Assessing the work of a family centre: services offered and referrers' perceptions. A pilot study

A multiple family orientated service was offered by a social services family centre. In order to examine the service, the number and type of presenting problems, services offered and length of contact were recorded for forty-six families. Perceptions of the referring social workers were elicited at the beginning and end of contact with the service, and at follow-up. These suggested that the perceived risk of the referred cases and their complexity decreased. Questions raised by these preliminary findings are discussed.     

The wish to die and the wish to commit suicide in the adolescent: two different matters?

We shall try to demonstrate the difference between two wishes--the wish to die and the wish to commit suicide--as they express themselves during adolescence. First, death is seen as irreversible, while the suicidal act, at least during adolescence, is seen as reversible. While thoughts of suicide may be a part of normal adolescence, and the suicidal act a manifestation of pathological development specific to this stage in life, the wish to die has no age restrictions and may accompany life as a shadow, devoid of any suicidal act, for many years. It should be noted that both of these wishes may be balanced with the wish to live. Pathology appears when there is an imbalance of wishes and abnormal developmental processes. This imbalance can result in two distinct activities: suicidal acts and death behaviors. We suggest that the two stem from different mechanisms and personality pathologies. Therefore, they should be evaluated separately in order to better understand differences between suicidal and other aggressive acts and manifestations of the death wish during adolescence.     

Narratives of Israeli Women in Retirement: Rewriting the Gender Contract

Sex Roles - In the present study, we analyze how older Israeli women narrate, make sense of, and negotiate their lives after retirement. By center-staging women in their life periods of after-care...     

Dialogue representation

We consider question-answer dialogues between participants who may disagree with each other. The main problems are: (a) How different speech-acts affect the information in the dialogue; and (b) How to represent what was said in a dialogue, so that we can summarize it even when it involves disagreements (i.e., inconsistencies).We use a fully-typed many-sorted language L with a possible-worlds semantics. L contains nominals representing short answers. The speech-acts are uniformly represented in a dialogue language DL by focus structures, consisting of a mood operator, a topic component and a focus component. Each stage of the dialogue is associated with a set of information functions (g-functions), which are partial functions taking a topic component (representing a question raised) to a set of propositions determined by the corresponding focus component (to the set of answers given to it).Asserting is answering a question and, hence, it causes a new g-function to be defined. Asking is an attempt to cause the hearer to define a new g-function satisfying certain conditions. A question asked requests a true and complete answer. A reaction answers a question if it satisfies some of the conditions of the question. Indirect questions are viewed as indirect answers.A dialogue representation consists of: commitment sets, each representing the commitments expressed by one participant; sets of questions under discussion associated with each stage of the dialogue, and the common ground, containing the g-functions and representing consistently what was said in the dialogue.Concepts of informativeness are naturally defined within the theory. Whether an utterance is informative depends on which question it answers and how the question was answered previously. These concepts yield that uttering mathematical and logical truths is as informative as uttering a contingency.     

The Dancing Jew and Other Characters: Art in the Jewish Settlement in Palestine During the 1920s

Contrary to the predictions of sociologists that modernity would spell Judaism’’s demise, Judaism in the last three centuries has shown itself to be remarkably productive. The inner dynamic of that productivity is not the bipolarity of assimilation and nationalism that historians have asserted, but rather the dialectic between apprehensions for survival on the one hand and messianic hopes and presentiments on the other. That dialectic has resulted in interlinked developments of secularization and sacralization that have occurred in three identifiable waves of change that have been formative for the modern period.     

Solving the Heap

The present offers a pragmatic solution of the Heap Paradox, based on the idea that vague predicates are “indexical” in the sense that their denotation does not only depend on the context of their use, but it is a function of the context. The analysis is based on the following three claims. The borderlines of vague terms are undetermined in the sense that though they may be determined in some contexts, they may differ from one context to the next. Vagueness serves the important communicative function, enabling speakers to identify entities as objects (as things we can talk about) in terms of some quantitative differences between the “object” and its background in the context. Thus, in some contexts we can naturally partition the group of men uniquely so as to distinguish the bald from the not-bald. Whether a man with a given hair number is among the bald in a given context depends not only on his own hair number but also on the hair number of others in that context. This provides the background for the claim that when we assert that John is bald, we presuppose that there is a unique demarcation to the bald in that context. I consider the truth of the Paradox’s statements in contexts where the presupposition is true and in contexts where it is false. The analysis yields that the contradiction is avoided because though each of the statements is often true, never are all the sentences in the Paradox true together.     

Impaired associative taste learning and abnormal brain activation in kinase-defective eEF2K mice

Memory consolidation is defined temporally based on pharmacological interventions such as inhibitors of mRNA translation (molecular consolidation) or post-acquisition deactivation of specific brain regions (systems level consolidation). However, the relationship between molecular and systems consolidation are poorly understood. Molecular consolidation mechanisms involved in translation initiation and elongation have previously been studied in the cortex using taste-learning paradigms. For example, the levels of phosphorylation of eukaryotic elongation factor 2 (eEF2) were found to be correlated with taste learning in the gustatory cortex (GC), minutes following learning. In order to isolate the role of the eEF2 phosphorylation state at Thr-56 in both molecular and system consolidation, we analyzed cortical-dependent taste learning in eEF2K (the only known kinase for eEF2) ki mice, which exhibit reduced levels of eEF2 phosphorylation but normal levels of eEF2 and eEF2K. These mice exhibit clear attenuation of cortical-dependent associative, but not of incidental, taste learning. In order to gain a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms, we compared brain activity as measured by MEMRI (manganese-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging) between eEF2K ki mice and WT mice during conditioned taste aversion (CTA) learning and observed clear differences between the two but saw no differences under basal conditions. Our results demonstrate that adequate levels of phosphorylation of eEF2 are essential for cortical-dependent associative learning and suggest that malfunction of memory processing at the systems level underlies this associative memory impairment.