Does an International Academic Environment Promote Study Abroad?

Although many studies on international student mobility have examined the impact of individual factors (e.g., gender, age, family background) on students’ decision to study abroad, much less attention has been devoted to the role played by the institutional climate and characteristics of one’s home university. Using data from an Italian survey containing information on a large number of university students, this research investigated the extent to which a more international academic environment incentivizes students to participate in study abroad programs. A logit model was developed to estimate the effect that the degree of internationalization of one’s home university has on the probability that its students will study abroad, while controlling for several student-level factors. The empirical estimates indicate that this effect is significant, suggesting that being part of an international academic environment, where domestic students can interact more frequently with international students, helps motivate them to undertake study abroad. This result stresses the importance of engaging domestic students in the internationalization process of their universities

Changes in socioeconomic inequality in access to study abroad programs: a cross-country analysis

The growing evidence about the benefits of studying abroad calls for increased public efforts to equalize study abroad opportunities among university students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Using student-level data from the nationally representative surveys of three European countries (Italy, France and Germany) between the 2000s and mid-2010s, this paper investigates how the social gap in access to study abroad programs changed over time and what are the factors driving these changes. Logistic regressions are used in order to identify the determinants of study abroad program participation and a decomposition technique is employed in an attempt to both determine how much of the gap each factor explains and compare its relative contribution over time. The results indicate that, not only has disparity in study abroad participation rate between students from more and less advantaged backgrounds not decreased in any of the countries considered here, but there is consistent evidence showing that it has increased in Germany. Differences in earlier educational trajectories and performance between these two groups of students are important predictors of the gap. However, a large part of this gap remains unexplained, and this underscores the important role played by unobserved or difficult-to-measure factors in accounting for inequality

A generalized small model property for languages which force the infinity

This paper deals with formulas of set theory which force the infinity. For such formulas, we provide a technique to infer satisfiability from a finite assignment.Comment: 21 pages. to appear on "Le Matematiche

Periodic solutions of forced Kirchhoff equations

We consider Kirchhoff equations for vibrating bodies in any dimension in presence of a time-periodic external forcing with period 2pi/omega and amplitude epsilon, both for Dirichlet and for space-periodic boundary conditions. We prove existence, regularity and local uniqueness of time-periodic solutions of period 2pi/omega and order epsilon, by means of a Nash-Moser iteration scheme. The results hold for parameters (omega, epsilon) in Cantor sets having measure asymptotically full as epsilon tends to 0. (What's new in version 2: the case of finite-order Sobolev regularity, the case of space-periodic boundary conditions, a different iteration scheme in the proof, some references).Comment: 23 page

What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Science? On Ernst Mach’s Pragmatic Epistemology

The paper aims to investigate some aspects of Ernst Mach’s epistemology in the light of the problem of human orientation in relation to the world (Weltorientierung), which is a main topic of Western philosophy since Kant. As will be argued, Mach has been concerned with that problem, insofar as he developed an original pragmatist epistemology. In order to support my argument, I firstly investigate whether Mach defended a nominalist or a realist account of knowledge and compare his view to those elaborated by other pragmatist thinkers, such as W. James, H. Vaihinger and H. Poincaré. Secondly, the question of what does it mean, for Mach, to orient ourselves in science is addressed. Finally, it will be argued that, although Mach tried to keep his epistemology restricted to a mere operational and economical account of science, that question involves the wider plane of practical philosophy