Italians are quite honest, after all

The Economist publishes a summary graph detailing how often european people use undeclared labour to purchase goods or services.
Quite surprisingly, Denmark, The Netherlands and Sweden come to the first places… Rather than, say, Italy. Is iot that we really buy less ‘grey’ goods and services? Or just that Italian don’t even perceive buying sunglasses from the senegalese street-kiosk and paying the car’s mechanic cash without fiscal receipt as ‘the same kind of thing’? Me thinks the second one is more correct…

DMC-FZ18 Reviews, finally!!!

I have finally found some reviews of the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18. Here, and here. I am sold. I am ordering it as soon as I can from the US, together with a DMC-TZ3 for my lady. I still can’t understand why prices in the EU are so outrageous, with the TZ3 costing 400 Euros and well below 300 US$ on the other side of the pond. Even counting in taxes, it still makes no sense.

Stay tuned for my next pictures, probably starting with my trip to Rwanda at year’s end.

Grey Power

The Economist tackle the issue of Italy’s education system breakdown (may require subscription)

The biggest fault in Italian education is that there are too many old teachers

Since 2000 successive reports from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment have shattered the belief that Italian schools are among Europe’s best. The most recent put them near the bottom of the heap. In maths Italy’s 15-year-olds were outperformed by their peers in all but three OECD countries. Almost a third were “unable to display the minimum level of mathematics proficiency needed to succeed in their professional and private life”. The share of young adults with essential qualifications was far below the OECD average.

No similarly exhaustive comparison has been done for tertiary education. But that so many young Italians study abroad, and so few young foreigners (2% of all foreign students) do in Italy, points to equally low standards at university level.

All of this sounds sadly true to me.

If I have to judge on the limited sample of high school students which I get to talk to (my youngest brother) , I can see the huge divide with what I was taught to, often by the very same professors (thirteen years apart, we shared the same math teacher). Even taking into account differences in personal attitude, the rest must be ascribed to decreasing quality of education.

We must find a way to fix this. I will certainly not be one of the meagerly-paid high school teacher for Italy’s new path to education. 1100 Euros/month to tackle 25 teen-agers day after day is pretty close to my idea of Hell.

Ouch! Fantastic Four: The rise of Silver Surfer sucks, too…

The NY Times reviewer says so.

Well, I guess that I’ll have to check it out as usual. Although since the move I haven’t been very active in downloading movies. Miracles of commuting, I’d say.
(In the picture, the Silver Surfer leaves the cinema in a rush after the movie, to avoid furious spectators)

My movie time goes wasted on the motorway, now. Together with the hydrocarboms laboriously
accumulated by mother Earth during the last 500 million years. Ouch!

Ze books I am reading.

It’s been a while since I have posted about which books I am reading.

Not much new, in fact, I haven’t had the time to finish Dr Tatiana’s (now a TV series!)yet, which is OK for casual reading since it’s made of short letters. It usually makes my cess-pit-stops (can I say this on a blog?) more interesting.

And, to celebrate the start of my Mechelen-2-Turnhout daily commuting, I have started reading Stephen Baxter’s Exultant. A book settled 28000 years in the future, in the Xeelee sequence as one of his fctitious universe is known. I previously read Timelike Infinity:

Set thousands of years in the future (5407AD), the human race has been conquered by the Qax, a truly alien turbulent-liquid form of life, who now rule over the few star systems of human space – adopting processes from human history to effectively oppress the resentful race. Humans have encountered a few other races, including the astoundingly advanced Xeelee, and been conquered once before – by the Squeem – but successfully recovered.

A human-built device, the Interface project, returns to the solar system after 1,500 years. The project, towed by the spaceship Cauchy, returns a wormhole gate, appearing to offer time travel due to the time ‘difference’ between the exits of the wormhole (relativistic time dilation), with one end having remained in the solar system and the other traveling at near lightspeed for a century. The Qax had destroyed the solar system gate, but a lashed-up human ship (a great chunk of soil including Stonehenge, crewed by a group called the Friends of Wigner) passes through the returning gate, traveling back to the unconquered humanity of 1,500 years ago.

I also read Ring, previously, where the Xeelee sequence kind of come to an end, at least in this universe. I did skip Flux, since, even if the premise of the book looks cool, with microscopic humans transcribed on a neutron star’s surface used as weapon against the Xeelee Ring, it doesn’t strike me as enough interesting to build a whole book out of it. May be I’ll recover it later.

But let’s get back to Exultant. Humankind has been at war with the all-powerful Xeelee, princes of the creation, for the past 25000 years, and the conquest of the galaxy has stalled all around the Galaxy core for some 3 thousand years or so. The part I’ve read until now is all about the struggle of few humans to find a new way to hit the Xeelee, exploiting a time-travel computing machine able to overcome the computing power which is apparently the Xeelee’s single greatest advantage over humans. And here, in my humble opinion, start the problems. I can imagine a war lasting 28 thousand years. I can understand that the whole society gets restructured and forced by this prolonged state of war, as so many resources are devoted to destructive means and not to improving humankind’s condition. Still, the world depicted by baxter seems to me grossly unrealistic – their technology seems to be pretty advanced, yet their fundamental science seems to be still stuck at our times. Also, I really can’t believe that in 25 thousand years of FTL fighting, nobody else ever thought about the FTL-CPU. Mah… The lost technologies seems to be lost forever, as in the ability of humans of 20000 years before to create exotic matter and wormholes. It would be like us complaining that nobody today knows how to make a decent spearhead out of a piece of rock. For sure I don’t right now, but if I needed one, I’d learn how to – in fact I know how hard is to get obsidian’s arrowheads since I did try this when I was a teenager. The character in the book seems to be dumb, compared to today’s humans.

Also, if the Xeelee are so powerful, how come that we managed to get hold of the whole galaxy, just with stolen technology? And how come that our competition hasn’t spurred the Xeelee to improve their own technology? I really can’t envisage a 3 thousand years long stalemate, not without at least an attempt to armistice. And if the xeelee really think of us as vermins, why on hell they didn’t sterilise Earth before we took off to the stars? Mah…

Other than that, the book offer the usual assortment of nice characters, albeit stereotyped and not as well developed as those from, for example, Peter F Hamilton books, whos story doesn’t push that far in the future, but certainly looks more realistic.

In general, I probably resent Baxter incredibly pessimistic view of aliens. I mean, I am no Star Trek fan, for sure, but really can’t imagine that the Xeelee would not ask for other races help rather than trying to accomplish what they’re up to on their own. And I really can’t believe that an alien race would subjugate us just because they can, wiping out our ecosystem – I mean, one thing is to decimate human, this could also be OK. But if I were an alien, I would make sure that I kept as much as I can of Earth biology base intact, if nothing else ’cause some strange compound may turn out to be useful to me.

Even worst is the way humans treat their home planet. Ok that the Squeem, then the Qax made a mess out of it. Ok that most of their ancient knowledge has been lost, after thousand of years of occupation. But seriously, do you really think that we would drill down to the core of Earth to get Iron out of a deep gravity weel when so much of it is available for the grab in countless asteroids all around this system and other that we can easily accesswith our mighty spaceships? Please Stephen, be serious and check your economics.

All in all, I still like it enough to push until the end, hopefully it’ll get better.

(edit: why is it so easy to review a book, and so hard to write my goddamn papers?)

Study Finds Hurricanes Frequent in Some Cooler Periods

Ouch! even when the ocean has been warmer, in the past five thousand years, strings of hurricanes managed to ravage the Atlantic Caribbean… This is the conclusion of some analysis performed by some scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Here’s their press release. Apparently, variation on the intensity of El Niño and monsoon intensity in West Africa influence the Caribbean hurricane season.
Should we trust them? Are we sure they are not some kind of fake research institute funded by republicans? As a matter of fact they’re not, and they state their position on real warming quite clearly in the paper, saying that more than one mechanism may be at play in determining the weather patterns in the area – Global warming effect seems to be ascertained, and if it were to compound with one of these cold-pacific, rainy-Africa periods, effects might be even more devastating than expected. No Hurray for global warmers denialist, then. Quite the opposite. But then they will probably laugh at the idea that one can obtain reliable sampling of past hurricane intensity from the muddy bottom of lagoons. Their intelligence, unfortunately, can’t grasp that much. In the mud, they simply live…

a funny news from their website: Vitamin B12 Is Also an Essential Vitamin for Marine Life
The vitamin has impacts on the marine food web and Earth’s climate – reading it like this, it looks like we should dissolve big-ass pills of vitamins in the oceans, to keep it healthy. But don’t worry, those scientist haven’t gone mad…

in the words of the authors: The presence or absence of B12 in the ocean plays a vital and previously overlooked role in determining where, how much, and what kinds of microscopic algae (called phytoplankton) will bloom in the sea, according to a study published in the May issue of the journal Limnology and Oceanography.

These photosynthesizing plants, in turn, have a critical impact on Earth’s climate: They draw huge amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, from the air, incorporating carbon into their bodies. When they die or are eaten, carbon is transferred to the ocean depths, where it cannot re-enter the atmosphere.

Many more news to discover in their website… go and check it out!

Chimera, Grifon, Laelaps…

Which one is NOT a mythical creature?

Laelaps introduces us a really intelligent alternative to visiting the Creation Museum, some damn piece of crap put up by some pice of crap-ass creationist in the american untellectual junkyard.

So, you should rather go, Laelaps suggests, to the American Museum of Natural History’s exhibition on Mythical Creatures, where fantasy is certainly better used than in thos bible stories – I think desert shepherd should have been just that, without attempting to compete with science fiction with their “Bible”.

(I will admit though that I read the bible in comic version, where I was a child – it was given to me by a nun aunt, and I didn’t know better. drawings were ok, too, although I found the stories strangely anticlimatics. Also, I believe the Apocalyps wasn’t include. The only decent part, probably. Pity.

Luckily, I have the Gaiman and Pratchett version of it.

Google’s User Experience Research

I signed up to complete Google’s User Experience Research. The banner said something like “Would you like to play around with blogger for one hour or so, and get 100$?”

Of course I want. At the heart, I am still a student, happy to drop down a pill even if it makes my hair falls (that’s NOT how I lost them – long story) – so, money for toying with computers? that’s MY current job, right? why not moonlight?

Hopefully, they will not ask too much about my personal life.

Until now, it’s mostly about the usage of their web services – most of which I enjoy, some other I rarely use, a couple I don’t know what they’re about – Orkut? what’s that?

Third page of five: usage of Google’s and third party softwares and online services, for communication, news reading and such.

Fourth page, more of the same.

Fifth page, is for employers, so just skip it.

End!!!

page says: Thank you for filling out our survey. We will keep your details on file and contact you when a suitable study comes up.

So, where’s my money? What? that was the application form? You bastards!!!

Featured in the (bad) press

Uh Oh, The NY Times has a very nasty piece on the American branch of J&J and AM GEN who’ve apparently been paying (a lot) doctors to prescribe their anti-anemia treatments (EPO, a.k for its role in cycling doping).

Here’s how the trick works.

Doctors buy from the company 9M US$ worth of drug. They prescribe it to the patients. Insurance or Medicare pays (let’s say) 10M US$, to cover the drug’s and all other costs. The company who sold the drug, though, send the doctors a rebates worth 2.7 M US$. Profit!!!

Frankly, I am disgusted of these practices, especially knowing that the company I work for (one of the two) prizes itself so much over his own credo. Now, I know this kind of practices are legal in the US, still this does not make them morally acceptable. Bleagh.

Finally, the End is Near for Pharma Reps

The NY Times reports on the malsane (for me) habit of big and small pharma to give away free samples to doctors. These samples are then passed to patients, often against suggested first line treatments. now, that’s bad. It’s also bad that pharma reps invite out for expensive dinner/lunches
doctors, with the pretext of talking them about the latest drug from their companies. I don’t say this because my lady is a doctor and I am jaealous of the pharma shills knocking at her door. Well, that doesn’t make them wellcome to me, for sure. I am an italian boy, after all. What really pisses me off is seeing all that money being spent in marketing ploys of doubtful effect on doctors. Money which the patients end up paying, at the end, with higher medicines costs, and therefore higher taxes. It’s a lose-lose situation, excluded may be for pharma shills which, after all, have to eke out a living (and were more interested in driving a powerful free car than in doing actual science – stab!).

In the great scheme of things, probably, free samples do the least arm, I would say. As a child of a poor family, I have often been treated with free sample coming from my family doctor’s cabinet. And, I am also OK with big pharma paying out conferences to doctors (and scientist, although the numbers involved aren’t nearly the same – even as orders of magnitude) – but is it really necessary to run every single shitty medical conference at the Sheraton or Plaza? Isn’t it enough to talk in the auditorium of some University, equally well equipped and certainly less expensive? I can’t tell for sure, but hey, here’s my two cents. If that is, doctors really are interested in hearing about the latest treatment, and not merely in getting a free paid holiday in a luxury hotel, all in.