Received: 8 August 2005 Revised: 22 September 2005 Accepted: 28 September 2005 Introduction Göteborg, Sweden, July 1999. I had just landed in the town that would have hosted me for my visiting period as Ph.D. student in Management Information Systems (from Luiss Guido Carli, Italy). The Viktoria Institute was going to be my location for 1 year. It was a light rainy day. For a weird coincidence ...

In 1633, after many years of skirmishing with the Catholic Church over his support for Copernicus’ heliocentric theory of the universe, Galileo was finally sentenced by the inquisition to prison and religious penances. In a formal ceremony at the church of Santa Maria Sofia Minerva, he was forced to abjure his errors, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest in Sienna. The prophet had ...