Experimental history: swinging pendulums and melting shellac     

Paolo Palmieri   《Endeavour》2009,33(3):88-92

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Fairness in education: The Italian university before and after the reform     

Paolo Brunori  Vito PeragineLaura Serlenga 《Economics of Education Review》2012

In 2001 the Italian tertiary education system embarked in a broad process of reform. The main novelty brought by the reform was a reduction of the length of study to get a first level degree together with the introduction of a two-years, second level, master degree. This paper aims at studying the effects of the reform in terms of fairness. To this end, we first define fairness criteria following a well developed theory of equality of opportunity, we then discuss existing inequality measures consistent with these criteria, we show their relationship, and adapt them to the educational framework. We finally employ this set of measures to show the evolution of fairness in the access to university in Italy before and after the reform. Although not all fairness measures we estimated show a higher degree of fairness after the reform, the large majority does, suggesting a positive effect of the reform under a vast range of possible definitions of fairness.  相似文献   

The Evolution of Teaching Instruments and Their Use Between 1800 and 1930     

Paolo Brenni 《Science & Education》2012,21(2):191-226

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the core of a typical teaching collection was composed by apparatus, which were very similar to the ones proposed in the eighteenth century by ‘s Gravesande, Nollet, Desaguliers and others lecturer demonstrators and makers. Since 1820 circa, new didactic instruments were introduced. Most of them concerned the fast developing branches of physics such as wave optics, electromagnetisms and acoustics. Instrument makers (and many scientists as well) were extremely prolific in inventing new devices for better demonstrating all the laws of physics and for clearly visualizing all its phenomena. Therefore, around 1900 all the most important German, French and British makers proposed in their thick catalogues thousands of didactic apparatus. But were all these instrument really used? Probably not. Many of them were acquired by schools and universities because they were considered “status symbol” marking the importance and the completeness of a collection. Others were simply shown as “tri-dimensional” illustrations. For various reasons, during the first decade of the twentieth century the number of available didactic instruments was drastically reduced. The introduction of student training laboratory, the increasing cost of labour and of materials after WWI, the needs of a more standardized production, the progresses of physics not only eliminated from the trade catalogues many of the classical but old fashioned instruments but also stimulated the use of modular and simpler didactic apparatus.  相似文献   

The Media as a Policy Instrument in Influencing the Business Model of Professional Soccer: Evidence From Italy     

Paolo Di Betta  Carlo Amenta 《Journal of Media Economics》2013,26(2):109-129

Italian soccer clubs in the first division have individually sold broadcasting rights for their home matches, until new laws imposed pooling and joint-selling those rights through the league and established a mandatory sharing rule to redistribute revenues in order to improve on-the-pitch competitive balance (CB). This article compares the two institutional designs. While reducing revenue inequality, the new regime distorts allocative efficiency and informational rent appropriation, opens up costly ex post renegotiations and antitrust litigations, and does not improve CB.  相似文献   

A pilot project of a cancer patient library in Italy: results of a customer-satisfaction survey and its products     

Truccolo I  Bianchet K  Capello F  Russell-Edu W  Dal Maso L  Colombatti A  Ciolfi L  Tirelli U  De Paoli P 《Health information and libraries journal》2006,23(4):266-274

AIMS: The purpose of this study is to determine the degree of satisfaction of users of the Cancer Information Point section of the Library for Patients (CIP-LP), active since 1998 at the National Cancer Institute of Aviano, Italy. The CIP-LP is based on a skilled intermediary, adequate informative material and a specific location, within the Scientific Library of the Institute. PATIENTS AND METHODS: A survey was developed to assess service functionality and quality from the users' viewpoint. During a 6-month period, a questionnaire was mailed to 194 patients and relatives who previously used the CIP-LP; 113 (58%) were returned and processed. RESULTS: Of the respondents, 91% were pleased with the CIP-LP and 95% would recommend the service to other people. The information obtained contributed to a clearer understanding of the illness and treatment (45% as first answer) and a better control of the situation (33%). Fifty-one per cent evaluated the information received as 'good', 42%'excellent' and 4%'of sufficient quality'. CONCLUSION: This survey shows the appreciation and usefulness in the users' perception of a specific hospital library for cancer patients and their relatives, providing an information service supplementary to doctor-patient communication.  相似文献   

Literature Survey: Recent publications in the history and philosophy of mathematics from the Renaissance to Berkeley     

Paolo Mancosu 《Metascience》1999,8(1):102-124

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Query reformulation mining: models,patterns, and applications   总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1  

Paolo Boldi  Francesco Bonchi  Carlos Castillo  Sebastiano Vigna 《Information Retrieval》2011,14(3):257-289

Understanding query reformulation patterns is a key task towards next generation web search engines. If we can do that, then we can build systems able to understand and possibly predict user intent, providing the needed assistance at the right time, and thus helping users locate information more effectively and improving their web-search experience. As a step in this direction, we build a very accurate model for classifying user query reformulations into broad classes (generalization, specialization, error correction or parallel move), achieving 92% accuracy. We then apply the model to automatically label two very large query logs sampled from different geographic areas, and containing a total of approximately 17 million query reformulations. We study the resulting reformulation patterns, matching some results from previous studies performed on smaller manually annotated datasets, and discovering new interesting reformulation patterns, including connections between reformulation types and topical categories. We annotate two large query-flow graphs with reformulation type information, and run several graph-characterization experiments on these graphs, extracting new insights about the relationships between the different query reformulation types. Finally we study query recommendations based on short random walks on the query-flow graphs. Our experiments show that these methods can match in precision, and often improve, recommendations based on query-click graphs, without the need of users’ clicks. Our experiments also show that it is important to consider transition-type labels on edges for having recommendations of good quality.  相似文献   

Effectiveness of bibliographic searches performed by paediatric residents and interns assisted by librarians. A randomised controlled trial     

Gardois P  Calabrese R  Colombi N  Deplano A  Lingua C  Longo F  Villanacci MC  Miniero R  Piga A 《Health information and libraries journal》2011,28(4):273-284

Background: Considerable barriers still prevent paediatricians from successfully using information retrieval technology. Objectives: To verify whether the assistance of biomedical librarians significantly improves the outcomes of searches performed by paediatricians in biomedical databases using real‐life clinical scenarios. Methods: In a controlled trial at a paediatric teaching hospital, nine residents and interns were randomly allocated to an assisted search group and nine to a non‐assisted (control) group. Each participant searched Pub Med and other online sources, performing pre‐determined tasks including the formulation of a clinical question, retrieval and selection of bibliographic records. In the assisted group, participants were supported by a librarian with ≥5 years of experience. The primary outcome was the success of search sessions, scored against a specific assessment tool. Results: The median score of the assisted group was 73.6 points interquartile range (IQR = 13.4) vs. 50.4 (IQR = 17.1) of the control group. The difference between median values in the results was 23.2 points (95% CI 4.8–33.2), in favour of the assisted group (P‐value, Mann–Whitney U test: 0.013). Conclusions: The study has found quantitative evidence of a significant difference in search performance between paediatric residents or interns assisted by a librarian and those searching the literature alone.  相似文献   

The political economy of applied research: Plant breeding in Great Britain, 1910–1940     

Paolo Palladino 《Minerva》1990,28(4):446-468

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Science or graduates: How do firms benefit from the proximity of universities?     

Bart Leten  Paolo Landoni  Bart Van Looy 《Research Policy》2014

This paper examines the impact of universities on the technological performance of adjacent firms. We extend existing research by jointly analyzing, and comparing, the effects of education (graduates) and scientific research (publications) activities of universities on firms’ technological performance. Adopting the knowledge production framework, our study is conducted at the level of 101 Italian territorial areas (provinces) and four industries. Overall, fixed-effect panel data models reveal a positive effect of both university graduates and scientific publications on the technological performance of firms. At the same time, considerable industry differences are observed. While the provision of university graduates positively affects firm performance in all industries under study, additional effects for scientific research are only observed in electrical and pharmaceutical industries that are science-intensive and where the scientific knowledge base is changing rapidly over time. The observation that spillovers from academia into the industrial texture of provinces rely on education and research in an industry-specific manner is relevant to the design of appropriate research and innovation policies.  相似文献