Keith Flint, vocalist with the Prodigy, has died at the age of 49. He was found at his home in Essex on Monday.
The Prodigy released a statement confirming the news, saying: “It is with deepest shock and sadness that we can confirm the death of our brother and best friend Keith Flint. A true pioneer, innovator and legend. He will be forever missed. We thank you for respecting the privacy of all concerned at this time.”
Liam Howlett, who formed the group in 1990, wrote on Instagram: “I can’t believe I’m saying this but our brother Keith took his own life over the weekend. I’m shell shocked, fuckin angry, confused and heart broken ..... r.i.p brother Liam”.
An Essex police spokesman confirmed that a 49-year-old man had died. “We were called to concerns for the welfare of a man at an address in Brook Hill, North End, just after 8.10am on Monday,” he said.
“We attended and, sadly, a 49-year-old man was pronounced dead at the scene. His next of kin have been informed. The death is not being treated as suspicious and a file will be prepared for the coroner.”
With his punk aesthetic of piercings, spiked hair and intense stare, Flint became one of the UK’s most iconic musical figures in the 1990s. He joined the Prodigy as a dancer, later becoming a frontman alongside rapper Maxim. Aside from their 1992 debut, all of the group’s seven albums have reached No 1 in the UK, the most recent being No Tourists, released in November 2018.
Flint performed the vocals on the Prodigy’s best known singles, Firestarter and Breathe, which both went to No 1 in 1996. Firestarter became their biggest US hit and the group are often credited with helping to break dance music into the mainstream in the country.
Firestarter’s black and white video, featuring a headbanging, gurning Flint, was banned by the BBC after it was screened on Top of the Pops, with parents complaining that it frightened children. The self-lacerating lyrics - “I’m the bitch you hated/filth infatuated” - were the first Flint had written for the band. “The lyrics were about being onstage: this is what I am. Some of it is a bit deeper than it seems,” Flint told Q magazine in 2008. The track sold more than 600,000 copies in the UK.
Speaking to the Guardian in 2015, Flint lamented the state of modern pop music. “We were dangerous and exciting! But now no one’s there who wants to be dangerous. And that’s why people are getting force-fed commercial, generic records that are just safe, safe, safe.”
His success was hard won. Having grown up with dyslexia, he dropped out of school aged 15 and worked as a roofer in Essex before joining the Prodigy. He later weathered an addiction to prescription painkillers but became sober and married Japanese DJ Mayumi Kai in 2006. The couple later separated.
As well as his success with the Prodigy, Flint founded the successful motorcycle racing outfit Team Traction Control, which made its debut in 2014 and went on to win multiple Supersport TT titles.
The Prodigy played some of the biggest stages in the UK, including the 1996 Knebworth concerts headlined by Oasis and, in 1997 became the first dance group to headline Glastonbury. Festival organiser Emily Eavis paid tribute, calling their set “a huge, unforgettable moment”.
Eavis added: “He’s played here so many times with the Prodigy and was booked for 2019. What an incredible frontman.”
Gail Porter, who dated Flint between 1999 and 2000, simply wrote the word “heartbroken” on Twitter.
Further tributes have been made from his musical peers. Ed Simons of the dance duo the Chemical Brothers shared a memory of Flint on Instagram.
A post from the Chemical Brothers’ official Twitter account said Flint “was an amazing front man, a true original and he will be missed”.
Richard Russell, the head of the XL Recordings label that first signed the group, said on Twitter: “Devastated keith flint is gone. not just a great performer. he had total integrity & an incredible sense of humour. one of the sweetest people I’ve ever worked with. what a beautiful energy. what a gentleman. privileged to have known him. miss u keith.”
Sleaford Mods, whose frontman Jason Williamson collaborated with the Prodigy on the 2015 track Ibiza, tweeted: “Very sorry to hear of the passing of Keith Flint. Good night mate. Take it easy.” Another collaborator, the band Kasabian, described him as a “beautiful man” and “incredible pioneer”.
The rapper Professor Green said the Prodigy at the Brixton Academy in 2009 was “the best gig I’d ever seen, and still is till this day” and had inspired him to be a music star. He added: “Your music, your presence, your attitude. It all had such an influence on me. Saddened doesn’t even cut it.”
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In red: bullshits.
1. The relationship should be natural, easy and uncomplicated: The truth is that all relationships take time, effort, commitment and energy. You need to make time for each other, to do fun things together, to work on communication, and to learn to negotiate and compromise.
2. The relationship should be conflict free: Because we are each individual and unique we all disagree with others at times, so conflict is natural, and not to be feared. In fact, conflict can force us to confront our differences, and to grow as individuals, and as couples too.
3. Soul mates are romantic: Real life is not the movies, and love can be expressed in countless different ways, and still be genuine. Look out for all the signs that show your partner cares, and don’t be disappointed if they’re not “the stereotype”. Don’t force them to be something that is maybe nor their style.
4. You should always see things the same way and have the same opinions, outlooks and beliefs: You both have different backgrounds and have individual brains so you’re going to sometimes differ in the way you look at life. That needn’t be a problem - you don’t want to be clones.
5. My soul mate will always like and love me: Consideration, respect and a concern for your partner are symptoms of a loving relationship. But being rude and disrespectful or irresponsible are not endearing qualities that build relationships. Instead, we need to give to get - as it’s not “all about me”.
(some hints: Online Counselling College)
In March 2017, Michal Kosinski, a psychologist and director of the Psychometrics Centre at Cambridge (currently professor at Stanford), presented the results of some of his studies at CeBIT's Keynote: Psychometrics applied in the context of the Social Media. More precisely, one of the Psychometrics most applied methods: the Big Five (five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, amicity and emotional stability - neuroticism in the original term), through which create large profiling clusters. If it reminds my research ambit, the digital clusters you're right: but they are two different things (even if contiguous). Psychometry is used since Nineties to determine the personality traits with a metric model, as the name: through interviews, surveys, etc.
Prof. Kosinski, instead, used social data, such as Facebook in particular, to get accurate results in less time. In the video, he shows a chart analyzing the likes of an experimentation, identifying the traits of "personality" with precision: with a few hundred likes, in particular, the accuracy he affirms is more than 80%. The video is called "The End of Privacy" and is online. There is also a site you can try yourself, if you want: log in with Facebook at applymagicsauce.com.
Partially basing on the research of the Stanford professor, there’re the activities of this company with an evocative name, Cambridge Analytica — whose origin is for you obvious now. The “scandal” of the big data involving Facebook (link to the post of Zuckerberg), according to Guardian had repercussions in the 2016 American elections, in the european Brexit referendum, and other cases. Facebook is certainly not the only social platform — as confirmed by Zuckerberg himself— but today it’s the most famous to exchange data (or “been hacked to”) for commercial and political purposes. This is not the matter of this article, thought. Even if…a tour on the CA Twitter profile, however, might be instructive, partly because their bio spells “Behavioral Microtargeting” and partly for their following…
The automatic behavior
What I wanted to emphasize is another important aspect of this story: the "automatic" behavior behind our activities on social networks - and not only. Michal Kosinski, if you had the patience to see the video, shows that with a certain number of likes he is able to delineate personality traits. Is that true? We can answer "yes" in a first general answer. But, what does he mean with "outlining people personality" and what he "observes"?
Psychometrics is an objective-descriptive description: it observes and catalogs. Before Internet these method involved personal surveys and interviews, that is, a psychologist or psychiatrist controlled the experiential context and the person doing the tests. What happens with social media? This is a bit different. We have to deal with at least three things: i) The disinhibition phenomena given by the medium, ii) the de-contextualization effect, and iii) the "Automatic behaviors", that's the more interesting part.
The disinhibition - that is, the fact of viewing a screen and not a real person - is a known base factor: it disables the nuances of non-verbalized communication, and they are many. The automatic behaviors triggered in this context (the social behaviors) make the observation prone to virtually infinite misunderstandings - rather I would say this is the most common thing! Just look at the comments, the flames, the endless discussions, etcetera.
Way more interesting is the experiential de-contextualization. I try to explain it in a nutshell: reading a thing or writing it on social media is very far from having an experience of that thing. The ways in which we're involved in the social media world make the narration still more distant from the reality, and they place the shared experience in a "virtual non-place" -which is transmitted and recorded.
In times of profound changes in the context of communication and interaction, (narration and storytelling are continuosly in our lives), the social media influence in a much more subtle way. Facebook is consulted by billions of people every day (tens of millions in Italy), mostly in mobility.
We are always connected and we talk about our own things and our experiences. And this happens, in most cases, without belonging to the context in which things are seen and take place. It is like a sort of a continuous distance dialogue: the place is virtual and perennially de-contextualized. In some way it's as we are progressively missing the opportunity of a pure reflection on our shared experience. We speak “beyond experience”, which is not “together with” but is transmitted and verbalized: it is created by words and images, chosen among the most suggestive and involving...
Psychometry is thus an observation from the outside of things that we routinely do and say or what others do or say. In the case of social media, others write. But be warned, because our knowledge of the other is influenced by our needs and expectations.The question is: these data read and seen how much correspond to what the person is, to his motivations? Well, not much. A true awareness requires the unveiling of one's inner mechanisms of self-deception, self-knowledge, personal narration and, finally, Self.. Furthermore, the relationship between external behavior and thoughts is revealed through action.
But even action, which is considered thought, reflected (the notorius and inaccurate saying "thought is forerunner of action"), fruit of free will, in many cases is automatic - through Heuristics, when all goes well, or Cognitive Biases when there is a distortion... People, often, don't really know the reasons for which they do something. Sometimes, when they're questioned on the motivations of their behavior, they provide not congruous explanations. Any psychologist or psychotherapist will confirm this experience. It's the narrative construct, in which the person "tells self a story". That our behavior is a direct and conscious expression of our will in reality, is already a questionable fact; let alone on social networks!
Algorithms and awareness
Let's go back to the algorithms. They know what is the motive that triggers and causes an automatic behavior? Tendentially yes, but with some important distinctions. Firstly, propaganda: the call to an ideal, a value, a need or a fear, are well known baits by behavioral marketing and widely used by communication pros. So, we can see where is the matter: if these clicks, these likes, are the result of automatic behavior, then they are not particularly aware and, finally, not so meaningful. In other words, the person who clicks, puts a like, etc. on the basis of solicitations, acts in a context with poor control nor full awareness. Therefore, in this context the algorithms that observe these reactions and behaviors, in some way measure the degree of unawareness that these behaviors have.
Is this a problem? Probably not, but in the sense that these dynamics don't depend on Social media. The unawareness is there regardless of the medium. It's explicit on Facebook because this social is the most used widespread, and with more trust (...) and involvement. The fact that "Facebook conditions us" is meaningless enough: the algorithms amplify, select and present us with a "reality" that we largely already see, or rather, we want to see. So much we want to see reality some way, that if we don't find algorithms presenting that way, we start looking it by ourselves (leaving precise traces, however, that deeply help algorthms in the selection). The difference between us and them is that algorithms are good and precise, and they stimulate the automatic behaviors to trace their magnitude and present the desired contents to an ever larger number of people (and advertisers...).
A conscious behavior can be unpredictable, but only in the individual. On large numbers, algorithms measure and catalog and they do it very well: but this work has always been done, even before digital media. Today it is on a larger scale and on a different context. The important thing is that algorithms do not "read in the mind", just as we do not. And after all it has not so much importance, because mind is not a sealed "object" -that one takes and reads; it doesn't act in isolation, sometimes it is inaccessible even to ourselves. On the contrary, it's explicit when we act, and in the context, and the components of emotions, feelings, memory, values, produce meaning and meaning to our thought - and maybe even at that moment they clarify us ...
The problem then is not the fact that what is written on social media is read or scanned by others, and then used by marketing or politics. This was already known for a long time. The sale of data is the business of platforms, and psychometry analysis on social media is the last piece of a well known model.. The problem is to know the real "accuracy" that these data contain, be aware of what you write and, above all, what you want to read.
]]>"There are things that don't look connected, but at some point you can connect them and everything makes sense", says Cheryl in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (the remake is not a great movie but contains several good insights).
Sometimes I put together some elements to find a pattern, a model of meaning. Steve Jobs focused his famous Stanford speech of 2005 on the concept of connecting dots, adding that to achieve it you can only look back. It's like that, and sometimes I can do it well, sometimes less. On many occasions, this year, I have been able to connect the dots and see a bigger picture, and it was perhaps the year in which it happened more clearly.
Not for everyone is this way, or not for all things (the theme of personal and collective narration is a leitmotif of my research - so somewhere here the longread is assured). If I look at the stories of friends, ex's, or colleagues, I realize that for some of them, it's not easy to connect dots and see a "design". In some cases, they do not give importance to things that, instead, make sense to connect. In other cases we are fixed in a narration that apparently makes sense, but which is not connecting the "right" things. We often do not give space to what is painful, because we don't want to see it in our life, and consciousness. So we tell us a story, but the dots do not connect, or something is always missing... and the painting simply doesn't appear.
The last check on my list is in this category: it was a loss I do not understand well. I can cling to a poet motto, or tell me that it helped growing (in some circumstances, it was), but the truth is that after all these years I'm still unable to catch sense of this story - maybe our singer Vasco is right: there is no one. No dots to join, no pattern.
In connecting things, there is a personal focal and an extended one.
In the personal focal I can say that a recognizable pattern was certainly the field of study, on the topics that were of my greatest interest: research on digital processes and teaching. The possibility offered by the degree in humanities, combined with the one in computer engineering, gave me the basis to configure a path of deepen professional growth in these two areas. I saw how everything I had done was necessary. Clearly, in order to achieve these results, it was necessary to work hard, but there is a common thread that links the past things - even apparently wrong (such as the degree in engineering, in fact) - to what I have done nowaday. Those skills and past "wrong" studies now make sense.
That's why when I see friends avoiding connecting experiences, I get to say "believe me, it's not useless". Yet I already know that they will not believe me. I too, often, struggle to recognize the experiences, especially the painful and senseless ones. It is way a continuous work, which we never stop learning to do - with a method. Often we find ourselves failing to reread our personal history from different perspectives, and - specially - with a different look...
The tiring adjective refers to all the things that have happened in a single calendar year, so many. Beautiful (most), but also exhausting, because I had to review almost all of my work and study models. It seems not so, but it's like changing head or almost, after 45... Someone could call it "a beautiful challenge" (a term that immediately makes you think of the marketing language). Complicated challenges, too. At the end of the year I experienced two events that are difficult to manage (and we are the third adjective, difficult), I prefer not to talk a lot about. From the seemingly simple distortion to the wrist - that instead is perhaps something other -, to important people who moved away from my routine for work and obedience's reasons. And I will miss them...
Since I'm not the kind of person who stands still for a long time - nor I do everything right, but the contrary*, in January will start my newsletter, which in a flicker of imagination I called "LGPost". It'll be weekly and based on the Paper.li platform drawings from the social feeds I read (Twitter, plus Facebook, Linkedin, in the future), and some articles that I report directly. Hence, if you want to sign up, I'm glad!
* At the time of Splinder - an italian blog community - I wrote a little "eulogy of balance"; today, unfortunately in the maximalism era, articles against mediocrity are rampaging on Medium. Maybe I should find that post...
]]>Why I’m talking here about it? For a couple of reasons. The first one is to keep track in the blog, about such an important event for me. From the first post it’s exactly fifteen years (it was 2002 when I started): now and then I read what has changed around me, and how “I am changed”; the blog - in my opinion - remains the best place to fix some experiences and concepts along the path.
The second reason is to focus some of the elements from this particular experience of study. I basically found three underlying themes:
1 - Change when things don't go. After the happy experience in Nice (from 1998 to 2004), where I brought my early experiences and skills, I worked for a few years in Telecom Italia (italian main telco company), and later in a consulting and system integration company, then as a programmer in one of the most valued and productive teams I worked with in the Rome area. And yet... in that time I had the toughest crisis: at the end of 2010 I realized that Programming and Web development was no longer my way…
It was not only a cognitive problem (the stomach pains was afflicting me from a couple of years) but the fact that I was changed. From the early years of editorial debut to the period of software engineering, my interests shifted more and more to other topics. I still used the typical technical tools like Eclipse, configuring perfectly for PHP and SVN versioning, but things were getting worse every day.
So. In 2011 I decided to take a sabbatical year, trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I had a degree in the computer science field, worked as programmer, and it was very difficult to reconfigure (to use a congruent term) a professional career - although in a state of crisis. I remember how that time was horrible.
By re-reading that experience, I can say it was the more useful phase. I had to get away from a world that was no longer my own, to understand that my world was another. In the end of that year there was an event - those who change your life: Giovanna Abbiati (with whom I would later do big important things) called at my phone: she asked me if I was available to teach in the upcoming «Master in Communication and New Media» at the Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum. I already did some courses on Programming topics, but in small ambits and with few people. This was an opportunity for a “quantum leap” and to really test myself. I answered yes, with fear but also great motivation. In that ambit I discovered what I call a sort of “teaching vocation”. It was really a revolution: indeed the beginning of change. In the next years I realized a training course on Social media issues, that I knew very well as early adopter, along with the digital skills known as a technician, bringing in dowry and covering many topics in the set number of hours (pushing a little bit).
I found that the process of transferring my experience and skills to others was fatiguing but at the same time beautiful: teaching is an adventure that makes you understand more, tell you more, requires you to learn more and learn a lot from the students and colleagues. It was a leap that led to the reconfiguration of my professional career. At that time I realized that the relationship with computer science was changed: what I studied and learned needed to be reorganized to be transferred to others who would use all in different and new ways. From that experience, for example, took place the great initiative of the TEDxViadellaConciliazione in 2013, which in these days has been resurfaced for Pope Francis' talk - who in that year was just elected - at TED 2017 Vancouver (here is the video speech).
2 - Need for continuing education (especially in those times of illiteracy). When you practice a profession like engineer, or doctor, or architect, you should always keep up to date. What in ITC is obvious (technology runs in our lives), in my experience can apply to (almost) all the qualified professions. On the other side this is a very common problem, because not always is easy to attend courses (if undone by the working company, you have to pay courses by yourself, not to mention time to dedicate, topics to choose, etc.). Technological issues - as said - are strongly “under pressure” in the professions but not only there. I haven’t use the term “pressure” randomly: sometimes talking to friends working in different areas, such as psychologists and psychotherapists, or theologians, even in these fields a continuous update path has become indispensable. To remain in the example, only in the field of Psychology in the last twenty years has changed almost everything! Many of the models considered good up to the nineties, are in an undergoing deep review process - due to new findings in neuroscience and psychotherapy, and so on. It’s clear that those who studied in those years ’80-’90 are faced with a complex (and sometimes unqualified) recalculation path in their life - without mention the dozens of different models and schools. The same concept can be extended to other professions.
Now, imagine what’s like when you needs to teach, in one, or - as my case - in contiguous disciplines and fields: professional updating should be continuous and as much diversified as possible. I realized this lesson: if I wanted to be a “good teacher” I had to fill several gaps in human sciences and to connect different fields. As engineer I was covered by the technical side, and with the magazine experience I dealt with issues about communication and publishing. But, the more I deepened these issues, the more I realized I needed an upgrade, not only based on personal readings. In late 2014 I decided to start a new study, which led me to choose the Tor Vergata Philosophy and Literature university ─ after selecting the two other public Rome’s universities ─ as the most appropriate to what I was looking for.
It was the right choice: there I found very special people, starting with my tutor who cut out a “tailor-made” plan of studies for me, revealing optimal, and my supervisor, who dealt with me structuring my research at the moment I was still clearing it to myself.
From this adventure I took at least two important lessons: without a broad-spectrum culture, which joins both technical side (in my case the hard sciences) and human one, you can’t be a good teacher, nor a coach or a trainer. Among other things, I’ve observed how important can be the process of cultural deepening to read the complex reality that surrounds us - in terms of politics, narration, psychology, and all data about social networks. I found that the so-called “digital illiteracy” (which needs, however, always a specification) and cultural illiteracy in general are creating a situation, in most cases, dramatic, and not only in the “less-developed” nations or in western ones. There is a lot, lot to do.
3 - The Dynamics of Social networks. I could start with the "fanaticism runs over the net" - I think it's an experience everyone has met in online discussion. However, today's situation has become very complicated. Precisely on recent years, my research has focused on the distorting dynamics of digital processes, highlighted by social networks. There is religious and historical fanaticism, political fanaticism, social, and in general, an ideological narrative that lives in pseudo-truth, from several decades. But it’s only when these ideologies meet the social networks’ dynamics that the structure changes and grows dramatically: the distorting narratives are amplified and reinforced in ways that make the leap enormously extended to amounts of people previously confined to small communities - for example misinformed, or not wanting to broaden their viewpoints. Small groups of persons sharing an even wrong point of view, in little places, isn’t alarming but simply natural.
But. For a few years now (generally dating from 2009-2010, the spreading era of Social media) hundreds of thousands - and millions - of individuals share common narratives in a diffusive model in thousands of online groups and social pages, where algorithms have a preponderant part. Algorithms try to comprehend users’ preferences, and the filtering models act by showing what is considered “liked” by the user - often not wrong. The effect is a kind of loop: people make choices, and select first sources and content to search for specific topics, that confirm beliefs and preconceptions (including cognitive bias and so on), algorithms begin to filter content by presenting more and more of that kind of content.
Starting with the “filter-bubble”, identified in 2011 by Eli Pariser, from the customization of Google's search results, it has been clear that the distortion phenomenon became so large that it produces an even more alarming effect: the conversational model is deteriorating, in such a quick way that’s making people less able to confront and dialogue, but rather more closed and refractory. We’re no more talking about “digital bubbles” as in the past, but as “armored cells” (Luciano Floridi). This is a process especially known to communication experts, but it went up to forefront in Donald Trump's US elections, as for the term “fake news” used sparsely. The problem of misinformation and false news has been focused in a couple of huge researches released in recent months (mainly the Anatomy of news consumption on Facebook, published on PNAS at the beginning of 2017), showing as the primary consequence of the distortion process the extreme polarization on specific topics. Continuing in this research field, I observed something else, that makes this model very aggregative, triggering a disagreement between experience and reality (where narrative and narration are common elements) that produces glaring effects: elections are the more noticeable example, but prodromes are visible already in many places of the social networks.
These three themes have made more "clear" my study path, by properly deepening the fields of communication, sociology, psychology and history. When you teach, you must first learn: it’s trivial, but you can decline it in a variety of ways. As an example, I learned (and I'm still learning) to think in a scientific way, that it is neither easy nor obvious. An historian can distort the truth, if he renounces to deepen the facts to "make right the counts". So, when writing scientific papers - or at least in a certain level of rigor - you’ve to get used to demonstrate everything you claim, link to the facts and to arguments, debates and ideas, and even to put them into question, if necessary.
Today, this is perhaps one of the crucial points of many interpretative criticisms: in such a rich contextual information, to distinguish things with the due time and level of deepening is a challenge for everyone: there is an right-false process (of probability) where the user is constantly subjected to a “fatigue of refinement and selection”; it’s difficult even for the “experts”. It’s a mix of intuition and ability and is complicated, realistically, for most people to understand where the opinions or fake news (often spread in beautiful mail) stop, and where the "nude fact" begins. I could also quote the Rashomon effect, where four direct observers of a fact report four different versions of it.
The risk is to rely on third part institutions (from digital platforms to government sources) to decide what to read, see, and search - in a selection process that inevitably can’t be transparent, cannot show the “unknown unknowns”: the things we’re not seeing (concept made famous by Donald Rumsfeld in 2002).
So a new challenge begins. That will start from putting hands on the work done, for the necessary corrections and improvements so that the book can spread with a better certainty. Afterwards, thinking about a training program on the above topics. It will be a challenging commitment, but working with people with whom there is a beautiful feeling and a profitable ideas combination, is very rare in my experience. During these months I’ve worked not only improving the ability to select, connect things, and write them correctly (especially less narratively), but I had to “invent” a method to achieve the goals I set out, and apply them! To complete the project alone, but not "alone", thanks to the precious and patient help of the people I've been lucky to meet on the road.
In short: I thought I would stop, and instead there’re so many things to do now. In the Self-management course at my Athaeneum I will need some advice, probably. :-)
]]>Mimi Ikonn (photo), co-founder of Intelligent Change, and author of the new book The Bingo Theory, talks about a better definition of masculine and feminine. At the end or her piece, Mimi has a quiz to determine your dominant energy and how you can bring it into balance or what she calls a Bingo (based on the newsletter of Five Minute Journal).
Here it's an interviews published on Intelligent Change blog, by Alex Ikonn, June 2016.
* * *
Do you find it hard to sit still and relax? Do you feel lazy and guilty if you aren't constantly working through a to-do list?
Or perhaps your issues are just the opposite.
Is inaction your problem? You love options but can't decide? Do you find it hard to stand up for yourself? Do you constantly doubt yourself?
Stereotypically, the first camp is often associated with being masculine, while the second camp is associated with being feminine. The traditional view of masculine and feminine energy is very black and white. If you are a man, you are considered to be masculine, and if you are a woman, you are considered to be feminine.
But are these stereotypes actually true?
You might be or know women who are more masculine and men who are more feminine. However, this is still not fully accepted in our society and is often looked down upon. Many men feel ashamed for being called a feminine man and women being called masculine. This outdated and inadequate mindset has lead to a tremendous imbalance, both internally in our lives, as well as externally in our world.
Many of us do not embrace the natural strengths that we possess for fear of not being accepted.
A better definition of Masculine and Feminine
The idea of all men being masculine and women being feminine is broken.
Some men and women will fall into the stereotype. There are men with masculine energy being their strength and women with feminine energy being their strength. The traditional viewpoint is still valid.
However, being a feminine man or a masculine woman is not a weakness, it's a strength. Time has come that we learn how to nurture these strengths in ourselves and see them in others.
All of us actually have both of these energies within us.
For years it was believed that men and women's brains are wired differently - the famous 'Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus' idea - but now a growing body of research shows that neurologically we are all a mixture of both masculine and feminine traits.
Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychologist at Cambridge University, believes that we are all on a spectrum between Empathizers or Systemizers:
According to Baron-Cohen's research, 44 percent of women have empathizing brains, 17 percent of women have systemizing brains and 35 percent of women have brains that are roughly balanced between the two poles.
So far as men are concerned, Baron-Cohen found that 53 percent of men have systemizing brains, 17 percent have empathizing brains, and 24 percent are roughly balanced. The remaining 6 percent have an extreme male brain.
Apparently, these differences are created in the womb according to how much testosterone you are exposed to as a fetus. Lots of testosterone in your mother's womb causes your brain to develop a Systemized approach to life. Less testosterone in the womb leads to an Empathizing approach.
A unique mosaic of masculine and feminine
A new way of thinking suggests that hormonal differences play a very small part in why we are the way we are. A research conducted on 2015 by Daphna Joel, a professor of neuroscience at Tel Aviv University, has found that we are all a mosaic of masculine and feminine features. Joel analyzed the brain scans of more than 1400 men and women and failed to find consistent differences between the sexes. Instead she found that we are all a unique mixture of male and female features. Her study discovered that between zero and eight percent of people had all male or all female brains. The vast majority of people were somewhere in the middle, showing that gender isn't binary - we are all a blend.
What is your dominant strength energy?
Is it masculine or feminine? Here's a quiz proposed by author that will help you find out: the "Bingo Theory quiz" (external link)
So what does that mean exactly?
As the author has mentioned above, we all have both masculine and feminine energies inside of us. Based on nature and nurture, one of these energies is usually our dominant energy.
In order to live a happy and balanced life internally, as well as externally, I believe we must bring both of these energies into balance. I call that winning combination of Masculine and Feminine Energy a "Bingo".
It's only then that we are able to have healthy, loving relationships with ourselves and others. This includes both personal and business relationships and affects every area of our lives from love and romance to career and physical health.
]]>In these days I've finally decided on the type of training and professional update that I will take. By now it was necessary, and couldn't be postponed anymore.
I had many choices in front of me: I was chosing even a new faculty, and I was really interested on Psychology or Educational Sciences. But in the progress to come to a final decision, I went for elimination..
- Psychology at my age is a bit late, I could make a three-year degree (bachelor), but it doesn't create many job opportunities and above all, to do this work seriously serves a full degree and many years of expertise or specialization.
- Same goes for Educational Sciences: it's true, the teaching has become my passion and both a profession, but the only degree that's valid had to be taken before, plus, it's still oriented on the support teacher professional figure. That perhaps is not exactly the most suitable for me, I don't know.
I opted for an international Master of professional specialization, in "Education Leardership, Management and Emerging Technologies" at an online University that's very good. So, you will see me extremely busy for several months from now. This choice goes in two directions to get me advancing in studies, updating my knowledge on arguments of computer science and education, technology and more, and will facilitate my inclusion in teaching in the public service. That sounds good and completes my professional formation in the direction of academic fulfillment.
Looking at 2015
I was quite surprised to receive a series of confirmations that I didn't expect to be all concentrated in the same time. That's a challenge I've to understand better to set a coherent outlook to the new year's organization. In part, that's because in 2014 I have sown much, and as seems, several plans come finally to fruition.
Among them, an advanced course on the PHP language and a series of courses in the MIUR ambit (italian Ministry of Research and University) for public figures, where I'll teach some of the topics in Communication and new media taught in Atheneum's Master, and it will also include elements of cyberbullying, as well as the target of some lessons will be for teens and pre-teens.
Addendum
What was looking like a good choice i the first time, didn't result in this one. So I decided to stop the progress in the above mentioned master and started postgraduating in Information and communication science whereas I could find a perfect syntonization with my passions and needs.
by Michael Gerhard Martin*
It's been over a week since Robin Williams killed himself. I loved Mork when I was a kid, and Williams (as Mr. Keating) was one of my idols as a young teacher. I am sorry to hear of his passing, but I wouldn't say I am grieving. After all, I didn't know him. But as someone who struggles with depression, I've found that the media blitz around his suicide has messed me up more than I could have imagined
I had my first thoughts about suicide around the eighth grade. I was bullied at summer camp, which certainly didn't help. Once you contemplate suicide, it's in there forever, a rattling in the attic, a whisper in the ear. The window in an airless room. I survived decades without help, and I'm not entirely sure how.
The songwriter John Prine sang, "Two men were standing upon a bridge/ one jumped and screamed 'You lose!'" Johnny Cash wrote about driving out to some caves, crawling inside one, and waiting there to die. At my worst - and that was hanging out on the Panther Hollow Bridge in Pittsburgh, looking down to the shallow, filthy pond hundreds of feet below -- I berated myself for my cowardice. Come on, pussy - up and over and you don't even have to walk home.
It took a few days to figure out where the creeping dread was coming from, like a rotten potato behind the fridge. Any kind of habitual self-destruction cuts a deep rut in the brain, and I felt the wheels jerk between its walls before I knew what was going on.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with my life - I'm not Robin Williams, but I have a book deal and a good job. I'm happily married and live at the beach. That doesn't matter. While some people might be able to process a news cycle full of suicide, racial violence, and apocalyptic climate change with analytical distance, I've felt personally overwhelmed with hopelessness and shame. And most of all, the constant, graphic reports about Robin Williams' death have haunted me.
For about three days, I'd been exposed to hundreds of news stories, social media posts, eulogies, obituaries, memes, appeals for mental health care, hotlines, media insensitivity and testimonials. Suicide, suicide, suicide, suicide, suicide, like a crossword puzzle with dozens of clues and only one answer, repeated over and over. Until the wheel spins and digs.
Shrinks always ask if I have ever made an "attempt," meaning something that led to hospitalization. I never have. That would have put me in a position where I couldn't do it if I wanted to. There was a time when killing myself seemed the only way I could imagine having control of my life, my mind, myself.
In college I bought a rifle, thinking I would take up hunting with some of the guys. I tried out the steel barrel, to see how it felt under my chin. I got rid of it.
Now, I'm not in any danger. I've responded well to medication and therapy, and eventually Robin Williams and his suffering and his tragic final choice will cycle out of the news, and I'll stop feeling crushing doom every time I read the goddamned word. My suicidal ideations will hang in the doorway, but they won't get in. I've trained like an athlete to fill in that rut. I laugh and say, "I hate my brain!" to avoid thinking "I hate myself." But our media's relentless fixation on Williams' suicide -- not just on the fact that it happened, but on hashing out the gruesome specifics -- has felt deeply inappropriate and misguided to me.
Personally, the only way I've ever been able to process death is through humor. My mother scolded me for cracking jokes at my grandmother's funeral when I was 11. When my friend Aimee was in the hospital to have her gall bladder removed, I drew her a diagram of her intestines populated by spermatozoa, chicken wings and worms.
And in this situation, as hard as it may be, perhaps we should all be cracking jokes ─ memorializing Williams in the way he lived instead of ruthlessly publicizing the terrible way he died. After all, Robin Williams ran from the sounds of mourning; he wanted, profoundly, to hear laughter.
* Michael Gerhard Martin originally published this post on Salon.com on Aug. 23, 2014
]]>This is the 2nd time this pc is delivered to me, since the first time, at the end of April, was severely bent in the middle, and the computer was returned to the store to be changed. The merchant ByTecno, thought, was really correct and immediately proceeded to change it on my report basis.
Now the baby is in the house! I've to install some good software...
It's a HP Envy 15, with a Full HD screen of 15,6" - I choose this machine because of the double initiative of HP:
1) taking back of a pc with i5 processor, valued 140 €, and
2) the return of 15% on the price of a HP laptop purchased.
This combination, and the fact that I've found it at a best price of 800 € instead of 1000 on the Internet, means that the total savings will be almost 50%!
Follows the specification of the machine (mine it's a J104SL but has same specs):
Nome del prodotto | 15-j104el |
---|---|
Code | F9E68EA |
Microprocessor | Intel Core i7-4700MQ w/Intel HD 4600 (2,4 GHz, 6 MB cache, 4 cores) |
Chipset | Intel HM87 Express |
Memory | 12 GB of SDRAM DDR3L at 1600 MHz (1 x 4 GB, 1 x 8 GB) |
Memory slots |
2 available to the user |
Video card |
NVIDIA GeForce GT 740M (2 GB of dedicated DDR3) |
Hard disk |
SATA 1 TB (5400 rpm) |
Display | LED BrightView FHD diagonal 39,6 cm (15,6") (1920 x 1080) |
Network card |
LAN Gigabit Ethernet 10/100/1000 integrated |
Wireless operations |
Combination of 802.11b/g/n (1x1) and Bluetooth 4.0 |
Audio | Beats Audio w/4 speakers and 2 subwoofers |
Keyboard | Full with adjustable backlit and numeric pad |
Pointing device |
HP Imagepad with multi-touch gesture support |
Ports | 1 multiformat SD reader 1 HDMI 1 headphone/mic combined 4 USB 3.0 (1 HP USB Boost) 1 RJ-45 |
Dimensions | 37,95 x 25,07 x 2,79 cm |
Weight | 2,1 kg |
Battery | Lithio-Ion 6 cells (62 WHr) |
Photocamera | Webcam HP TrueVision HD (frontal) w/digital dual-array microphone |
Future historians will probably regard Italy as the perfect showcase of a country which has managed to sink from the position of a prosperous, leading industrial nation just two decades ago to a condition of unchallenged economic desertification, total demographic mismanagement, rampant "thirdworldisation", plummeting cultural production and a complete political-constitutional chaos.
In a previous post on this very blog, the dire situation of Italy's economy has been briefly sketched. A few months later, the scenario of a serious disruption of the Italian state's finances is building up, with tax revenues contracting 7% in July, a deficit/GDP ratio projected again well over the 3% mandatory threshold and public debt well over 130% of GDP. It will get worse. The government knows perfectly well that the situation is unsustainable, but for the moment it is only capable to resorting to an extremely short-sighted VAT rate increase (to a staggering 22%), which will depress consumption even more, and to vague proclaims about the necessity of shifting the tax burden way from wages and companies to financial rents, although the chances of this to be implemented are essentially negligible.
Throughout the summer, Italian political leaders and the mainstream press have hammered the population with messages of an imminent recovery (la ripresa). Indeed, it is not impossible for an economy which has lost about 8% of its GDP to have one or more quarters in positive territory. However, it is a profound distortion of elementary semantics to call a (perhaps) +0.3% annual rebound as "recovery", considering the economic disaster unfolding in the last five years. More correct would be to talk about a transition from a severe recession to some sort of stagnation. But unfortunately, like characters of a Greek tragedy, Italian leaders were deprived by the gods even of this illusionary and pitiful dream of a stagnation. Economic data of the summer months indicate that the economic downturn is far from being over.
A recent study indicates that 15% of Italy's manufacturing industry, which before the crisis was the largest in Europe after Germany's, has been destroyed, and about 32,000 companies have disappeared. This data alone shows the immense amount of essentially irreparable damage which the country is undergoing. In the author's view, this situation has its roots in the immensely degraded political culture of the country's elite, which, in the last few decades, has negotiated and signed countless international agreements and treaties without ever considering the real economic interest of the country and without any meaningful planning of the nation's future. Italy could not have entered the last wave of globalisation under worse conditions. The country's leadership never recognised that indiscriminate opening to Asia's light industrial products would destroy Italy's once leading industries in the same sectors. They signed the euro treaties promising to the European partners reforms which have never been implemented, but fully committing themselves to austerity policies. They signed the Dublin Regulation on EU borders knowing perfectly well that Italy is not even remotely able (as shown by the continuous influx of illegal migrants in Lampedusa and the inevitable deadly incidents) to patrol and protect its borders. Consequently, Italy has found itself locked up in a web of legal structures which are making the complete demise of the nation practically certain.
Italy has currently the highest taxation levels on companies in the EU and one of the highest in the world. This factor, together with a fatal mix of awful financial management, inadequate infrastructure, ubiquitous corruption and an inefficient bureaucracy, which includes the slowest and most unreliable justice system in Europe, is pushing all remaining entrepreneurs out of the country. This time not only towards cheap labour destinations, such as East or South Asia, but a large flux of Italian companies is pouring in neighbouring Switzerland and Austria, where, despite the relatively high labour costs, companies will find a real state cooperating with them, instead of sabotaging them. A recent event organised by the Swiss city of Chiasso (next to the Italian border) to illustrate the investment opportunities in the Tessin Canton was attended by a crowd of 250 Italian entrepreneurs.
The demise of Italy as an industrial nation is also reflected by the unprecedented level of brain drain, with tens of thousands young researchers, scientists, technicians emigrating to Germany, France, Britain, Scandinavia, as well as to North America and East Asia.
In sum, everybody in the country producing anything of value, together with most of the educated people is leaving, planning to leave, or would like to leave. Indeed, Italy has become a place for some sort of demographic pillaging from the perspective of other, more organised countries, which have long seen the opportunity to easily attract highly qualified workers, often trained at the expenses of the Italian state, simply by offering them resonable economic prospects which they will never see if they remain in Italy.
All this seems not to preoccupy the Italian political leadership. On the one hand, the country is the prisoner of a cultural duopoly: it is either the Catholic culture, or the socialist culture. Both are preoccupied with universal ambitions (somehow eschatological and increasingly anti-modernist) which make the national perspective unviable to them. Indeed, the Italian state was created by liberal-conservative and monarchist modernists, sometimes animated by virulent forms of anticlericalism, essentially the opposite of the current political elite. It is not surprising that what the former accomplished gets dismantled by the latter. The problem is not so much, however, the dismantling of the nation state, but that the nation state is not going to be replaced by any meaningful political project, leaving its space, essentially, to chaos.
On the other hand, Italy has entered a period of constitutional anomaly. Because party politicians have brought the country to a near-collapse in 2011, an event which would have had severe consequences globally, the country has been essentially taken over by a small number of technocrats coming from the President of the Republic's office, the bureaucrats of several key ministries and the Bank of Italy. Their task is to guarantee stability to Italy vis-à-vis the EU and the financial markets at any cost. This has been so far achieved by sidelining both the political parties and the parliament to unprecedented levels, and with a ubiquitous and constitutionally questionable interventionism from the President of the Republic, who has extended his powers well beyond the boundaries of the still officially parliamentary republican order. The President's interventionism is particularly evident in the creation of the Monti government and in the current Letta government, which are both direct expression of the Quirinale. The point here is that, where politicians have failed, bureaucrats and technocrats hope to succeed. The illusion, which many Italians are cultivating by believing that the President, the Bank of Italy and the bureaucracy know better how to save the country, is now widespread. They will be bitterly disappointed. The current leadership, both technocratic and political, has no ability, and perhaps even no intention, to save the country from ruin. On the contrary, it would be easy to argue that Monti's policies have exacerbated the already severe recession. Letta is following exactly the same path. But everything has to be sacrificed in the name of stability. The technocrats share the same cultural backgrounds of the political parties, and in symbiosis with them have managed to rise to their current positions: it is therefore hopeless to think that they will obtain better results, since they are also unable to have any sort of long term vision for the country. They are actually the guarantors of Italy's demise.
In conclusion, the rapidity of the decline is truly breathtaking. This is certainly not exclusive to Italy, as arguably most if not all Western countries are undergoing rampant thirdworldisation. Italy has simply less economic and social "capital" to burn in comparison to Germany and other Nordic countries. But it must be clear that, continuing on this way, there will be nothing left of Italy as a modern industrial nation in less than a generation. But just in another decade or so entire regions of the country, such as Sardinia or Liguria, will be so much demographically compromised that they may never recover. The founders of the Italian state one hundred and fifty-two years ago had fought and even died hoping to bring Italy back to a central position as a cultural and economic powerhouse within the Western world, as the one it occupied in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. That project has now completely failed, with the abandonment the very cultural idea of having any meaningful political ambition going beyond the sheer day-to-day management on the one hand, and the messianic (but effectively pointless) universalism of saving the world on the other even at the expenses of one's own political community. Unless some sort of miracle occurs, it may take centuries to reconstruct Italy. At the moment, it seems to be a completely lost cause.
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Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Euro Crisis in the Press blog, nor of the London School of Economics.
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Just a note. One of the best films I've ever seen is Before the devil knows you're dead, (2007), where the filmmaker, the amazing Sidney Lumet, has directed his last film (and last for Hoffman too): the exceptional character of the protagonist (the other one is Ethan Hawke) makes this movie really special, and through the story and the perception it leaves.
I had two contradictory but complementary responses to the news that Philip Seymour Hoffman had died of a drug overdose at the suddenly tender age of 46 -- two responses, that is, beyond how terrible and damn, he was great.
The first was that there was no way Hoffman had died with a syringe still in his arm -- no way that an actor who brought such finicky dignity to his portrayal of the most desperate characters had permitted himself to die so ruthlessly unmasked.
The second was that of course he had died in such a sordid manner -- how else was Philip Seymour Hoffman supposed to die? There was no actor, in our time, who more ably suggested that each of us is the sum of our secrets...no actor who better let us know what he knew, which is that when each of us returns alone to our room, all bets are off. He used his approachability to play people who are unacceptable, especially to themselves; indeed, his whole career might be construed as a pre-emptive plea for forgiveness to those with the unfortunate job of cleaning up what he -- and we -- might leave behind. The only way that Philip Seymour Hoffman could have died in a manner more consistent with the characters he created would have been if he had died by auto-erotic asphyxiation.
And in the extermity of these two responses was, I think, the essence of Hoffman's art.
He often played creeps, but he rarely played them creepily. His metier was human loneliness -- the terrible uncinematic kind that has very little to do with high-noon heroism and everything to do with everyday empathy -- and the necessary curse of human self-knowledge. He held up a mirror to those who could barely stand to look at themselves and invited us not only to take a peek but to see someone we recognized. He played frauds who knew they were frauds, schemers who knew they were schemers, closeted men who could only groan with frustrated love, heavy breathers dignified by impeccable manners, and angels who could withstand the worst that life could hand out because they seemed to know the worst was just the beginning. And what united all his roles was the stoic calm he brought to them, the stately concentration that assured us that no matter whom Philip Seymour Hoffman played, Philip Seymour Hoffman himself was protected.
That's what I thought, anyway -- in reading the early reports of his death, I was surprised that he'd battled the demon of addiction, because I'd always confused Hoffman's mastery with detachment, and assumed that he had lived by Flaubert's charge to live an orderly life so that he could be violent and original in his work. But I shouldn't have been surprised, and -- here's that contradictory and complementary response again -- I wasn't. I'd never met Philip Seymour Hoffman, never knew anyone who knew him, never even read a passably revealing magazine profile of him. All I really knew was that he was a character actor who came as close to being a movie star as character actors ever get, and that he played the lead in more Hollywood movies than any other portly, freckly, gingery man in human history. And that, in its way, is all I, or anyone else, needs to know.
We live in the golden age of character actors -- in an age when actors who have done their time in character roles are frequently asked to carry dark movies and complicated television dramas. The line between character actors and movie stars is being erased -- in art, anyway, if not in life. In life, it's different, because the "movie star" remains not just the product of looks and charm, but also a kind of social construct, with very distinct social obligations. Character actors like Philip Seymour Hoffman and James Gandolfini have found themselves getting more and more leading roles because they are permitted to behave onscreen in ways that George Clooney and Matt Damon never could. But the same permission extends offscreen, and that's where we see the cost; indeed, we pay to look at men who look like us only when they convince us that that they live in psychic spaces that we could never endure...unless, of course, we happen to be enduring them.
Would Matt Damon ever be found dead, with a syringe still hanging from his arm? Would George Clooney essentially eat himself to death? No, for the simple fact they both have way too much to lose. But neither would they permit themselves to be weepily jerked off by Amy Adams, as Philip Seymour Hoffman was, in The Master, or to crawl as far into his own dead eyes as James Gandolfini regularly did in The Sopranos. The great character actors are now the actors whose work has the element of ritual sacrifice once claimed by the DeNiros of the world, as well as the element of danger-- the actors who thrill us by going for broke. It should be no surprise when, occasionally, they break, or turn out to be broken. RIP.
In fact, there're many aspects to consider when upgrading MT, and several scripts to change and upgrade, in several parts. Without an expert mind, I think nobody could point out all these aspect particularly because they can vary from platform to platform, and from situation to situation ─ depending from your installation configuration.
One point from which start is surely forums.movabletype.org. Here you can find solutions from the persone doing Movable Type, that's clearly the best solution.
In particular, I must thank Mihai for the Signing in stuck problem in comments (consult this post to have information on the whole problem and the related aspects): It was very hard to resolve this also because it was involving several other upgrades to do. But at least all went well.
Another problem you would encounter when upgrading is the inability to properly use the edit window under Firefox 16 or higher. Also for this problem there's a solution, and in this case it's the MT staff developer Takeshi Nick Osanai to furnish it: check the page named "Patch file for Firefox 16 users" to resolve the issue.
Happy Movable-typing!
]]>I write this post some days after knowing that Aaron Swartz, the genius behind RSS, Creative Commons and co-founder of Reddit, decided to end his life at 26. I was shocked to read some of his blog posts, in particular the "Sick" one, because almost all of the synthomps are mine too.
I don't know if he was thinking at suicide, at the time he posted that. It's a thing which some of us must live with. So here's the three-quarters of the problems I share.
Cold. I always feel cold; It 'something that annihilates you, makes you feel old and weak. Eventually prevent you from doing even the most ordinary, like exiting from the home. it's almost like the stomach problems in terms of effects (see below). Also in this case, it's a new that came in the last 2 or 3 years. I don't know if it's something related to a metabolism changing, but I think yes.
Stomach. Yes, here I can use almost the same words as Aaron. "Huge pains grind through my stomach". All started in this way for me too, later in 2007, and still I'm struggling with this problem, aparently without a cause (not organic, at least). Food is always followed by pain, and often I can't sleep at night, waiting for stomach to calm down. From that moment, i've never been at the restaurant with the same mood nevermore. I'm afraid to go out for dinner because I already know that it will be a problem, with the friends or colleagues. I've experimented this particular problem in my last job. And this makes me angry and confused. At times the pain is excruciating and even after it goes I spend some time just reeling from it.
Depressed mood: Here I can find adherently words to my mood and to some situations I've felt in some way similar to Aaron. "Surely there have been times when you've been sad. Perhaps a loved one has abandoned you or a plan has gone horribly awry. Your face falls. Perhaps you cry. You feel worthless. You wonder whether it's worth going on. Everything you think about seems bleak -- the things you've done, the things you hope to do, the people around you. You want to lie in bed and keep the lights off. Depressed mood is like that, only it doesn't come for any reason and it doesn't go for any either. Go outside and get some fresh air or cuddle with a loved one and you don't feel any better, only more upset at being unable to feel the joy that everyone else seems to feel. Everything gets colored by the sadness."
Depression is not the main problem in my case, not as the sadness. In some cases I've heard the word "Adaptive depression". But the stomach problems sometimes fall me down to a state of idleness, as I have only to wait, and wait, that all passes away, meanwhile I can't do none of my things..
Parties are shying away from the radicalism Rome needs
Italians go to the polls to choose their next prime minister in a little less than five weeks. The election result will reverberate well beyond Italy. The eurozone's future prosperity will depend on whether its third-largest economy can keep its fiscal house in order and resume growth after a decade of stagnation.
The technocratic government led by Mario Monti as well as decisive action by the European Central Bank have helped restore Rome's fiscal credibility. Foreign investors have resumed buying Italian paper and yields on 10-year bonds are significantly lower than what they were in November 2011. Yet the economy is stuck in the longest recession since the second world war. Italy's external competitiveness has not improved since the start of the crisis. Productivity is stagnant and, unlike Spain, Portugal and Ireland, unit labour costs have barely started to fall.
Solving these deep-rooted problems requires a trustworthy leader with a credible economic programme. Neither applies to Silvio Berlusconi, the plutocrat-cum-politician who is planning a comeback after taking his country to the edge of the fiscal precipice. Some elements of his election manifesto, such as steep cuts to government spending that would finance a reduction in business taxes, are sensible in principle. But we have heard it all before. In his nine years in power, Mr Berlusconi, the laughing cavalier, promised much but delivered nothing. Italians should not be beguiled again.
Pier Luigi Bersani, candidate for the centre-left Democrats, and Mario Monti, who is heading a centrist coalition, both have personal credibility. During his time in government, Mr Bersani passed many reforms, including liberalising the legal professions and pharmacy shops. Mr Monti, meanwhile, is trusted both by investors and Italy's eurozone allies
However, neither leader has yet to set out a convincing economic vision for the country. The Democrat leader has to prove he will not be taken hostage by the left wing of his party, which opposes reforms to an inefficient labour market. Mr Monti is right to argue for tax cuts but must spell out where he will find the savings needed to deliver them.
Read the complete article on FT.com