Ethical dilemmas in teaching and nursing: the Israeli case

This article explores a cross‐occupational approach for dealing with ethical dilemmas by comparing teaching and nursing. Findings indicate more shared patterns of ethical dilemmas (such as caring for needs for others versus following formal codes) than dilemmas specific to teaching (e.g., advancing universal values versus advancing knowledge) or nursing (e.g., patient modesty versus hospital policy). The large number of shared dilemmas suggests that results can be applied to a curriculum devoted to ethical dilemmas in high schools and universities in order to better prepare students to handle them. Formal discussions of these dilemmas can help define the roles of these occupations, thereby improving their status.     

A second chance for higher education: Academic preparatory programs in Israel

The Israeli academic preparatory programs (APPs) challenge the sorting regime of regular education by offering a genuine second chance for higher education to youngsters who have failed to acquire the necessary prerequisites via the mainstream. The study analyzes the success of the APPs to produce changes in their students in light of the failure of a different second-chance framework, the community college, to do so. The analysis of a sample of APP graduates indicates that background characteristics and high school history, powerful sources of differentiation upon admittance to the APPs, lose their discriminating power after graduation. All graduates join any postsecondary educational framework, regardless of their initial disadvantages. The success of the APPs in eliminating initial gaps among the students is assigned mainly to their nonconformity to the selection criteria of regular education. The purpose of this research was to assess whether second-chance educational programs that challenge the sorting criteria of the mainstream succeed in enhancing social equality in education. Outcomes of the challenging second-chance academic preparatory programs in Israel are analyzed in light of the reported failure of community colleges to moderate inequalities in higher education.     

Hijab and principalship: the interplay between belief systems,educational management and gender among Arab Muslim women in Israel

This paper discusses the decision of Muslim female principals in Israel to don the hijab following their appointment to school principalship. This research employed narrative life-story interviews to understand the women's decision to alter their appearance and how this transition is connected to their role as female school principals in the indigenous Muslim community in Israel and the reaction they faced both in personal and professional spheres. The principals' narratives elucidate that transition to wearing the hijab was a matter of choice and collective belonging; it empowers them and affected their leadership style, although it also provokes others' resistance and reactions. Findings clarify the social and personal identity of Arab Muslim women school principals in Israel, and point to the need for consideration of traditional cultural contexts, to enrich managerial theory. This understanding also supports the argument that governmental and organizational policies and initiatives should recognize the diversity in Muslim women's backgrounds and the dangers of privileging mainstream women's perspectives.     

Cognitive and metacognitive determinants of eyewitness memory accuracy over time

Metacognition and Learning - In the present study, we investigated the accuracy of eyewitness accounts over time from a metacognitive perspective, in which post-retrieval monitoring and control...     

On improving Tunstall codes

Though many compression methods are based on the use of variable length codes, there has recently been a trend to search for alternatives in which the lengths of the codewords are more restricted, which can have useful applications, such as easier processing and fast decoding. This paper explores the construction of variable-to-fixed length codes, which have been suggested long ago by Tunstall. Using new heuristics based on suffix trees, the performance of Tunstall codes can in some cases be improved by more than 40%.     

Bidirectional delta files

A bidirectional delta file is a novel concept, introduced in this paper, for a two way delta file. Previous work focuses on single way differential compression called forwards and backwards delta files. Here we suggest to efficiently combine them into a single file so that the combined file is smaller than the combination of the two individual ones. Given the bidirectional delta file of two files S and T and the original file S, one can decode it in order to produce T. The same bidirectional delta file is used together with the file T in order to reconstruct S. This paper presents two main strategies for producing an efficient bidirectional delta file in terms of the memory storage it requires; a quadratic time, optimal, dynamic programming algorithm, and a linear time, greedy algorithm. Although the dynamic programming algorithm often produces better results than the greedy algorithm, it is impractical for large files, and it is only used for theoretical comparisons. Experiments between the implemented algorithms and the traditional way of using both forwards and backwards delta files are presented, comparing their processing time and their compression performance. These experiments show memory storage savings of about 25% using this bidirectional delta approach as compared to the compressed delta file constructed using the traditional way, while preserving approximately the same processing time for decoding.     

Organizational and institutional influences on creativity in scientific research

This paper explores institutional and organizational influences on creativity in scientific research. Using a method for identifying creative scientific research accomplishments in two fields of science (nanotechnology and human genetics) in Europe and the US, the paper summarizes results derived from twenty case studies of highly creative research accomplishments, focusing on contextual patterns at the group, organizational, and institutional levels. We find that creative accomplishments are associated with small group size, organizational contexts with sufficient access to a complementary variety of technical skills, stable research sponsorship, timely access to extramural skills and resources, and facilitating leadership. A potential institutional threat to creative science is the increase in competitive research council funding at the expense of flexible institutional sponsorship. Implications for research management and research policy are considered.