This article delves into the transnational aspects of the “Two Cultures” debate initiated by the British chemist and writer C. P. Snow, and explores how Italian and West German intellectuals localized and translated aspects of the debate within their respective political landscapes. Snow described the relationship between science and the humanities, and attributed a unique social responsibility to science. Prominent leftist thinkers, including Gino Martinoli, Adriano Buzzati Traverso, Aldo Visalberghi, Giulio Preti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Karl Steinbuch, Hans Mohr, Hilde Domin, Jürgen Habermas, and Robert Jungk, engaged Snow's ideas, each formulating their stance on the role of science. These intellectuals were divided in their response. Some concurred with Snow, viewing scientific advancement as a cornerstone of social progress and considering the scientific ethos as a model for political emulation. Others, however, were critical, questioning the very notions of scientific progress, rationality, and modernization. This intellectual discourse foreshadowed the New Left's critique of scientism in the 1970s, a movement that significantly challenged the longstanding marriage between socialism and science.

Luchino Visconti is widely recognised as a high-culture director. However, in his films of the period 1943–63 there was a firm engagement with consumer culture and modernity in terms of themes, characters and references. This article explores this often overlooked dimension in Visconti's films by analysing a number of key sequences and moments that relate directly to consumption, consumer culture, leisure, modernity, Americanisation and youth culture. The analysis shows how these representations related to the ongoing changes in Italian postwar society and to incoming Americanisation in particular. My research is informed by the work of Gary Cross, Victoria De Grazia and Emanuela Scarpellini on consumer culture and contextualises how Visconti's referencing of consumer culture and modernity was received by the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano or Italian Communist Party).

Electrocardiographic changes resulting from apical hypertrophic cardiomyopathy may mimic an acute coronary syndrome. A 67-year-old Sudanese male without cardiac risk factors presented to hospital with chest pain and electrocardiographic findings of septal ST-segment elevation, ST-segment depression in V4-V6, and diffuse T-wave inversion. He was treated as an acute ST-elevation myocardial infarction with thrombolytics. There was no cardiac biomarker rise and coronary angiography did not reveal evidence of significant coronary arterial disease. Ventriculography, transthoracic echocardiography, and cardiac magnetic resonance imaging were consistent with apical hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. The patient was discharged three days later with outpatient cardiology follow-up. We highlight the clinical and electrocardiographic findings of apical hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, with an emphasis on distinguishing this from acute myocardial infarction.

The ‘école barisienne’ refers to a group of intellectuals, active between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1980s, who brought their academic and political activity together in order to bring the cultural heritage of Italian communism up to date and to construct a new theory of the revolution. Interpreting the student movement of 1968 as the historical agent of a social and political revolution, their intention was to transform the Italian Communist Party (PCI) into a ‘partito-società’ (‘party-society’) that could take hold of the new generation’s demand for democracy and overturn the hegemony of Christian Democracy, understood as the ‘partito-Stato’ (‘party-state’). This article retraces the life of this intellectual grouping, from the education of its proponents, marked by the Southern Question as a national question, through to the demise of their project. Specifically, it examines the relationship between the research activity of the école, highlighting some significant analytical categorisation used in its historiographical output, its political activity, and the national position of the PCI.

Long neglected by critical literature and historians, the Neapolitan journal Sud (1945–1947) shared similar aims and objectives with the more famous Il Politecnico, although the two journals were inserted into and connected with lively yet different cultural environments and networks, which crucially influenced their outputs. Most notably, both journals paid significant attention to politically committed literary and essay translations. By combining an analysis of the journals’ articles and translations with the editors’ published and unpublished correspondence, the article reassesses the journals’ relationship and illuminates the engagement of the two editorial boards through translations. The analysis of the two intellectual networks and projects will re-establish the relevance of Sud in stimulating a transnational dialogue and will reconsider the role of translation in shaping the editors’ political identities. Finally, the article offers a geo-cultural perspective on post-war Italian impegno by charting its multiple, both national and transnational, identities.

This article evaluates the discourse developed around Benedetto Croce in the Italian cultural periodical press between 1944 and 1947 and it discusses the forms of adversarial discourse and the agents involved in the anti-Croce polemics that unfolded in the Communist Party’s official cultural journal Rinascita. Specifically, this article focuses on a selection of intellectuals who moved away from Crocean idealism to embrace Marxism in order to investigate how their conversion was presented in Rinascita.

In this study we investigate the time variation of several solar activity, geomagnetic indices, and solar wind parameters (B, V). It is well known that solar wind is one of the main contributing factors to geomagnetic activity and his topology is strongly affect by solar events such as CMEs and coronals. For these two solar events, we study the correlation between PCI and BV during solar cycle phases and point out the close link between PCI and the occurring of CMEs and high wind speed flowing from coronal holes.

This article is an analysis of a long union dispute between the workers and the management of the Società Mineraria del Valdarno (S.M.V.), a company which had mining rights in the lignite basin of Castelnuovo dei Sabbioni, in the municipality of Cavriglia. Cavriglia is in a ‘red zone’ in the province of Arezzo, in central Tuscany and the dispute raged on from the end of 1947 to the first half of the 1950s. The article focuses primarily on two aspects: (1) how the union dispute of the miners of Valdarno fits into the broader political strategy of the Italian Communist Party (PCI); (2) how this struggle was perceived and elaborated by workers and incorporated into the collective memory of local communities.

Scholars have long argued that institutional context significantly influences business strategy and economic performance. Research on the relationship between institutions and business strategy, however, has overwhelmingly focused on the decisions of larger, established corporations, mostly neglecting the strategic thinking of smaller, more entrepreneurial ventures. This article seeks to correct this bias by focusing the analysis directly on the critical decision of small-scale entrepreneurs to move from the informal and largely unregulated sector into operation as formal companies. Using a unique dataset and ranking of provincial governance institutions from Vietnam, the authors show that improvements in institutions make firms more likely to choose the formal sector from the start and, for those who do not, to spend less time in the informal sector. The study also finds that property rights have a more salient impact on formalization than other types of institutions.

Objectives: The objective of this study was to collect all systematic reviews on invasive strategies for acute coronary syndromes (ACS) and reanalyze the data in these reviews to reach combined estimates, as well as to make predictions on the effectiveness and risk of harm so as to facilitate relevant decision making in health care.

Methods: The data sources used were the following electronic databases, searched from 1994 to September 2004: Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews; Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials; DARE, HTA, EED (NHS CRD); MEDLINE(R) In-Process, Other Non-Indexed Citations, MEDLINE(R), and PubMed (2000 to 2004). References to the identified systematic reviews were checked. An ancillary search to identify recent randomized controlled trials (RCTs) covering the period from January 2003 to January 2006 was done in MEDLINE(R). We included systematic reviews of RCTs on patients with ACS. In unstable angina and non–ST-elevation myocardial infarction (UA/NSTEMI), eligible reviews had to compare early routine invasive strategy with early selective invasive strategy. In ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI), a comparison between primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) and thrombolytic therapy was required. The methodological quality of the reviews was assessed, and a standardized data extraction form was used. Results for the main outcomes of the RCTs in the reviews were reanalyzed. An additional search of those RCTs not included in the meta-analyses was performed for UA/NSTEMI and short-term morality data on STEMI. Bayesian models were constructed to estimate the uncertainty about a possible treatment effect and to make predictions and probability statements. Main results are based on these analyses. Mortality was considered as the primary outcome measure.

Results: One systematic review on invasive strategies was identified for UA/NSTEMI and nine on invasive strategies for STEMI. Five reviews of the latter that were published after the year 2000 were included for the final analysis. The median quality score was 10.5 (range, 7–13; n = 6) on a scale from 0 to 18 points. An updated literature search identified one further RCT on UA/NSTEMI. Regarding NSTEMI and mortality, the average risk difference favoring an early invasive treatment strategy compared with early conservative strategy was .6 percent (95 percent credible interval [CrI], −2.1 to 1.0). Predicted risk (relative risk/risk difference scales) of doing harm was 26.7/26.6 percent. Regarding STEMI and mortality, the absolute risk reduction in favor of primary PCI over thrombolysis was 4.1 percent (95 percent CrI, −7.1 to −1.1) when PCI was compared with streptokinase and 1.2 percent (95 percent CrI, −2.7 to .2) when compared with fibrin-specific thrombolytics. Predicted risk of harm was 8.9/5.3 percent and 8.0/13.3 percent, respectively.

Conclusions: There seems to be at present no solid evidence for survival benefit on early invasive strategy for UA/NSTEMI as a broad diagnostic group, and the risk of doing harm should be considered. Also, the evidence for PCI to decrease early mortality after STEMI is scanty. Estimations of predicted harm may further aid decisions on whether to implement the new treatment over the old one. It may also give an additional dimension for interpreting the results of any meta-analysis.