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* Comments, letters, and articles published on ISSNAF Magazine, and materials posted on ISSNAF Forums express the views of the authors, and do not reflect the views of the Foundation, unless otherwise explicitly stated.
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Inside ISSNAF -
Initiatives
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> ISSNAF Research Interaction Opportunities - (IRIO - 10)
A major objective of ISSNAF is to promote research interactions among students and scholars in North America and Italy. An effective mechanism to further this program is the creation of fellowships. The areas of interest include Economic and Social Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Engineering and Information Sciences, Humanities, Medicine and Biology, and Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics. To this end, ISSNAF is developing a database where topics of existing or potential collaboration are identified. The database will be visible on the web site. The database will also be used by ISSNAF to raise funds for the fellowships from the private and public sectors in Italy and in North America. More...
ISSNAF encourages Italian and North American Researchers interested in the Program to post their research projects using this Form. |
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Inside ISSNAF -
Initiatives
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> 2010 Summer Program of Scientific Internship for Italian Students
ISSNAF - INFN Borse di apprendistato scientifico in USA per studenti di Fisica, Informatica e Ingegneria - Estate 2010 / Summer program of scientific internship at Fermilab Students’ Training Programs.
Marco Colo' (Fisica Sperimentale, University of Pisa)
Supervisor: Patrick Lukens, working in the context of NOVA Project at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Training Plan: During the summer of 2010, the Nova experiment will be installing and commissioning the first sections of the Near Detector in the new Near Detector Surface Building, located just south of the Minos Service Building. The activities for this summer include the mechanical installation of the detector blocks, filling them with liquid scintillator, and installation of the full data acquisition and detector readout electronics. The student will join this effort and will work with members of the Nova collaboration on the electronics installation. That will be the first time a large scale Nova detector will operate.
In addition, there will be a large Nova mechanical prototype built in the summer of 2010. This prototype will be instrumented with strain gauges and proximity sensors, for the purpose of providing information on the mechanical stability of the Nova Far Detector when it is loaded with scintillator. Depending on the advancement of this construction the student will collaborate in this effort as well. All together, working within the Nova team in summer 2010 will provide the student with direct experience with the development of an advanced particle physics detector.
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University Reform Passed by Senate |
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News -
Present and Future of the Italian University
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Thursday, 29 July 2010 23:08 |
Gelmini's university reform may continue to generate heated exchanges outside but the Ddl passed the senate after a relatively short floor discussion, with 152 votes in favour, 94 against, and one abstention. The debate over capping mandatory retirement at 65 was voted down. The bill moves on to the Chamber of Deputies.
Read more...
> Atto Senato n. 1905, XVI Legislatura
> Here are some of the latest comments
- La Voce on Gelmini's university reform
- Giavazzi, un liberista su tutto ma non sull'università, by L. Pegoraro, Italia Oggi
- "Conviene davvero pensionare i baroni," by F. Amabile, La Stampa
- "Largo ai giovani o abbasso i vecchi" by P. Ostellino, Corriere
- «Io ricercatrice dico: non vogliamo solo essere promossi», Corriere Sera
- «Il vero nodo è liberare i posti dei vecchi prof», by Francesco Giavazzi, Corriere Sera
- Vero o falso? Ecco il test per la riforma dell'Universita', by S. Luzzatto, Sole24Ore
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INSMLI-ISSNAF Fellowship Awarded To Stanislao G. Pugliese |
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Inside ISSNAF -
Initiatives
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Thursday, 29 July 2010 00:00 |
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Stanislao Pugliese, a Distinguished Professor of Italian and Italian American Studies at Hofstra University (New York), is the recipient of the first INSMLI-ISSNAF visiting Fellowship at the INSMLI center in Naples (Istituto Campano per la Storia della Resistenza, dell'Antifascismo e dell'Età contemporanea "Vera Lombardi") for the Fall 2010 semester. Professor Pugliese is the author, editor or translator of a dozen books on Italian and Italian American studies. His most recent book, Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone, was the winner of the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History, nominated as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in the USA, and recently awarded the Premio Internazionale Ennio Flaiano per Italianistica (the Flaiano International Prize for Italian Studies, issued by the Cultural Association Ennio Flaiano in collaboration with the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Italian Cultural Institutes worldwide). The new book Pugliese is currently working on -- "Dancing on a Volcano: A Cultural History of Naples," to be published by the prestigious Farrar, Straus & Giroux -- has a chapter on the Quattro Giornate di Napoli, the subject of his research at the INSMLI center in Naples. Years ago, for his first book - "Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Anti-Fascist Exile" (Harvard 1999; Bollati Boringhieri, 2001) -- Pugliese spent time at the INSMLI center in Florence.
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Strong Temptations, Weak Incentives: and the Winner is… ? |
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News -
Present and Future of the Italian University
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Tuesday, 27 July 2010 05:17 |
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An article by Paola Potestio * and Aldo Rustichini **
Potestio and Rustichini test Gelmini Ddl‘s strategy of incentives simulating behavioral responses to the reform of the system of recruitment and promotion within the Italian universities. It doesn’t take much, they claim, to figure out why weak incentives may not succeed in offsetting the pervasive temptations of opportunistic behaviors.
* Paola Potestio is a Professor of Economia politica at Roma 3, and a former dean of the faculty of economics, from 1998 to September 2008. ** Aldo Rustichini is a Professor of Economics at University of Minnesota, and a member of ISSNAF.
Related readings
Paola Potestio – Aldo Rustichini (The authors write in their personal capacity)
Tentazioni forti, incentivi deboli: chi vincera’?
Immaginate di essere un professore in una certa universita' italiana, e che la vostra facolta' abbia l'opportunita' di assumere un nuovo collega. Due candidati sono in ballo. Per un concorso di circostanze, la decisione sta a voi. Per esempio, dopo ampie consultazioni con i colleghi avete capito che il numero dei sostenitori dell'uno e dell'altro candidato sono uguali, e vi trovate dunque ad essere l'ago della bilancia. Si' da' il caso che uno dei candidati sia un amico; l'altro no, anche se e' sicuramente migliore sul piano accademico.
Immaginate ora anche, per un breve momento, di essere una persona guidata prima di tutto dall'interesse personale, e meno da norme astratte di comportamento. Avete ragioni a favore dell'una e dell'altra scelta. L'amico e' un amico, e favori fatti oggi avranno contropartite domani. L'altro amico non e', e quindi non si puo' contare su di lui nel futuro. Ma la maggiore abilita' accademica potrebbe portare dei vantaggi. Per esempio, il dipartimento acquisterebbe lustro grazie alla sua presenza. D'altra parte, un albero grande fa ombra, ed essendo umano, e quindi attento alla vostra collocazione nella gerarchia della facolta', non siete sicuri che questo sia poi un gran guadagno. Stando cosi' le cose, ed essendo voi come si diceva umano, molto umano, propendete per l'amico. E' in fondo una storia comune.
Ora pero' il Ministero vi fa sapere che una quota del Fondo di Finanziamento Ordinario sara' in futuro assegnata ai dipartimenti sulla base della quantita' e qualita' della ricerca prodotta nel dipartimento. Questa quota aggiuntiva sara' distribuita (diciamo cosi', per semplicita') ugualmente fra i membri del dipartimento. In seguito a questa comunicazione, i vostri conti cambiano, e l'amico meno capace e' improvvisamente meno attraente. Questa e' naturalmente una conseguenza positiva: almeno in alcuni casi gli incentivi offerti cambiano la scelta, e nella direzione giusta. Sulla massa delle decisioni, una serie di piccoli effetti marginali, sommandosi, da' un effetto totale di miglioramento. Il problema e', di quanto?
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Higgs Boson Hunters -- a Lighter Catch? |
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News -
ISSNAF News
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Tuesday, 27 July 2010 00:18 |
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| Image credit: Fermilab |
The Higgs particle remains "the last not-yet-observed piece of the theoretical framework known as the Standard Model of Particles and Forces," but Fermilab physicists at the Paris International Conference on High Energy Physic show data which support "improved non-observation" and an "immense progress" on the Higgs' search. Fermilab's experiments "narrow the allowed mass range value for Higgs boson" and the race to be the first to spot the Higgs between the Tevatron teams at Fermilab and the LHC teams at the European particle physics laboratory (CERN) continue to be on as the possibility of finding the "goddamn particle" is seemingly closer.
Guido Tonelli, spokesman for CMS, looks favourably at the prospective of Tevatron and LHC working as "complementary" machines for the next 2 or 3 years -- assuming that the Tevatron continue to run, which is currently being debated and not yet decided.
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Time Traveling -- Paradox Free ? |
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News -
ISSNAF News
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Monday, 26 July 2010 00:06 |
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| Image credit: Seth Lloyd, et al. |
All theories of time travel have been faced with the challenge of the “grandfather paradox:” say, a traveler going back in time could kill his grandfather and thus prevent his own existence, which would also prevent the murder taking place. In the early 1990s, David Deutsch came up with a model which allowed the time traveler remember killing his grandfather without having actually done it -- an improvement which however retains inherent inconsistencies between the past remembered and the past experienced, remarks Seth Lloyd, director of the MIT center for extreme quantum information theory (xQIT), who has been testing quantum time travel theories with a team of researchers including the Italians Vittorio Giovannetti and Lorenzo Maccone.
Lloyd's group put forth a "post selected model" of time travel, an experimental simulation which censors "paradoxical situations" by "going back and outlawing" any event that would prove paradoxical in the future. The xQIT theorists' model beat the "Grandfather Paradox" -- or, as they put it, "no matter how hard the time-traveler tries, she finds her grandfather a tough guy to kill."
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Inside ISSNAF -
Initiatives
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A NEW INITIATIVE: INSMLI-ISSNAF
ISTITUTO NAZIONALE PER LA STORIA
DEL MOVIMENTO DI LIBERAZIONE IN ITALIA
INSMLI Network
Milano
INSMLI and ISSNAF partner to open up outstanding archives and libraries for North American researchers and scholars interested in the study of contemporary history in Italy. The institutes of Bologna, Firenze, Milano, Modena, Napoli, Padova, Torino, Trieste e Venezia are part of the INSMLI Network.
Study of Contemporary History in Italy
The National Institute for the History of the Liberation Movement in Italy (INSMLI), with the Italian Scientists and Scholars in North America Foundation (ISSNAF), offers to University students, graduate students , researchers and Faculty from the US and Canada the exceptional opportunity to access INSMLI’s outstanding collections of information, primary sources, books and studies available in its libraries and archives (which contain both paper and photographic records), on the XXth century history of Italy , particularly in the following fields:
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