"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<p>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.<p>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.<p>The situation is equally difficult for postdocs trying to make the jump to a junior faculty position or a permanent job at a national lab. The Snowmass Young Physicists survey received responses from 956 early-career researchers, including 343 postdocs. But INSPIRE currently lists just 152 "junior" positions, including 61 in North America. And the supply of jobs isn't likely to increase, says John Finley, an astrophysicist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who is leading a search to replace two senior particle physicists. "For the most part, I don't think departments are looking to grow their particle physics programs," he says.<p><a href="http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2013_08_29/caredit.a1300185" rel="nofollow">http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previou...</a><p>Despite earlier assurances that it had been deleted, Google still had in its possesion payload data collected by its Street View cars' Wi-Fi systems<p><a href="http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Google-must-delete-last-of-UK-Street-View-data-1894652.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Google-must-delet...</a>
Meanwhile that's how <i>data</i> gets processed:
<a href="http://company.yandex.com/press_center/blog/entry.xml?pid=6" rel="nofollow">http://company.yandex.com/press_center/blog/entry.xml?pid=6</a><p>"One of the four big experiments at the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, is now testing Yandex’s machine learning technology, MatrixNet, on their data on B-meson decay."
To better understand the scale of the detectors, look at this picture of ATLAS: <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/views/view/streetview/cern/cern-atlas/kWZ2TA53b9AAAAQJODkDDg?gl=us&heading=170&pitch=105&fovy=75" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/maps/views/view/streetview/cern/cern-...</a> . There's a _crane_ reaching up to the beamline which is ~1/2 of the size of the cavity the detector is in.