This publication describes the methods used to measure the centrality of inelastic Pb-Pb collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 2.76 TeV per colliding nucleon pair with ALICE. The centrality is a key parameter in the study of the properties of QCD matter at extreme temperature and energy density, because it is directly related to the initial overlap region of the colliding nuclei. Geometrical properties of the collision, such as the number of participating nucleons and the number of binary nucleon-nucleon collisions, are deduced from a Glauber model with a sharp impact parameter selection and shown to be consistent with those extracted from the data. The centrality determination provides a tool to compare ALICE measurements with those of other experiments and with theoretical calculations.

A measurement of the ratio of branching fractions of the decays B þ → K þ μ þ μ − and B þ → K þ e þ e − is presented. The proton-proton collision data used correspond to an integrated luminosity of 5.0 fb −1 recorded with the LHCb experiment at center-of-mass energies of 7, 8, and 13 TeV. For the dilepton mass-squared range 1.1 < q 2 < 6.0 GeV 2 =c 4 the ratio of branching fractions is measured to be R K ¼ 0.846 þ0.060 −0.054 þ0.016 −0.014 , where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second systematic. This is the most precise measurement of R K to date and is compatible with the standard model at the level of 2.5 standard deviations.