Hadron Collider urinal cake tale wins El Reg's LHC book giveaway

Entrants to our soaraway somewhat-Hadron-Collider-themed writing competition have been biting their nails all week, desperate to know who has scooped the awesome "Large Hadron Collider Pop-Up Book: Voyage to the Heart of the Matter" prize. But now, their wait is over. The Reg can announce that the winner of a gleaming free …

[ukgnome]

A begrudging congratulations from Collider Man

[Darryl]

Is that where the camera zooms in on your face after the winner was announced and you have to plaster on a fake smile and clap a few times to show what a gracious loser you are?

[xperroni]

Edwin is my man, er, cake?

I, too, am honored that a comment I wrote made its way into a Reg article – and not the FoTW at that.

[monkeyfish]

Link?

Care to put a link to the original story so readers who may have missed it the first time can read it?

[Parax]

Re: Link?

Try here.

[Chris Evans]

Re: Link? Consistently unhelpful

Glad to see ElReg are being consistent in their refusal to include relevant links.

[andreas koch]

@ Arnaut the less - Re: "I am thoroughly nuts in the minds of several engineers"

. . .

just having the "wrong" alloy wheels on your car is enough to be branded as nuts.

. . .

That'll be wheel nuts then, right?

[Dr Patrick J R Harkin]

Re: @ Arnaut the less - "I am thoroughly nuts in the minds of several engineers"

Yes - and dem wheel nuts get wheely wound up about dat sorta fing!

[Irongut]

It would seem sensible to include a copy of the winning entry in the article rather than some vacuous comments from people other than the winner. Or a link to the original article since this is the www.

[cyborg]

Don't be silly! It's time to get out the microfiche and look through the archives.

[goldfish]

Congratulations Edwin, a worthy winner, and long may your fragrance linger........from Shadowman

[Anonymous Coward]

Walter Lippmann

"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper

The numbers make the problem clear. In 2007, the year before CERN first powered up the LHC, the lab produced 142 master's and Ph.D. theses, according to the lab's document server. Last year it produced 327. (Fermilab chipped in 54.) That abundance seems unlikely to vanish anytime soon, as last year ATLAS had 1000 grad students and CMS had 900.

In contrast, the INSPIRE Web site, a database for particle physics, currently lists 124 postdocs worldwide in experimental high-energy physics, the sort of work LHC grads have trained for.

Let's not confuse students and fellows with missing staff. [...] Potential missing staff in some areas is a separate issue, and educational programmes are not designed to make up for it. On-the-job learning and training are not separated but dynamically linked together, benefiting to both parties. In my three years of operation, I have unfortunately witnessed cases where CERN duties and educational training became contradictory and even conflicting.

http://ombuds.web.cern.ch/blog/2013/06/lets-not-confuse-students-and-fel..

An unsatisfactory contract policy

This will be difficult for LD staff to cope with. Indeed, even while giving complete satisfaction, they have no forward vision about the possibility of pursuing a career

http://staff-association.web.cern.ch/content/unsatisfactory-contract-policy

Pensions which will be applicable to new recruits as of 1 January 2012; the Management and CERN Council adopted without any concertation and decided in June 2011 to adopt very unfavourable mesures for new recruits.

http://www.gac-epa.org/History/Bulletins/42-2012-04/Bulletin42-en.html

And a warning to non-western members:

"The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value of Y) [where Y>X]

source: LHCb calorimeters : Technical Design Report

ISBN: 9290831693 cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264