Why is it so difficult to know how long Italians really live?
The healthy life expectancy is the average number of years that one can statistically expect to leave before falling sick because of some serious, chronical disease. Professor Ugo Bardi, teacher of Physical Chemistry at the University of Florence, recently noted an impressive decrease, starting in 2003, in the healthy life expectancy of Italians and therefore asked: how long do Italians really live? Personally, I have no specific competence to answer this question, or to validate the correctness of Bardi's starting thesis.
Why doesn't the City of Milan use Netlamps?
A couple of years ago I wrote about Municipalities that open their GIS systems to citizens, pointing out that what's great about Geographic Information Systems (GIS) made with Free Software, or at least based on open file formats and protocols, is the fact that not citizens can use such systems to do much more than reading maps: open GIS allow citizens to create and publish by themselves geographic data of public interest.
Schools, Healthcare, useless jobs and the Internet
Please have a look at these pictures, taken in November 2010:
Are ebooks better or worse than paper books? Do (not!) ask the experts!
Last month Corriere della Sera, one of the major Italian newspapers, asked several novelists and other writers if and how the age of ebooks is changing fiction and the general approach to creation of literature. It was an interesting read, because it contained both pearls of wisdom and things that are either irrelevant or simply wrong, but all said by the same “gurus”.