly support the arguments brought by Max in his long and interesting mail.

I start from the point of view of a person working since 5 or 8 years in CMS with the perspective of starting to produce physics results from 2008.
I also assume that each physicist, from the start up of data taking, will share his/her work in two parts: a continuous work of maintenance, calibration, recovery of dead channels, software improvements and so on on one side, and the participation to a physics analysis study group on the other. Clearly each person will report to two bosses, the group leader for the M&O activity and the responsible of the chosen physics group, on the other.
This is relevant because this person will have collected a deep knowledge on some particular aspect of the detector, be it hardware or software.
Most of this work and expertise has not been chosen by him/her but by the group leaders according to the financial and technical capabilities of their institution. The consequence is that he/she will choose the physics working group in which his experience and knowledge can be of strongest help. Our physicist has accepted all this under the assumption that he/she will participate to the whole experiment.
Immagine a brilliant student who works in the tracker and therefore participates in the working group on b, tau physics where he/she can take best advantage of a specific competence on secondary vertices.

How should he/she feel when the study group on Higgs physics discovers the Higgs boson through the decay into two photons and cannot participate to the discovery? What I want to say with this exemple is that it is largely too late to force each physicist into a 10f the physics results of the experiment at this late stage of the life of the collaboration..
I fear that such a decision would give origin to a real revolution and  to a disgragation of the collaboration through a nasty competition among detector people, analysis groups and individuals inside the groups. I can easily imagine that the collaboration would split into fighting gropus of people, refusing a common vision and a common effort, contrary to what happens now, each community making sacrifices in order to help others when they encounter serious difficulties.

For me the only mechanism to convince a person not to sign a paper is his/her judgement of not beind enough involved in and aware of the content of the paper.
In this direction I can imagine to proceed further, for instance we could ask the supervisors of PhD students and post-docs to interrogate the students and suggest to sign or not a paper according to his/her capability of defending its content.
In conclusion I cannot imagine a short-cut decision changing the commonly accepted rules. I can see the evolution of the meaning of a signature which requires a more and more active role of each member of the collaboration. The minimum result is an increased responsibility of people who sign and a much better capability of defending the physics result.
But it is even possible that such a procedure, if taken really seriously by supervisors, group leaders and Collaboration management, could bring with time towards the ratio 1 to 10 without distroying the collaboration spirit.
Sorry for this long mail but the subject deserves a really big attention and I conside mine only a contribution to move to a deeper understanding ciao Lorenzo

On Mon, 4 Apr 2005, Vera Luth wrote:

>
> *** Discussion title:
>  Thank you Max for your long and detailed response.
>
>  And, yes you are most welcome as a member of this working  group, 
> just because you are part of a large existing  collaboration who has 
> decided in the past not to change  their policies. I fully respect you 
> point of view which  I know is shared by many! I will try and 
> integrate your  assessment of the current practice more closely in the  
> report.
>  But I still would like to present the two alternatives  as option to 
> be considered.
>
>  We had decided at the last phone meeting that I write up  the 
> discussions we had had so far, which I tried to do and  I had hoped 
> for comments and critique like yours when I'
>  posted it. We also agreed to develop a questionnaire,  and since I 
> did not get much input, I also drafted one  myself for everybody else 
> to critique.
>
>  I had asked for a suitable date for another phone  discussion, but 
> had responses from only three of you,  so I have not set up another 
> session. Also, I had asked  for all of you to send me a time and phone 
> number for a  one-on-one conversation by phone. No response so far!
>
>  I am not adverse to a meeting in person. I talked to Dmitri  and Hiro 
> when they were at Stanford a couple of weeks ago.
>  I am planning to be at CERN in early June, so we could  arrange a 
> meeting there on June 1st or June 3rd in the  afternoon, at least for 
> some of you.
>
>  May be I can meet Lorenzo in Pisa on May 21 (Saturday)??
>  or May 27th - 31 in Florence???
>
>  Also, who of you are planning to attend the LP05 in Uppsala,  we 
> could certainly arrange to meet there again, before we  present the 
> report to C11. I am presently thinking of  reporting on these 
> discussions at the conference, and then  send the questionnaire out 
> afterwards if the working group  and C11 still think that this is 
> appropriate.
>
>  So, I am looking forward for other comments on this draft  write-up 
> from the rest of you, and let me know how you  would like to proceed.
>
> Best regards
> Vera
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------
> Visit this SLACSite at hypernews.slac.stanford.edu message (to reply or unsubscribe) at:
> http://hypernews.slac.stanford.edu:5090/HyperNews/slacsite/get/C11Auth
> orship/29/2/1.html
>