The determinants of teacher mobility. Evidence from a panel of Italian teachers

In the Italian system teachers are allocated to schools according to a seniority-based centralized system with no role of individual schools in attracting, selecting and retaining teachers. Largely because of the rather limited pay scale, seniority-based rights to move to a particular school and geographical location represent one of the main career opportunities for tenured teachers. This paper examines the main drivers of the resulting (voluntary) mobility of Italian teachers. We find that the teachers' place of birth (after securing a tenured position, teachers try find work near their place of birth) and several features related to the student mix and the social context of the school are very important. Teachers systematically try to move away from schools where teaching is likely to be more difficult, for example where the students come from a lower socio-economic background and have poorer educational abilities even though teachers could have a more important role in boosting students' human capital accumulation. The centralized allocation system does not appear to equalize opportunities among different school environments. Furthermore, the absence of any criteria other than seniority in regulating teachers' locational preferences produces high staff turnover and a widespread lack of motivation among teachers who, all too often, are simply waiting in one school until they can move on to another.The labour market for teachers, teacher mobility, geographical mobility, school characteristics

Labour market for teachers: Demographic characteristics and allocative mechanisms

The paper considers the teachers’ labour market in Italy. The quality and motivation of teachers are certainly among the determinants of pupils’ achievement, but they are difficult to measure, so we examine the composition of the pool of teachers and their behaviour to infer information about them. We look also at the institutional features that motivate the implicit contract that drives Italian teachers' behaviour, which essentially involves low salary and correspondingly low commitment and effort. In particular we examine the mechanism that allocates teachers to schools. For each school we construct three indicators; one indicating the level of turnover, which we interpret as a source of turmoil; one that refers to the mismatch between tenured teachers and their school; and a “revealed preferences indicator” that measures the schools’ quality as evaluated by the population of tenured teachers. We measure the association at the school level of our indicators with achievement as gauged by PISA 2003. Students scores are correlated negatively to the turnover and the mismatch indicators, positively to revealed preferences.Teachers labour market, Italian educational system

The Earth transiting the Sun as seen from Jupiter's moons: detection of an inverse Rossiter-McLaughlin effect produced by the Opposition Surge of the icy Europa

We report on a multi-wavelength observational campaign which followed the Earth's transit on the Sun as seen from Jupiter on 5 Jan the 2014. Simultaneous observations of Jupiter's moons Europa and Ganymede obtained with HARPS from La Silla, Chile, and HARPS-N from La Palma, Canary Islands, were performed to measure the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect due to the Earth's passage using the same technique successfully adopted for the 2012 Venus Transit (Molaro et al 2013). The expected modulation in radial velocities was of about 20 cm/s but an anomalous drift as large as 38 m/s, i.e. more than two orders of magnitude higher and opposite in sign, was detected instead. The consistent behaviour of the two spectrographs rules out instrumental origin of the radial velocity drift and BiSON observations rule out the possible dependence on the Sun's magnetic activity. We suggest that this anomaly is produced by the Opposition Surge on Europa's icy surface, which amplifies the intensity of the solar radiation from a portion of the solar surface centered around the crossing Earth which can then be observed as a a sort of inverse Rossiter-McLaughling effect. in fact, a simplified model of this effect can explain in detail most features of the observed radial velocity anomalies, namely the extensions before and after the transit, the small differences between the two observatories and the presence of a secondary peak closer to Earth passage. This phenomenon, observed here for the first time, should be observed every time similar Earth alignments occur with rocky bodies without atmospheres. We predict it should be observed again during the next conjunction of Earth and Jupiter in 2026.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure

Neutrino mixings from a U(2) flavour symmetry

We extend a previously developed description of the flavour parameters in the charged fermion sector, based on a U(2) flavour symmetry, to include two main features of the neutrino sector seemingly implied by recent data: a large mixing angle $\theta_{\mu \tau}$ and a large hierarchy in the neutrino squared mass differences. A unified description of quark and lepton masses and mixings emerges. The neatest quantitative predictions are for elements of the unitary mixing matrix in the lepton sector: |V_{\mu 1}| = |V_{e 3} / V_{\mu 3}| = |V_{e 2} / V_{\tau 3}| = \sqrt{m_e / m_\mu}, which go together with the analogous relations in the quark sector: |V_{ub} / V_{cb}| = \sqrt{m_u / m_c}, |V_{td} / V_{ts}| = \sqrt{m_d / m_s}Comment: 11 pages, uses amsmat

Experimental Realization of Polarization Qutrits from Non-Maximally Entangled States

Based on a recent proposal [Phys. Rev. A 71, 062337 (2005)], we have experimentally realized two photon polarization qutrits by using non-maximally entangled states and linear optical transformations. By this technique high fidelity mutually unbiased qutrits are generated at a high brilliance level.Comment: RevTex, 8 pages, 6 figure

Two-loop QCD corrections to charged-Higgs-mediated b→sγb\to s\gamma decay

The charged-Higgs-mediated contribution to the Wilson coefficient of the $b\to s\gamma$ magnetic penguin is expected to be one of the more promising candidates for a supersymmetric effect in B physics, probably the only one in gauge-mediated models. We compute the two-loop QCD correction to it. With naive dimensional regularization and MSbar subtraction, for reasonable values of the charged Higgs mass and for mu-bar = m_top, we find a (10--20)% reduction of the corresponding one-loop effect.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures. Misprints corrected. Comparison with hep-ph/9710335 adde

Heliocentric distance dependencies of the C2 lifetime and C2 parent production rate in comet P/Brorsen-Metcalf (1989o)

Comet P/Brorsen-Metcalf (1989o) has been extensively observed in the visible and in the ultraviolet during its latest apparition of summer 1989. In this paper we report a preliminary determination of the C2 production rates and lifetimes and we compare those rates to the H2O production rates obtained from UV data

Two-loop heavy top effects on the MZ-MW interdependence

The O(alpha^2 mt^2/mw^2) correction to the relation between G_\mu and the vector boson masses is computed in the MSbar scheme, and the results are used to investigate the magnitude of the effect on the theoretical prediction of mw and sin^2\theta_\msbar(mz) from alpha, G_\mu, and mz.Comment: 11 pages, LaTeX, includes 1 LaTeX figure, uses equations.sty and cite.sty, one minor comment and interpolation function for variable mtop added, no change in the result