More on Reverse Age Discrimination in Italian Universities

A while back, I wrote a post spurred by a reading of the commentary Reverse Age Discrimination, written for Nature Physics by Francesco Sylos Labini and Stefano Zapperi, two physicists based in Rome. I was reminded of that piece over the week-end, when I glanced at this on-line article from La Repubblica, a widely read Italian newspaper. The article is in Italian, and so won't be accessible to most readers. However, the figures mentioned in that article will be clear to everyone.

Here is the executive summary. Italian academic staff has never been older. The average age of associate and full professors is over 51. Over 50% of Italy's full professors is older than 60, about 8% is over 70, only 1,7% is under 40 and less than 19% is under 50. About 25% of the associate professors is over 60, and only 10% is under 40. Looking at researchers, a paltry 2% is younger than 30.

How does my home country compare with other European countries? Not well, alas, judging from the figures mentioned in that article. The average age of university professors is 45 in France, 44 in Spain and 42 in Germany. There is more. In Italy only 4% of university professors is below 34. Compare this figure to the ones in France (21%), the UK (27%), Finland (28%) and Germany (32%), and you will see why Italy continues to suffer from brain drain whereas other European countries are reversing this trend.

Can anybody point out similar statistics for countries like Australia, Canada, Israel and the USA, say? And what about Eastern Europe?

One thing seems clear to me, and it breaks my heart to say so. A country that does not offer better job opportunities to its young academics will suffer in the not-so-distant future and runs the risk of losing whole generations of gifted researchers. I hope that things will change soon, but I am not very optimistic.

Concurrency Column for the BEATCS: June 2008

I have just posted the Concurrency Column for the June 2008 issue of the BEATCS. It is an excellent survey paper entitled 20 Years of Modal and Mixed Specifications by Adam Antonik, Michael Huth, Kim G. Larsen, Ulrik Nyman and Andrzej Wasowski.

Modal transition systems are a variation on the classic model of transition systems where transitions come in two flavours: those that any refinement of the given specification must possess, and those that it may, but is not required to,
have. This model of computation was introduced about twenty years ago by Kim Guldstrand Larsen and Bent Thomsen. Since then, it has been the subject of investigation by several groups of researchers, and interest in this model and in its sibling that goes by the name of mixed specifications has grown over the last few years. In the light of the recent rapid growth in the research literature on modal and mixed specifications, and their applications, I thought that it was appropriate to devote an instalment of the Concurrency Column to a survey of recent results and open problems in the field. I am very happy to be in a position to offer the readers of the Concurrency Column this excellent overview paper by some of the prime movers in the development of the theory and applications of modal and mixed specifications. I trust that this piece will be of general interest, and I hope that it will entice several researchers to contribute to the on-going work on these models. Enjoy!

If you'd like to contribute a piece to the Concurrency Column, do write to me.

Interview to an Opinionated Mathematician

About a fortnight ago, I had to make a sudden trip and, as reading material, brought with me some print-outs that had been lying on my desk for a long time. One of those was An Interview with Vladimir Arnold, which appeared in the Notices of the AMS in 1997. Vladimir Arnold is regarded as one of the great living mathematicians and the number of disciplines in which he has worked is truly astounding. (The areas are Dynamical Systems, Differential Equations, Hydrodynamics, Magnetohydrodynamics, Classical and Celestial Mechanics, Geometry, Topology, Algebraic Geometry, Symplectic Geometry, and Singularity Theory.) What I found out by reading the above-mentioned interview is that he is certainly a man with strong opinions and that he has no qualms about airing them.

One answer of his that really got me thinking was this one:

Lui: Do you notice any differences in the way people from different cultures do mathematics?

Arnold: I was unaware of these differences for many years, but they do exist. A few years ago,
I was participating in an International Science Foundation (ISF) meeting in Washington, DC.
This organization distributes grants to Russian scientists. One American participant suggested
support for some Russian mathematician because “he is working in a good American style.”
I was puzzled and asked for an explanation. “Well,” the American answered, “it means that he is traveling a lot to present all his latest results at all our conferences and is personally known to all experts in the field.” My opinion is that ISF should better support those who are working in the good Russian style, which is to sit at home working hard to prove fundamental theorems which will remain the cornerstones of mathematics forever!

It is certainly true that travel and networking are fundamental parts of our daily life at work. What Arnold seems to be saying, however, is that we may be pushing this part of our work too far, and that this might be detrimental to the purely scientific part of our work. Of course, each of us has different work pattern, but there seems to be a tendency these days to shun good old scholarship for the modern gods of networking, leadership and what not.

Arnold also paints a picture of his days as a student at Mechmat (Moscow State University Mechanics and Mathematics Faculty) in the fifties. He says:

"The constellation of great mathematicians in the same department when I was studying at the
Mechmat was really exceptional, and I have never seen anything like it at any other place. Kolmogorov, Gelfand, Petrovskii, Pontriagin, P. Novikov, Markov, Gelfond, Lusternik, Khinchin,
and P. S. Alexandrov were teaching students like Manin, Sinai, S. Novikov, V. M. Alexeev, Anosov, A. A. Kirillov, and me."

I guess that it is hard to argue against his opinion. I looked up some of these names on the web, and this is really a most impressive collection.

Finally, to add a little more to the debate, Arnold seems to indicate that in 1997 it was still possible for a Western mathematician to build a good career rediscovering weaker versions of results known earlier to Russian mathematicians. And I have not mentioned his opinions on Bourbaki and the French mathematical establishment :-)

There are definitely worse ways to spend a few minutes during a flight than reading that interview.

ICALP 2008 Early Registration Deadline TOMORROW

The early registration deadline for ICALP 2008 is tomorrow. I strongly encourage you to register by May 5 at the latest to take advantage of the early registration rate and secure suitable accommodation.

In the meantime, the list of accepted papers/speakers for the affiliated workshops are being made available. See

• Foundations of Information Management in Networks (July 6)
• Quantum Physics and Logic/Developments in Computational Models (July 12 and 13) and
  
• Second International workshop on Mobility, Algorithms and Graph theory In dynamic NEtworks (IMAGINE 2008) (July 12).

Call for Nominations: The 2008 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing

The call for nominations for the 2008 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing is now out. See here. The prize is given for outstanding papers on the principles of distributed computing, whose significance and impact on the theory and/or practice of distributed computing has been evident for at least a decade, and is sponsored jointly by the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) and the EATCS Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC). The award is presented annually, with the presentation taking place alternately at ACM PODC and EATCS DISC - this year it will be presented at PODC 2008.

Let's think up outstanding nominations!

Complete Scientific Programme for ICALP 2008

The scientific programme for ICALP 2008 is now available here. It looks like we are going to have a scientific feast, and hopefully many of you will come and join us.

ICALP 2008: Bird's Eye Programme

In case you are wondering what is going to happen at ICALP 2008, and when, I encourage you to look at the skeleton of the conference programme, which is available here. Some more detail is presently available for track B.

The conference organizers strongly recommend that you register for the ICALP conference and book accommodation before May 5th, as that date is the deadline for registering at the lower fee. After May 5th hotel rooms will also start to get released since July is the prime holiday season in Iceland and the demand for hotel accommodation is very high.

NOTE: For those who have not decided yet which workshop(s) they are going to attend when registering for the conference, it is possible to register for workshops at the lower fee until June 5th by sending an e-mail to the Conference Secretariat.

Look Who's Doping

The inimitable Dr. Z wrote in his April 1, 2008, opinion:

But I strongly disagree with the unfortunate decision to forbid the use of any result, or solve any open problem posed by, the great Paul Erdös, on the grounds that he was "doping" by using stimulants like amphetamines. While I definitely do not recommend anyone to start taking prescription drugs, mathematics is not (yet) the tour-de-France, and if we start forbidding them, what's next? coffee?. It is no coincidence that Erdös quipped that a mathematician is a machine that turns coffee into theorems. Without coffee (and unfortunately other stimulants) we would not have progressed beyond Euclid. Coffee is so much part of our culture that it would take much more than one committee to disallow it at AMS meetings.

On the same day, a press release written by evolutionary biologist Jonathan Eisen of the University of California, Davis, declared that the US National Institutes of Health is to crack down on scientists 'brain doping' with performance-enhancing drugs such as Provigil and Ritalin.

These were, of course, intended as two funny pranks. Now, however, Nature is spotlighting a study on the use of cognition-enhancing drugs by academics. (Alas, a subscription is needed to access the text.) The article in Nature reports on the results of a survey conducted by that journal on whether readers of Nature (scientists) would consider “boosting their brain power” with drugs. The article states that 1,400 people from 60 countries responded to the online poll.

Apparently "one in five respondents said they had used drugs for non-medical reasons to stimulate their focus, concentration or memory." Moreover, use of drugs did not differ greatly across age-groups. According to the article, "the numbers suggest a significant amount of drug-taking among academics." So, not only academics drink more than rest of population on average (or so I seem to recall reading somewhere recently), but they also enhance their performance by taking drugs :-) Will we soon have to sign declarations that our work was not done under the influence of performance-enhancing drugs as well as copyright release forms? Or will we have to have drug tests taken when we submit papers to conferences or journals? And will all authors of an article have to take such tests?

On a more serious note, as a parent, I was a little concerned when I read that

When asked whether healthy children under the age of 16 should be restricted from taking these drugs, unsurprisingly, most respondents (86%) said that they should. But one-third of respondents said they would feel pressure to give cognition-enhancing drugs to their children if other children at school were taking them. Morein-Zamir found this coercive factor very interesting. “These numbers strongly suggest that even if policies restricted their use by kids, pressure would be high for parents,” she says.

(The emphasis is mine.) Would you give drugs to your children to enhance their mental performance?

Sometimes I wonder what our answer would be if we were offered a Faustian pact promising that we would solve, say, two fundamental problems of our choice at the price of our "soul". What would your reaction to this "two-for-the-price-of-one" offer be? Has any science-in-fiction novel ever been written on this theme?

Addendum: After I wrote this post, Luca Trevisan pointed out to me the delightful short story "The devil and Simon Flagg" by Arthur Porges. I recommend it!