Moodle for Italian Astronomy Olympiad

Italian Astronomy Olympiads are organized by Societ\`a Italiana di Astronomia in collaboration with Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) and they are included in the MIUR's upgrading program for educational excellence. The Presidency of the National Olympic Committee based at Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera (INAF). Olympiads are aimed to italian high school students: the winners of the national stage participate to International Astronomy Olympiad (IAO). IAO officially born in 1996 at the initiative of Euro-Asian Astronomical Society. They are held every year in autumn, in a different country, and they see the regular participation of over twenty national teams of the European and Asian area, including Italy. Today the didactical support is limited to the little material provided by Italian Committee on the italian official site. In order to supply this lack, we projected a didatcical platform, developed with Moodle, that it could propose astronomical learning pages like glossary's voices and a lot of exercises about every subject

The Impact of the Institutions on Regional Unemployment Disparities

The main aim of this paper is to study European regional disparities in unemployment, considering regional productive structures and some regional institutional variables. It is widely known that one most important stylized facts concerning the EU consists in regional disparities among regions. Such differences relate to both income per capita and the labour market, the latter generally measured in terms of unemployment rates. In a recent paper (Amendola, Caroleo Coppola, 2004) we have analyzed the economic structure of the EU’s regions using proxies for the productive structure and the labour market. In this paper we estimate a panel data model where the dependent variable is the regional unemployment rate and the independent variables relate to the productive structure and some regional institutional aspects. The results confirm that institutional variables, such as the centralization of wage bargaining, the decentralization of public expenditure and the level of bureaucracy, have important impactson unemployment rates.Unemployment, Regional Disparities, Institutions, Multivariate Analysis, Panel data

Dynamic Price Competition with Price Adjustment Costs and Product Differentiation

We study a discrete time dynamic game of price competition with spatially differentiated products and price adjustment costs. We characterise the Markov perfect and the open-loop equilibrium of our game. We find that in the steady state Markov perfect equilibrium, given the presence of adjustment costs, equilibrium prices are always higher than prices at the repeated static Nash solution, even though, adjustment costs are not paid in steady state. This is due to intertemporal strategic complementarity in the strategies of the firms and from the fact that the cost of adjusting prices adds credibility to high price equilibrium strategies. On the other hand, the stationary open-loop equilibrium coincides always with the static solution. Furthermore, in contrast to continuous time games, we show that the stationary Markov perfect equilibrium converges to the static Nash equilibrium when adjustment costs tend to zero. Moreover, we obtain the same convergence result when adjustment costs tend to infinity.Price adjustment costs, Difference game, Markov perfect equilibrium, Open-loop equilibrium

Health, Lifestyle and Growth

In this paper I will try to explain why lifestyle may have a positive impact on economic growth. First of all, I consider health affecting consumer’s utility and then define a Health Production Function where health is the output and consumer good the input. In this approach a parameter named Lifestyle Return to Scale (LRS) is defined. The first result is that an increase of consumer’s personal income may have a positive or a negative effect on health. In other words health may be a normal or an inferior good. It depends on Lifestyle Return to Scale- According to this result, I compute a health multiplier and then modify the Solow Growth Model in which health is labour-augmenting. The result is a model in which the Lifestyle Return to Scale positively affects the income per capita and the income per capita growth.health; lifestyles; growth

Why Are they Doing so Well while We Are Doing so Badly? A Comparison between the Canadian and Italian University Systems

The Italian university system is in a profound and dangerous crisis. The below par performance of Italian universities is compared with the increasingly successful accomplishments of Canadian Universities. The paper identifies the major source of this performance differential in the hiring and promotion procedures. Funding methods also facilitate the success of Canadian Universities. The paper recommends a radical reform of the Italian system and a move towards a more decentralized, independent, flexible and transparent system like that of Canada.

Health, lifestyle, Growth

In this paper we try to explain why lifestyle may have a positive impact on economic growth. First of all, we consider health affecting consumer’s utility and we define also a Health Production Function where health is the output and the consumer’s good are the inputs. In this approach we define lifestyle as the return to scale of the Health Production Function A first result is that an increase of consumer’s personal income may have a positive or a negative effect on health. According this result, we modify the Solow Growth Model. We consider health as labour-augmenting. The result is a semi-endogenous model in which the population growth affects positively the income per capita growth, if lifestyle is positive.health,lifestyle, growth

Three protected tetrapeptides

The structures of three protected tetrapeptides, containing the Boc-Gly-Gly-Phe-X-OMe chain, tert-butoxycarbonyl-glycy-glycl-phenylalanine-leucine methyl ester dihydrate, Boc-Gly-Gly-L-Phe-D-Leu-OMe, C25H38N4O7·2H2O, tert-butoxycarbonyl-glycy-glycl-phenylalanine-methionine methyl ester dihydrate, Boc-Gly Gly-L-Phe-D-Met-OMe, C24H36N4O7S.2H2O and tert-butoxycarbonyl-glycy-glycl-phenylalanine-norleucine methyl ester dihydrate, Boc-Gly-Gly-D-Phe-L-Nle-OMe, C25H38N4O7.2H2O, are described. The three molecules have the same conformation of the Boc-Gly Gly Phe-X-OMe tetrapeptide chain and display the same packing, consisting of couples of molecules linked head-to-tail by two hydrogen (N-HO) bonds; other hydrogen bonds, also involving two water molecules of crystallization, link these couples together, and give rise to a planar structure

On Decoding Schemes for the MDPC-McEliece Cryptosystem

Recently, it has been shown how McEliece public-key cryptosystems based on moderate-density parity-check (MDPC) codes allow for very compact keys compared to variants based on other code families. In this paper, classical (iterative) decoding schemes for MPDC codes are considered. The algorithms are analyzed with respect to their error-correction capability as well as their resilience against a recently proposed reaction-based key-recovery attack on a variant of the MDPC-McEliece cryptosystem by Guo, Johansson and Stankovski (GJS). New message-passing decoding algorithms are presented and analyzed. Two proposed decoding algorithms have an improved error-correction performance compared to existing hard-decision decoding schemes and are resilient against the GJS reaction-based attack for an appropriate choice of the algorithm's parameters. Finally, a modified belief propagation decoding algorithm that is resilient against the GJS reaction-based attack is presented