The Runaway Brains

The runaway brains

Two symptoms that all not is not well with the Italian research and university system are the number of Italian researchers who move abroad (noticeable) and the number of foreigners who move to Italian universities and research institutions (nearly zero).

Substantial, and expensive, structural changes would be needed to make good use of the talent that abounds in Italian universities. Instead, like in a mismanaged company, every few years there is a "reform" (it would be called a "reorganization" in a company) that is not accompanied by any additional funding, and whose effect is typically to just add to the misery, until, that is, the next reform a few years later.

Anyways, a few years ago, it was decided that something had to be done about Italian researchers moving abroad. This brain drain problem is more colorfully called fuga dei cervelli in Italian, which means, more or less, runaway brains.

The return of the brains

The response was the following zany scheme. A special fund was created to support visiting positions of Italians (or, actually, foreigners as well) employed by foreign research institutions. The fund would pay for a visit of length between three and five years at an Italian university.

The plan was called "rientro dei cervelli." The official English translation is "brain gain," but it actually means "the return of the brains."

Notice that the three year minimum seemed to have been cleverly chosen so that one had to give up one's job in order to take the position. One can be away for one year, by taking a sabbatical or a leave, possibly two years by combining a sabbatical or a leave, but few places would let you away for three years.

After five years, however, it's unclear what the "returned brain" is supposed to do.

The cheated brains

The program started in 2001, and the first positions have been expiring last year. Supposedly, people were expected to apply for jobs at Italian universities, but for the last few years a scandalous underfunding has created a complete freeze in hiring. Within the larger tragedy of a whole generation of researchers who have not been able to find jobs, lied the smaller farce of the "returned brains" that had no job openings to apply to.

Finally, another special fund was set apart to create tenured positions for the "returned brain" people, so that they could stay in Italy, as in the spirit of the whole thing.

But not so quickly. Each appointment of a "returned brain" to one of those positions had to be approved by the CUN, the National Council of Universities. This union-like outfit interpreted the regulations so that people could only be appointed to positions lower than or equal to those from which they quit five years ago in order to go back to Italy. So if someone was a postdoc abroad at the time she went back to Italy, well, no job for her, even though in the intervening five years she has led a lab and has now sufficient experience to be an associate professor.

Things weren't too bad for Aldo Colleoni, however. According to news report, he was able to secure a tenured professorship at the University of Macerata in light of the fact that he was previously a professor at the Zokhiomj University in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Indeed, such university does not seem to exist, and Professor Colleoni does not appear to have ever worked outside of Italy. As the honorary counsel of Mongolia, however, he was able to authenticate his documents himself when he applied for the Italian position. (If the news reporting is accurate, this might be the most brazen case of resume-padding ever.)

Nature has an article that valiantly tries to explain the whole mess (thanks to Luca Aceto for the link). There are also online comments.

The Adopted Brother

Yesterday's exchange between Stephen Colbert and Debra Dickerson on the subject of the "blackness" of Barak Obama was priceless.

(video via The Raw Story)

Lies, Damn Lies, and National Review (Part II)

Some time ago, the New York Times reported on census data that shows that only a minority of American women are married and living with their husband. Thomas Sowell writes in National Review to complain about the way the Times misleads with statistics. He repeats points made earlier, in the same magazine, by Jennifer Morse. (Namely, that the claim depends on the definition of "woman" and of "living with.")

But this is part of a pattern, Mr. Sowell writes, because,

Innumerable sources have quoted a statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce — another conclusion based on creative manipulation of words, rather than on hard facts.

The statistic is partly based on the fact that, in recent years, there have been about half as many divorces as marriages in any given year. It is of course not quite correct to project that half of the marriages are going to end in divorce: if the number of people getting married increases with time then, all other things being equal, the ratio of divorces to marriages in a given year underestimates the true fraction of marriages ending in divorce. Conversely, if the number of marriages goes down with time, one has an overestimate. I would suppose, however, that demographers take such trends into account in their models.

Sowell's objection is, of course, considerably more creative:

The fact that there may be half as many divorces in a given year as there are marriages in that year does not mean that half of all marriages end in divorce.

It is completely misleading to compare all the divorces in one year — from marriages begun years and even decades earlier — with the number of marriages begun in that one year.

CCC 2007

The list of accepted papers is online. I am so curious about the Feige-Kindler-O'Donnell paper!