John Ziman

What pushed His Excellency Enrico Fermi, acclaimed Academician of Italy entitled to a state car and driver, to leave Italy all of a sudden in December 1938 in order to reach New York, after a short stop in Stockholm for the ceremony that celebrated him as a Nobel laureate for physics, and to accept a job as a simple physics lecturer at the Columbia University

Web, bosoni e mendaci neutrini. Lezioni epistemologiche dal tempio della comunicazione totale

The European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva is the world biggest physics laboratory. But CERN is a communication laboratory, too. At CERN twenty years ago it was created the web. Today in CERN physicists are testing science communication in original situation: both in cases of successful researches (as the recent discovery of “Higgs boson”) both in case of “salutiferi errori”, providential errors, (as the recent saga of “neutrino faster than light”)

Systematically sceptical

One can no longer rely on the presumption that scientists comply with the Mertonian value of disinterest and assume that they always tell the truth when spreading the results of their research projects. This can be rightly considered as the gist of the four-page report submitted to the board of the American journal Science by the committee chaired by the chemist John Brauman, from the Stanford University, and comprising three members from the Senior Editorial Board of the same journal, two eminent biologists specialised in stem cell research and a top editor from the other major general press medium of the Republic of Science, the British journal Nature

A Nobel prize to public science communication

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has bestowed the 2007 Nobel Peace Price equally upon the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore, former vice-President of the United States of America, with the same motivation: «for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change»

Spectrum Sensing and Sharing for Cognitive Radar Systems

The IEEE 802.22 standard specifies the air interface, including the cognitive medium access control layer (MAC) and physical layer (PHY), of point-to-multipoint wireless regional area networks (WRAN) comprised of a professional fixed Base Station (BS) with fixed and portable user terminals, referred as the Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) devices, operating in the white spaces in the VHF/UHF TV broadcast bands while avoiding interference to the incumbent broadcast services. This work focuses on a Passive Coherent Location (PCL) system that exploits the signals emitted by IEEE 802.22 devices and is referred hereafter as a White Space PCL (WS-PCL) system. To cope with the very low transmitted EIRP of the IEEE 802.22 emitters, we focus on the design of a WS-PCL system that exploits all the useful signals received in each frame, and therefore the signals emitted from both the BS and CPEs. In this work we study the feasibility of the WS-PCL system, we derive the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) of the WS-PCL receiver and we define a multistatic velocity profiling algorithm for the estimation of the target velocity vector. The performances of the proposed receiver are compared with those of a WS-PCL system that exploits only the signal emitted by the BS

A total society of knowledge

The major Lisbon goal is to give Europe back the primacy as a society of knowledge. `Giving back' is a more appropriate term than `giving', as Europe long held that primacy in the past, and virtually as a monopoliser from the 17th century throughout the 19th. Then, Europe shared it with North America for a long portion of the 20th century

Scienza, democrazia e mercato

Nel mio intervento cercherò di dimostrare che la scienza, contrariamente a quanto molti pensano, è un’attività profondamente democratica e che democratici sono i suoi valori fondativi. I rapporti con la democrazia politica, tuttavia, sono complessi. La democrazia, dal canto suo, deve tutelare la libertà di ricerca e ha bisogno di una scienza libera. Mentre la scienza ha bisogno, per così dire, di una “libertà locale”. Nell’era della scienza cosiddetta post-accademica, tuttavia, il rapporto tra scienza e democrazia si complica, perché gli investimenti privati in ricerca e sviluppo assommano a due terzi di quelli totali. Ma per sua natura l’impresa tende ad obiettivi immediati e privati, appunto, ponendo seri vincoli alla trasparenza e all’universalità dell’attività scientifica

Pandemic: how to avoid panic?

The tsunami that took place on 26th December 2004 in the Indian Ocean and hurricane Katrina, that last August struck the Mexican Gulf, are two recent natural events that turned into catastrophes for mankind, causing several thousands victims. One of the reasons behind this can be traced back to the fact that useful information in the hands of scientists and experts did not reach the right people within the right time. A crushing defeat for risk communication was witnessed in these two recent events. All the more paradoxical since we live in what we like to name “the era of communication and information”

Nasal histamine responses in nonallergic rhinitis with eosinophilic syndrome

Background: Nonallergic rhinitis with eosinophilic syndrome (NARES) is persistent, without atopy, but with ≥25% nasal eosinophilia. Hypereosinophilia seems to contribute to nasal mucosa dysfunction. Objectives: This analytical case-control study aimed at assessing the presence and severity of nonspecific nasal hyperactivity and at finding out whether eosinophilia may be correlated with the respiratory and mucociliary clearance functions. Materials: The symptom score was assessed in 38 patients and 15 controls whose nasal smear was also tested for eosinophils and mucociliary transport (MCT). Nonspecific nasal provocation tests (NSNPT) with histamine were also carried out, and total nasal resistance (TNR) was determined. Results: The symptom score of NARES after NSNPT were not significantly different from the control group, and there was poor or no correlation among the single symptoms and the differences studied for every nasal reactivity class. This correlation improved when using the composite symptom score. The most severe eosinophilia was observed in high reactivity groups, and it was correlated with an increase in TNR. MCT worsened as eosinophilia and nasal reactivity increased. Unlike controls, a significant correlation was observed between the increase in MCT and TNR. Conclusions: In NARES, nonspecific nasal hyperreactivity is the result of epithelial damage produced by eosinophilic inflammation, which causes MCT slow down, an increase in TNR, and nasal reactivity classes, with possible impact on classification, prognosis, and treatment control