Got Zin? Every year around Superbowl weekend, a few thousand Zinfandel enthusiasts trek to San Francisco for the annual ZAP Festival. ZAP stands for Zinfandel Advocates and Producers. I am a card carrying member and like to think of myself as a ZAP-bar (Zinfandel Advocate and anti-Producer). The festival is held at the Fort Mason Center in two huge warehouses that stick out on piers into the Bay. It is the largest wine tasting in the world! Roughly 300 wineries come and pour their stuff and it amounts to around 1000 different wines to taste, all in a single afternoon.

OK, even I admit, that’s impossible. The trick is to remember that this is a tasting and not a drinking festival. The wineries pour tastes, not glassfuls. There are spit buckets everywhere and in theory one is supposed to take a taste and spit rather than swallow. Although I doubt if anyone spit out the Turley Hayne Vineyard which retails for $75/bottle and is impossible to find. I had 3 tastes of that…had to calibrate my tastebuds, ya know. At the end of the day, I tasted about 50-60 wines and spit about half of them.

This year was my 13th festival and I have a Zinfandel Festival tasting routine. First, it’s essential to eat a large lunch. Never taste on an empty stomach. Second, I arrive early, about 30-45 minutes before the doors open. The line is manageable at that point, but quickly grows to a disaster if one is any later. Once I’m inside, I head straight for Turley. I like to calibrate my tastebuds with one of my favorite wines. That way, if anything else I taste afterwards holds up, I know it’s good juice. I try to taste a balance of wines that I know and wines that I don’t. I also like to taste the really expensive ones that I can’t afford to buy (like the Hayne Turley…). Afterwards, I walk around the city, take some blurry photographs, have some coffee, and eat dinner before driving home.

What is special about Zinfandel that causes thousands of fanatics to come from all over and attend this event? Besides the fact that it just plain tastes good, of course? Zinfandel is known as America’s Heritage Grape and is basically grown only in California. The origin of Zinfandel has been the subject of much scientific investigation and puzzlement and the quest makes for an interesting story. Hypotheses that it originated in the US were long-time favored. Researchers later discovered that Zinfandel is a genetic match to Primitivo, grown mainly in the boot of Italy. However, Primitivo has only been grown in Itlay for 150-200 years, which is a short time in the history of wine, so it seemed unlikely that it was Zinfandel’s true parentage. Researchers speculated that perhaps Primitivo was brought across the Adriatic Sea from Croatia. Bingo! In 2001, scientists working in the field in Croatia and at the Enology lab at UC Davis found a perfect DNA match between Zinfandel and the rare old Croatian grape of Crljenak Kastelanski. Other Croatian varieties such as Plavac Mali and Dobricic are Zinfandel’s brothers and sisters. It was first imported into the US in the 1820’s by a nursery on Long Island. I’m glad they changed the name - you gotta admit that Zinfandel is much easier to pronounce.

Zinfandel is grown in every wine region in California and some “old-vine” vineyards date to the 1880’s. Needless to say, there is a special taste to Zinfandel made from 100-yr old vines. Old-vine Zin yields characteristics like graphite, licorice and slate, and is often very spicy – mainly pepper - and earthy. These old vineyards tend to be known by name. Just mention the words Pagani Ranch, Geyersille, Duarte, Monte Rosso, Dickerson, or Grandpere and a Zinfandel lover’s eyes will light up. Newer vines tend to give a more jammy or plumy taste.

So, what were the new finds from the tasting? Sidejob Cellars was pouring their very first bottling and it held up well to the Turley. It will be released in March. They are so new, they don’t even have a website yet. Plungerhead Vineyards won the award for the best name and offered a good quality to price ratio. Another lesser-known favorite is Macchia from the Lodi area.

For people wanting to get started with Zinfandel, I recommend the three R’s: Ravenswood, Ridge, and Rosenblum. All 3 have a diverse set of bottlings at a variety of costs, starting with a Vintner’s Cuvee, then blends from a single County, and then single vineyard bottlings including some 100-yr old vines. It’s a great way to be introduced to the many variations of this marvelous grape!

Oh, and by the way, it goes without saying, of course, that Zinfandel is a red wine.

Here at CV we continuously strive for total perfection. You all have had enough of us theorists telling you how measurements are made, how experiments are built and conducted, blah, blah, blah, blah. We theorists can bluff our way through most of that, but as Julianne put it - it’s nice to know what’s in the sausage. So, we are bringing in a new contributor. John Conway is a bonafide experimenter at the University of California, Davis. We were fellow post-docs at the University of Wisconsin (where John searched for the Higgs at the ALEPH detector at the LEP accelerator at CERN), after he graduated from Chicago. Like all great physicists, he escaped the midwest and moved to California. John now works on the CDF detector at the Tevatron at Fermilab (still searching for the Higgs) and the CMS detector at the LHC at CERN (where Higgs searches/measurements will continue). Within my household, he is best known for introducing me to epoisse, which has become a lifelong addiction. Welcome John!

I’m featured in the latest issue of Symmetry magazine which hit the bookstands a couple weeks ago. Alas, not for my groundbreaking work on signatures for extra dimensions in high energy accelerators. But for something more on the human side – my collection of Christmas ornaments. No, I am not joking! Symmetry excels in not only covering the exciting science that we do, but also in illustrating that us scientists are people too.

When the editor asked if they could do the feature, my first thought was how did they even know about my Christmas ornaments? You gotta admit – that’s fairly obscure. Then I was reminded of a common friend who had Christmas dinner at my house almost a decade ago….that’s a phenomenal memory on her part!

Everyone at SLAC has had fun with the article. Numerous people have stopped by my office and related their own Christmas ornament story (who knew people even had Christmas ornament stories?). Helen Quinn got the wrong box from relatives by mistake once and ended up with a perfectly dreadful set of plastic ice skaters. Burt Richter’s wife is an avid ornament collector and seems to have an overly large accumulation for their new smaller residence.

So exactly what is the deal with my Christmas ornaments? Turns out I buy one every time I visit a new place - and I mean every time I visit a new place. Something that reminds me of the place and the time I spent there. I started this as a grad student, so it’s clear that this is a hobby that doesn’t cost much. Sometimes I make do with a kitschy keychain and cut the chain off (my favorite of this ilk is a tiny Corcovado from Rio). As CV readers know, us scientists are frequent travelers, and this is my way of keeping track of where all I’ve been. For example, last week I was at the Aspen winter conference – and bought a nice hand-painted egg-shaped ornament with a winter Aspen scene. Last summer I was in Cologne, and bought a small beer mug thing. You get the picture. I have enough at this point to cover at least two Christmas trees, but that doesn’t stop me, the collector!

Back to the Symmetry article… I brought some of my favorite ornaments in and we had a photo shoot (no, I am still not kidding). Here’s the winning shot and the nicely penned piece by Jennier Yauck (billed as Ornaments Highlight Physics Conferences):

O Christmas Tree!
Like many particle physicists, JoAnne Hewett can trace the course of her career through her scientific publications. But for a more colorful retrospective of her work, the SLAC theorist simply decorates her Christmas tree.

About 20 years ago, Hewett, a graduate student at the time, bought a totem-pole keychain while visiting a collaborator in Vancouver. Shortly after, a sort of eureka moment struck: “I thought, hey, I could use this as a Christmas ornament,” she says.

Since then, Hewett has made a habit of collecting tree trinkets whenever she travels to conferences, workshops, committee meetings, and the like. “I look for something that says to me, ahh, this is that place,” she says.

Indeed, Hewett can tell you with enviable recall the place—as well as the year and event—each ornament represents. The hand-painted egg? Budapest, 1991, Beyond the Standard Model workshop. The cactus? Tucson, 2003, supersymmetry conference. The glass Santa in a gondola? Trieste, 2006, presentation of LHC lectures.

And then there’s the poorly crafted half-sphere diorama that’s stuffed with figures vaguely resembling people and cacti. “This is what you end up with when you’ve had too many margaritas,” Hewett laughs. San Diego, 1989, 4th generation physics meeting.

Most every ornament comes with a story, too, but clearly, the story that takes the holiday fruitcake belongs to the ornament shaped like the Stanley Hotel, where Hewett attended a linear collider meeting in 1995. Located in Estes Park, Colorado, the hotel is famous as the set for the thriller movie, The Shining. But what Hewett remembers most about the hotel is its run-down condition at the time. “We had no hot water or curtains, and the meeting was in a shack in the back yard with only two bathrooms for all of us. It was absolutely awful,” she says. “When I saw the hotel ornament, I knew I had to have it.”

And of course, there’s one other ornament Hewett always knew she had to have in her collection, too: a miniature cowbell. “Every physicist who’s ever been to CERN has seen one,” she says with a smile.

Happy New Year wishes to all, and a very, very special New Year it will be. The LHC is turning on! The LHC is turning on! The LHC is turing on!

Sorry if I seem carried away, but this is a special year indeed. We’ve been waiting for this accelerator for 25 years - my first paper with LHC calculations was in 1987, and I was relatively late in the game. We all expect the LHC to make spectacular discoveries on the nature of Electroweak Symmetry Breaking, the Hierarchy Problem, and Dark Matter - to name a few - not to mention possible discoveries of Supersymmetry or extra dimenions or another layer of compositness, or….

Let’s all raise a special toast of New Year’s bubbly to the success of the LHC!

While theorists routinely work with the most fundamental degrees of freedom in their calculations, the world of an experimentalist, i.e., the real world, is quite different. Experimenters must cope with particles that decay too quickly to be observed; particles that don’t exist freely by themselves but only in bound, hadronized, and fragmented states that keep showering into even more particles; and particles that cannot be detected at all. And we theorists expect them to relate the pile of stuff they observe to our fundamental degrees of freedom, and to get it right, every time. Experimenters accomplish this feat with what looks like a huge pile of semi-organized chunks of metal, liquid, gas, wire, and cable, called a detector. It’s amazing, really. I am always in awe when I visit a detector! In order to interpret LHC (or Tevatron or B-Factory) data, a theorist must have at least a rudimentary knowledge of how a detector works.

Modern collider detectors are known as 4pi, or hermetic, detectors. (Burt Richter led the team which built the first 4pi detector in the 1970’s at SLAC.) A hermetic detector is simply one which completely surrounds the collision point, i.e., in more technical language, it covers all 4pi steradians of solid angle around the collision. The shape of a collider detector is essentially cylindrical and one can think of it as a can, with the interaction point being located at the center of the can. The can has a barrel piece, which has the beampipe as its axis, and two endcap pieces which fit in snugly to the barrel region. The snug fit is incredibly important, and the degree of snugness is called hermeticity. A detector whose components do not have a snug fit is not hermetic - it would allow particles to escape undetected. If this happens, not only do you lose the particles that you should see, but you have over counted the production rate of the ones you shouldn’t see. That’s obviously a bad situation. Unfortunately, no detector is ever perfectly hermetic — they all have cracks and experimenters learn how to fold that into their data analysis.

These cylindrical detectors are a series of subcomponents, each wrapped around each other, and each performing a specific job. A general all-purpose collider detector has the following components (looking at a slice view and starting at the interaction point and going out):

Vertex detector: This is a very tiny component which surrounds the interaction region as closely as possible. It is basically built of layers of silicon and if a particle has a lifetime of order a picosecond (10^-12 seconds) then its decay vertex (i.e., the track of the single particle splits into the 2-3 tracks of its decay products) can be observed. Bottom quarks, and sometimes charm quarks, can be identified in this manner. The vertex detector is the first component to get fried if something goes even slightly amiss with the beam.

Tracking Chamber: This component determines the trajectory of charged particles. The electromagnetic energy loss (via interactions with the medium in the tracking chamber) and momentum of a charged particle can be measured. It works by tracing the helix of the charged particle as it traverses the chamber in a magnetic field. The chamber is made of layers of finely segmented material, usually silicon.

Electromagnetic Calorimeter: High energy electrons and photons interact with the material in the ECAL and create showers of particles — this process occurs at an exponential rate allowing for the ECAL to absorb all their energy and they finally come to rest. The energy of electrons and photons is thus measured. Various materials are used (lead crystals are popular), but the calorimeter is usually transversely segmented.

Hadronic Calorimeter: Hadronic particles (jets of particles made from hadronized quarks and gluons), usually protons, neutrons, pions, and Kaons, interact with the material in the HCAL, creating showers, coming to a stop and thus depositing all their energy in the HCAL. This usually requires a fairly dense medium (steel scintillators are popular) and is also generally transversely segmented.

Muon Chambers: These are huge chunks of iron that surround the outside of the detector. Muons are heavy and relatively long-lived — thus they traverse the rest of the detector without stopping and track through to the outside chambers. Supposedly, muons are the only particle that can travel through the detector without showering and stopping in the calorimeters, but sometimes very energetic pions can make it through the hadronic calorimeter and punch through into the muon chambers. This is known as pion punch-through and gives a fake muon signal.

As you can tell from the above list, every detector also has a magnet, in order to track charged particles. The size and shape of the magnetic can vary quite dramatically, but it is usually quite large with state of the art magnetic field strength.

A nice graphic illustrating these various detector subcomponents and the particles they are designed to identify is:

The solid lines illustrate when a particle leaves a track in a detector component, and the showers depositing all their energy in the ECAL and HCAL are also shown. Neutrinos, by the way, sail smoothly through the detector unnoticed, and unbothered by all the material placed in their path.

This is a very basic and rudimentary description of collider detectors, but one that I give on the first day of class when I teach a Collider Physics course. A nice set of lectures, written for theorists, describing detectors and collider physics in more detail can be found in hep-ph/0508097 by my good friend Tao Han at the University of Wisconsin. I admit to stealing the above graphics from these lecture notes.

As you can see, detectors are very complicated and finely tuned instruments and my hat is off to the experimenters who make them work and give us the data!

Thanksgiving is over, and most of us in the U.S. have had our fill of turkey leftovers fixed in various ways - but there is one more set of turkeys to swallow. The annual list of Top Ten Turkeys. As compiled by KFOG, a Bay Area radio station, on their popular 10@10 morning program. A KFOG turkey is a song that is truly stupid, you know better and yet you actually think it’s a good song. Despite your best efforts, you end up humming it in the car. Generally the instrumentation is decent, but the lyrics are a problem. Here is this year’s set:

1. Boys Don’t Cry - I Wanna Be A Cowboy
2. Clarence “Frogman” Henry - Ain’t Got No Home
3. The Vapors - Turning Japanese
4. Baltimora - Tarzan Boy (voted best of set)
5. Trashmen - Surfin’ Bird
6. Blue Swede - Hooked On A Feeling
7. They Might Be Giants - Istanbul (Not Constantinople)
8. The Monkees - Gonna Buy Me A Dog
9. Chumbawamba - Tubthumping
10. Toni Basil - Mickey

BONUS TRACK: The B-52’s - Rock Lobster

The best turkey of the set was decided by vote from Fogheads (yes, they really use that term) who email or blog in their vote. The Monkees Gonna Buy Me a Dog gets my vote for best turkey of the set. I must admit that it has always made me laugh, and for some incomprehensible reason I actually like it, even though I know I shouldn’t.

The Blue Swede, Vapors and Toni Basil (I truly despise this one) tunes are repeats from last year’s turkey set list, prompting me to wonder about the depth of KFOG’s collection. I am sure CV readers can nominate many more turkeys, so perhaps we should help KFOG out next year!

N.B.: OK, I know, I know. I’m late with this post. Thanksgiving is over and done. But over the holiday, I had a house full of relatives, did all the cooking, and broke out in hives, so you gotta gimme me a break here.

As I write this, it’s a cold dreary rainy Saturday morning here in the BlueGrass Airport in Lexington, Kentucky – I’m waiting for my delayed flight. Testimony that life as a physicist is not always so glamorous. In fact, readers of CV could get the opposite impression - that we are globetrotting celebrities, darting here and there to deliver lectures, attend meetings, and work with colleagues. It is true that physicists tend to have a heavy travel load. Going home today, I will log my 90,000^th flight mile for 2006 on United Airlines alone. Sometimes we visit exotic locales, but most of the time we travel so that we can spend our days discussing science in a windowless room in places like Batavia, Illinois. Sometimes, even when we travel to popular tourist destinations, we still spend our time in windowless rooms, prompting the phrase Travel Abroad, Stay Indoors. In particular, I remember a meeting in Paris, where all I saw was the inside of lecture halls, and even had working dinners in hotel restaurants with bad food. I might as well have been in Cleveland.

So, why do physicists travel so frequently? My family continuously asks that question and one aunt in particular is convinced that my life is one big vacation. The answer is simple: science is all about interaction. The image of an eccentric white-haired gentlemen working away, alone, in his ivory tower couldn’t be more false (on several counts). There are two main aspects to progress in science:

• Research: Yes, a scientist does have to sit down and do the actual work, and yes, that can sometimes be rather tedious. However, before one sits down to do the work, you gotta have an idea. Preferably an interesting idea. That idea usually does not arrive in a single eureka moment while sitting in isolation. Well, actually maybe it does, but only after interaction with colleagues. After listening to lectures, reading papers, discussing points, and then churning ideas over (and over and over) in your head.
• Dissemination: Even if you’ve done Nobel prize winning work, it doesn’t matter if no one knows about it. You’ve got to sell your work. Publication in a prestigious journal (or posting on the arXiv) is not enough. A significant fraction of the new material physicists learn is absorbed by listening to talks. I guess we never abandon the notion of learning at lectures.

So, what are the sorts of business trips that physicists take? My trips have included all of the following this past year:

• Conferences: We attend conferences to (i) give talks describing our own results, performing the dissemination part of our job, (ii) listen to other talks, gathering new ideas and staying up to date, and (iii) interact with a wide variety of colleagues.
• Workshops: These are usually working meetings, where we perform a calculation that is oriented towards a specific goal (i.e., study of XYZ at the LHC) and have intense discussions with fellow workshop participants.
• Summer Schools: Here we present a lecture series to a group of students. I must admit that I like summer schools that are held in nice or unusual destinations where I can spend time walking and taking pictures after my lectures are finished.
• Seminars/colloquia/public lectures: We give individual lectures for dissemination and attend them to learn and gather new ideas. It’s particularly important for young researchers to go on the seminar circuit so that they can become known.
• Collaboration meetings: This is mainly for experimenters to stay abreast with the results within their detector collaboration. Can you imagine the LHC detector collaboration meetings, with roughly 2000 participants, discussing the intricate details of Higgs searches and possible discoveries! As a theorist who works closely with experimenters, I have been invited to give pep talks (a theoretical interlude if you like) at many collaboration meetings, and I always thoroughly enjoy doing so.
• Visit a collaborator: This is clearly on the performing research side of the job, when collaborators meet face to face to develop ideas and further progress on a project.
• Committee/panel meetings: This is taking an increasingly larger fraction of my time. Most commonly, we serve on peer review panels to review a set of grant proposals or potential experimental projects for their scientific merit. I have also served on panels which advise the DOE and NSF on broader funding issues and which have written literature to explain the merits of a project to various audiences.

So, my trip to Kentucky? To give a physics department colloquium on Discovering the Quantum Universe. I enjoy communicating the excitement of my field and the impending scientific revolution we expect at the LHC!

How would you take a photograph of a molecule in motion? You can’t just go to the camera shop and pick the appropriate device off the shelf. You’ve got to build it yourself! So, what type of device should you build? Well, an average length for a molecule is 1 nanometer (10^-9 meters), so you would want a part of the electromagnetic spectrum with a small enough wavelength to be able to discern (i.e., scatter off) an object that size. X-rays, which have wavelengths of approximately 0.01-1 nanometers, would do the trick. And you don’t want blurry shots, so you would want the X-ray pulses to be rapid enough in order to freeze the ultra-fast molecular motion – something like 10^-(9-10) seconds between pulses would work. And the X-rays should be bright (high intensity) – nothing worse than a dingy picture.

Sounds like a job for an X-ray free electron laser! The world’s first such device of this scale is being built, right here at SLAC. We had the groundbreaking ceremony a few days ago, so the project is now officially underway. Lots of dignitaries were here to shovel the dirt and give inspiring speeches. They were Department of Energy Under Secretary of Science Raymond Orbach, Congresswomen Anna Eshoo and Zoe Lofgren, Congressman Mike Honda, Stanford University Provost John Etchemendy, and SLAC Director Jonathan Dorfan. Last, but not least, the Stanford University Marching Band performed at the event. They have a reputation for being a rowdy bunch (the band, that is) – the University has gone as far as to ban them from performing at football games this year – but they were appropriately toned down (for a band, that is), and added just the right air of festivity to the event.

So, just what is this X-ray laser going to do? Literally, it will take photographs of molecules and reveal their structure. Current X-ray sources primarily give a static picture of materials averaged over relatively long time scales. This new machine will make movies of fast-moving chemical reactions, capturing each movement instantaneously in a frame; it can also determine the structure of a single molecule or small clusters of molecules, and study new states of matter called warm dense plasmas, and perform a vast array of other scientific feats. For instance, it will be possible to record time-resolved images of chemical reactions, to the point of following the change in the chemical bond as the reaction proceeds. Indeed, it seems that it can do almost anything and that everyone is interested in it. Chemists, biologists, physicists, drug companies, even historians. You name it! Which is why the DOE is plunking over roughly $400 M for the project.

At the groundbreaking event, Stanford Provost John Etchemendy made an interesting comparison. He told the story of Eadweard Muybridge, who engineered and developed photographic equipment of his time. Under the employment of Leland Stanford in 1872, he was the first to take a picture of a galloping horse. Previously, during the entire history of humankind, it was thought that a galloping horse kept at least one, if not two, legs on the ground. Muybridge’s photographs comprised the first instance that a galloping horse’s movement had been frozen. And what did humankind learn? That galloping horses have all four legs simultaneously off the ground. May not sound like much to us today, but just imagine 130 years ago.

This wonder machine is called the Linear Coherent Light Source, or LCLS. LCLS will use the last third of the linac to create tightly-focused accelerated bunches of free electrons (here, free means not bound to atoms). Bunch compressors are being installed in the linac to squeeze the electrons into 20 micrometer sized, intense,pulsed packets. These electron bunches then leave the linac and enter a series of undulator magnets. To my understanding, the undulators make the electrons wiggle and thus change course, during which they give off X-rays via synchrotron radiation. And the undulators are built in such a way as to make the X-rays coherent, with a wavelength of 1.5 Angstroms (0.15 nanometer). At the end, the world’s most intense, fastest pulsed coherent (like a laser) X-rays are beamed into a suite of experiments. Cool!

Lastly, how do us SLAC particle physicists feel about turning our laboratory over to the Basic Energy Science division of DOE? I would be remiss if I did not mention this… Well, first of all, we are tickled pink that our linac will continue to produce groundbreaking scientific results. It is just another phase in a long history of outstanding science performed at our laboratory. I must also be honest and admit that there is some apprehension that particle physics will become marginalized at the lab. However, strong leadership and a thoughtful layout for the transition will ensure that this does not occur. SLAC has a very talented particle physics workforce, and current and future particle physics projects do and will depend on it!

That is the sound of a celebratory bird call. Celebrating the newly crowned 2006 World Series Champions!!!

The St. Louis Cardinals have just won their 10th World Series title out of 17 World Series appearances since the beginning of the franchise in the late 19th century. That record is second only to the Yankees. Their last World Championship title was in 1982 (I remember doing Quantum Mechanics homework while watching the games), and before that ‘67 (I was too young to notice), and before that ‘64, and before that…was way way before my time. Of course, the whole “World Series” thing is a bit of a misnomer since it only involves teams from North America, but tonight I don’t think anyone from St. Louis notices or cares.

The St. Louis fans did their part to support and bring good luck to their team:

As for me, I’ve been glued to the TV and sported a different t-shirt from my collection each day this week. I also dusted off my lucky hat which I’ve had since high school.

Time for some champagne for a toast to the Redbirds!

Everybody has their expectations. About basically everything in life. Will the Cardinals win the World Series? Will my date be nice? Can I solve this problem? What can I achieve in life? These are the types of things we all have expectations about.

A Canadian research group recently reported the results of their study on women’s expectations for solving math problems. You can find the article in Science (sorry, you need a subscription), and a report in the NYT. 220 women were divided into 4 groups and given math and reading comprehension tests between 2003 and 2006. The women were given a GRE (Graduate Records Exam)-like math test, then asked to read an essay, and then given a second math exam. Four different essays were handed out. These essays argued that gender differences in math performances were due to (i) genetic (G), or (ii) experiential (E) differences between the sexes, or (iii) employed standard sexual sterotypes without mentioning mathematical abilities (S), or (iv) argued that there are no gender related math-differences (ND).

The results showed that the women receiving the (S) and (G) essays answered 5-10 out of 25 math questions correctly, while the (E) and (ND) essay groups answered 15-20 of the questions correctly. That’s a factor of 2 difference! In other words, the women that were told they would perform poorly because they were women, did.

The results do not seem surprising to me, but I am glad someone has quantified this. I would like to see another study with a larger statistical sample, and I would like to see the results of the first and second math tests to ensure the four populations were statisitcally even in their inate mathematical abilites.

The study was performed by Steven J. Heine, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, and his PhD student Ilan Dar-Nimrod.