Atomic secrets and governmental lies : nuclear science, politics and security in the Pontecorvo case

This paper focuses on the defection of nuclear physicist Bruno Pontecorvo from Britain to the USSR in 1950 in an attempt to understand how government and intelligence services assess threats deriving from the unwanted spread of secret scientific information. It questions whether contingent agendas play a role in these assessments, as new evidence suggests that this is exactly what happened in the Pontecorvo case. British diplomatic personnel involved in negotiations with their US counterparts considered playing down the case. Meanwhile, the press decided to play it up, claiming that Pontecorvo was an atom spy. Finally, the British secret services had evidence showing that this was a fabrication, but they did not disclose it. If all these manipulations served various purposes, then they certainly were not aimed at assessing if there was a threat and what this threat really was

For Slow Neutrons, Slow Pay: Enrico Fermi’s Patent and the US Atomic Energy Program, 1938-1953

This essay focuses on the history of one of the “atomic patents.” The patent, which described a process to slow down neutrons in nuclear reactions, was the result of experimental research conducted in the 1930s by Enrico Fermi and his group at the Institute of Physics, University of Rome. The value of the patented process became clear during World War II, as it was involved in most of the military and industrial applications of atomic energy. This ignited a controversy between Fermi and U.S. government representatives over royalties to be paid for use of the process during and after the war. The controversy sheds new light on the role that the management of patents played in the context of the Manhattan Project and in the postwar U.S. nuclear program, encompassing issues of power and economic influence in the relationship between scientists, the military, and public administrators

Galois descent of semi-affinoid spaces

We study the Galois descent of semi-affinoid non-archimedean analytic spaces. These are the non-archimedean analytic spaces which admit an affine special formal scheme as model over a complete discrete valuation ring, such as for example open or closed polydiscs or polyannuli. Using Weil restrictions and Galois fixed loci for semi-affinoid spaces and their formal models, we describe a formal model of a $K$-analytic space $X$, provided that $X\otimes_KL$ is semi-affinoid for some finite tamely ramified extension $L$ of $K$. As an application, we study the forms of analytic annuli that are trivialized by a wide class of Galois extensions that includes totally tamely ramified extensions. In order to do so, we first establish a Weierstrass preparation result for analytic functions on annuli, and use it to linearize finite order automorphisms of annuli. Finally, we explain how from these results one can deduce a non-archimedean analytic proof of the existence of resolutions of singularities of surfaces in characteristic zero.Comment: Exposition improved and minor modifications. 37 pages. To appear in Math.

Productivity and Technical Efficiency in the Italian Insurance Industry

The purpose of this paper is to partially fill the gap in the existing literature by conducting an analysis of technical efficiency and productivity growth in the Italian insurance industry. The analysis makes use of a detailed data base on Italian life and non-life insurance companies over the period 1985-1993, provided by the Associazione Nazaionale fra le Impress Assicurazioni, the association of insurance companies. The authors measure technical efficiency, changes in technical efficiency over time, and technical changes over time for a sample of Italian insurers, and use the results to test hypotheses regarding industrial organization and to analyze trends associated with structural developments in the market. Data development analysis (DEA) is used to estimate product frontiers for each year of the sample. A production frontier gives the minimum inputs required to produce any given output vector. An important reason for conducting the analysis presented is to provide benchmark statistics to facilitate comparisons of efficiency and productivity under the new European regulatory regime when data on more recent periods become available. In addition, the production frontier results are used to test hypotheses about two major issues in industrial organization - the coexistence of alternative product distribution systems, and organizational forms in an industry. The results indicated that technical efficiency in the Italian insurance industry ranged from 70 to 78 percent during the sample period. There was almost no efficiency change over the sample period. However, productivity declined significantly over the sample period, with a cumulative decline of about 25 percent. The decline was attributable almost exclusively to technological regress, implying that insurers needed more inputs to produce their outputs at the end of the sample period that they did at the beginning. Although improvement in both technical efficiency and technical change appear to be needed, the main problem at present appears to be the adverse shift in the production frontier. Although the sources of the technical regress characterizing the Italian industry are not entirely clear, this phenomenon has been observed in at least one other financial services industry that experienced deregulation and growth in new products and distribution systems - the Spanish savings banks. In a dynamically changing environment, many insurers may be adopting new approaches to producing their outputs. This provides more opportunities for firms to make mistakes in the choice of technology, perhaps leading to excessive consumption of inputs even by "best practice" firms. An increase in the complexity of insurance products and markets could have a similar effect. As firms become more experienced at operating in the new environment and the initial false-starts in the adoption of new technology have been corrected, the productivity of the Italian insurance industry can be expected to improve. The increase in competition resulting from deregulation should reinforce this process, as firms that fail to improve are likely to be penalized the by the market.

Extreme Value distribution for singular measures

In this paper we perform an analytical and numerical study of Extreme Value distributions in discrete dynamical systems that have a singular measure. Using the block maxima approach described in Faranda et al. [2011] we show that, numerically, the Extreme Value distribution for these maps can be associated to the Generalised Extreme Value family where the parameters scale with the information dimension. The numerical analysis are performed on a few low dimensional maps. For the middle third Cantor set and the Sierpinskij triangle obtained using Iterated Function Systems, experimental parameters show a very good agreement with the theoretical values. For strange attractors like Lozi and H\`enon maps a slower convergence to the Generalised Extreme Value distribution is observed. Even in presence of large statistics the observed convergence is slower if compared with the maps which have an absolute continuous invariant measure. Nevertheless and within the uncertainty computed range, the results are in good agreement with the theoretical estimates