Research, TV ads, and Unacknowledgements

On Commercials. These days there is some relative controversy among Italian researchers because of a TV commercial. You can watch the commercial here. As it is quite likely that the commercial will be erased in the next few days, here's a rough description.

The advertised product is a bank; the commercial shows Claudio, 33, an Italian researcher at a laboratory in the US. We are told that he has an Italian laurea and an american PhD, and that he decided to remain at Los Angeles after finishing his studies. The commercial suggests that Claudio is very successful at what he does. In fact, he appears doing fancy stuff in a very modern laboratory. It is not clear what exactly Claudio's research is, though. Unfortunately, Claudio is not entirely happy and so, one day at the beach, he decides to return to Italy. Claudio has a girlfriend/coworker called Kate; she doesn't like Claudio's decision.

The next thing we see is Claudio resigning to his position at the American laboratory. Right after that, we see Claudio at what appears to be a very modern laboratory, but in Italy. At the Italian lab ---which is very similar to the American lab we saw before--- a colleague says to Claudio: "it feels as if we were in the US". Claudio replies: "and even better". We are told that it is not known if Claudio will fulfill his dreams. Then we see Kate appearing out of nothing, speaking a crappy Italian. Claudio and Kate get on a motorcycle and take a ride. The commercial closes; it reads: "There is an Italy that fights for its own dreams. We stand next to that Italy."

The commercial is offensive in that it Claudio's history is extremely unrelated to reality. It's almost science fiction. There are many highly skilled Italians doing research abroad. This is a very notorious phenomena nowadays, which can be perceived at basically every area of science and arts. Given the way in which the Italian research system expels its most talented individuals, the story of Claudio ---who willingly returns to Italy, with the same research conditions he had in the US--- appears simply laughable. And then it is not clear to me why a bank would like to produce such a commercial. The Italian system is infamous for the ever decreasing funds assigned to education and research, not to mention the unclear, old-fashion procedures it uses to distribute such funds and hire new young researchers. Sadly, the mere fact that the bank dared to produce such a commercial reveals that the Italian society at large is not aware of the huge problem brain drain represents for the country.

On

Unacknowledgements. As you probably know, it is common to add an "acknowledgments" section at the end of a scientific paper. There you thank people who helped you or gave you ideas for developing it, and/or mention the projects/institutions that funded your research. It is not mandatory to write such a section, of course. Well, today I saw something interesting that might impose a trend. In a very recent paper, the authors ---three researchers from Sapienza University of Rome--- include something else. As usual they have an acknowledgments section:

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous referees for their useful suggestions.

The novelty is the mention they added right after that:

Unacknowledgements

This work is ostensibly supported by the the Italian

Ministry of University and Research under the FIRB

program, project RBIN047MH9-000.

The Ministry

however has not paid its dues and it is not known

whether it will ever do.

You can take a look to the paper here. (For those of you in the CS world: the paper was accepted at SODA 2010, the ACM-SIAM symposium on discrete algorithms, a top conference on algorithmics.)

I suspect this indeed will initiate a trend, as I am sure there are many researchers in Italy in the same situation. Whether this is an appropriate way of acting or not is a matter of discussion. I was surprised by the originality of the protest. It is worth observing that generally completing a (good) paper represents a great effort, and hence arriving to a point where you write an acknowledgments section for a work of yours is supposed to be satisfying. Therefore, it is very sad to see people who arrived there and recorded their frustration in such a way. It is a matter of desperation, I suppose.