Book review: happiness and social policy in Europe edited by Bent Greve

Happiness has become a central research issue in recent years, and this book brings together researchers from around Europe to present, analyse and discuss the relationship between happiness and social policy. Pierpaolo Perna finds a very informative and insightful collection of essays, and recommends it for policymakers, researchers and academics interested in combining economics, psychology and sociology

Strategies for EU survival: bind states to cooperate, improve democratic legitimacy, and make the decision making process more efficient

Public unease with the European Union, Euro problems, and dysfunctional institutions give rise to the real danger that the EU will become increasing irrelevant, just as its member states face more and more challenges in a globalised world. Jean-Claude Piris, a leading figure in the conception and drafting of the EU’s legal structures, works through the options available in light of the economic and political climate, assessing their effectiveness. Reviewed by Pierpaolo Perna. The Future of Europe: Towards a Two-Speed EU? Jean-Claude Piris. Cambridge University Press. December 2011

From Smart Cities To Playable Cities. Towards Playful Intelligence In The Urban Environment

In the last decade, we have seen the rise of urban play as a tool for community building, and city-making and Western society is actively focusing on play/playfulness and intelligent systems as a way to approach complex challenges and emergent situations. In this paper, we aim to initiate a dialogue between game scholars and architects. Like many creative professions, we believe that the architectural practice may benefit significantly from having more design methodologies at hand, thus improving lateral thinking. We aim at providing new conceptual and operative tools to discuss and reflect on how games and smart systems facilitate long-term the shift from the Smart Cities to the Playable one, where citizens/players have the opportunity to hack the city and use the smart city’s data and digital technology for their purposes to reactivate the urban environment

Gamma-ray Burst Remnants: How can we find them?

By now there is substantial evidence that Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) originate at cosmological distances from very powerful explosions. The interaction between a GRB and its surrounding environment has dramatic consequences on the environment itself. At early times, the strong X-ray UV afterglow flux photoionizes the medium on distance scales on the order of 100 pc or more. Here I discuss the long-term effects resulting from the interaction between a GRB and its environment, and in particular the signatures of the emission spectrum produced while the heated and ionized gas slowly cools and recombines. Besides photoionizing the medium with its afterglow, a GRB explosion drives a blast wave which is expected to have a very long lifetime. I discuss possible candidates for such GRB remnants in our own and in nearby galaxies, and ways to distinguish them from remnants due to other phenomena, such as multiple supernova (SN) explosions.Comment: 3 pages, to appear in the proceedings of the 2nd Workshop "Gamma-Ray Bursts in the Afterglow Era",Rome,Oct.17-20,200

Moduli spaces of abstract and embedded Kummer varieties

In this paper, we investigate the construction of two moduli stacks of Kummer varieties. The first one is the stack $\mathcal K^{\text{abs}}_g$ of abstract Kummer varieties and the second one is the stack $\mathcal K^{\text{em}}_g$ of embedded Kummer varieties. We will prove that $\mathcal K^{\text{abs}}_g$ is a Deligne-Mumford stack and its coarse moduli space is isomorphic to $\boldsymbol A_g$, the coarse moduli space of principally polarized abelian varieties of dimension $g$. On the other hand we give a modular family $\mathcal W_g\to U$ of embedded Kummer varieties embedded in $\mathbb P^{2^g-1}\times\mathbb P^{2^g-1}$, meaning that every geometric fiber of this family is an embedded Kummer variety and every isomorphic class of such varieties appears at least once as the class of a fiber. As a consequence, we construct the coarse moduli space $\boldsymbol{\mathsf K}^{\text{em}}_2$ of embedded Kummer surfaces and prove that it is obtained from $\boldsymbol A_2$ by contracting a particular curve inside this space. We conjecture that this is a general fact: $\boldsymbol{\mathsf K}^{\text{em}}_g$ could be obtained from $\boldsymbol A_g$ via a contraction for all $g>1$.Comment: 31 page

Accretion flows in early-type galaxies and CMB experiments

We investigate the possible contribution from the emission of accretion flows around supermassive black holes in early type galaxies to current measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) at radio frequencies. We consider a range of luminosities suggested by targeted radio observations and accretion models and compute the residual contribution of these sources to the spectrum and bispectrum of the observed CMB maps. As for high-resolution CMB experiments, we find that the unresolved component of these sources could make up to ~40-50% of the observed CBI and BIMA power spectrum at l > 2000. As a consequence, the inferred sigma_8^{SZ} value could be biased high by up to 6-7%. As for all sky experiments, we find that the contribution of accretion-flow sources to the WMAP bispectrum is at the 2-3 per cent level at most. At the flux limit that Planck will achieve, however, these sources may contribute up to 15 per cent of the bispectrum in the 60-100 GHz frequency range. Moreover, Planck should detect hundreds of these sources in the 30-300 GHz frequency window. These detections, possibly coupled with galaxy type confirmation from optical surveys, will allow number counts to put tighter constraints on early-type galaxies radio luminosity and accretion flows properties. These sources may also contribute up to the 30 per cent level to the residual radio sources power spectrum in future high-resolution SZ surveys (like ACT or APEX) reaching mJy flux limits.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, accepted to MNRA