An Integrated Spatial Search Engine for Maps and Aerial Photographs on a Google Maps API Platform

A traditional library catalog does not do justice to maps and aerial photographs. Text can never fully describe them and maps' and aerial photographs' geographic coverage or perimeters cannot be displayed visually in the online public access catalog (OPAC), so searching based on their textual metadata without specific spatial reference data used also for display purposes is often not enough to locate relevant items. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem's (HUJI) Geography Department has developed a spatial search engine for their scanned aerial photographs collection that allows users to locate one or more aerial photographs according to the area of the Earth's surface that was photographed and their accompanying metadata. The Humanities and Social Sciences Library, which holds a large unscanned print map collection, has asked to integrate a similar map search mechanism in the Department's existing search engine, and a new website was launched in December 2015 (http://ccg.huji.ac.il/aerialphotos/) showing the aerial photographs' center points alongside the maps' rectangle perimeter. The search engine retrieves maps and aerial photographs that intersect with a user-drawn rectangle. This article discusses the characteristics of these collections, the rationale behind searching for maps and aerial photographs together, and the process of defining and building this spatial search engine. This method allows users to view which items are available in their area of interest side-by-side, on a Google Maps background map.     

Staging peace: Televised ceremonies of reconciliation

ABSTRACT

The visit of Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem was the model for Dayan and Katz’s conceptualization of the genre of media events, as live programs which have the power to transform history. Fifteen years later, a series of televised reconciliation ceremonies, which marked the stages of the peace process between Israel and its Arab neighbors (the Palestinians and the Jordanians), are used to re-examine the model. We demonstrate (1) how the effectiveness of these ceremonies depends on the type of contract among the three participants—leaders, broadcasters and public—each of whom displays different kinds of reservations, and (2) how the aura of the ceremonies draws on the prior status of the participants (Hussein), but also confers status (Arafat).     

Childhood emotional invalidation and adult psychological distress: the mediating role of emotional inhibition

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate a model in which chronic emotional inhibition mediates the relationship between a history of childhood emotional invalidation or abuse and adult psychological distress. METHOD: One hundred and twenty-seven participants completed a series of self-report questionnaires, and a subset of this group (n=88) completed an additional measure of current avoidant coping in response to a laboratory stressor. Structural equation modeling was used to evaluate and compare a full and partial mediational model. RESULTS: Findings strongly supported a model in which a history of childhood emotional invalidation (i.e., psychological abuse and parental punishment, minimization, and distress in response to negative emotion) was associated with chronic emotional inhibition in adulthood (i.e., ambivalence over emotional expression, thought suppression, and avoidant stress responses). In turn, emotional inhibition significantly predicted psychological distress, including depression and anxiety symptoms. CONCLUSION: This study found support for a model in which the relation between recollected negative emotion socialization in childhood and adult psychological distress was fully mediated by a style of inhibiting emotional experience and expression. Although it is likely that childhood emotional inhibition is functional (e.g., reduces parental distress and rejection), results suggest that chronic emotional inhibition may have long-term negative consequences for the inhibitor.     

Changes in educational beliefs and classroom practices of teachers and students in rich technology-based classrooms[1]

This study was conducted in the framework of a project that sought to change the school learning and teaching environment and adapt it to current reality through the proactive use of technology in the search for knowledge. It is an exploratory, longitudinal, case study of a single school, in one city in central Israel, which examines changes in educational beliefs, classroom practices, and knowledge restructuring processes of six teachers of grades 4-6, who for three years experienced an approach to teaching and learning focusing on information-rich tasks in an information-rich environment. The main findings show different patterns and rates of change in teacher educational beliefs, knowledge restructuring processes and classroom practices. They also demonstrate that students of teachers whose educational beliefs and classroom practices radically changed and which reflected a constructivist approach to learning regarded learning as a process of engaging with complex, context-related tasks requiring multiple viewpoints, whereas students whose teachers had a traditional positivist approach saw technologyassisted learning as learning with technical tools. The study indicates a reciprocal rather than unidirectional relationship between teacher classroom practice and changes in teacher educational beliefs and knowledge restructuring processes.     

Medicine as a calling among male and female medical students in Israel: Does it make a difference?

This study focused on the perception of medicine as a calling and its associations with medical training satisfaction, career certainty, career satisfaction, career commitment, and well-being among 176 Israeli medical students. Participants replied to an online questionnaire including the Brief Calling Scale (Duffy and Sedlacek in Career Dev Q 59:27–41, 2010) and measures related to medical training, a medical career, and well-being. Calling was positively associated with all outcome measures, and gender moderated these associations, which were stronger for female medical students in comparison with male medical students. The importance of taking these gender differences regarding calling under consideration for career counseling is discussed.     

A foreign model of teacher education and its local appropriation: the English teachers’ centres in Spain

This article explores the implementation of the English model of teachers’ centres in the context of 1980s Spain. Originally it was a top-down plan initiated by a national government. However, from the very beginning its fate was dependent on a bottom-up educational project carried out by pedagogical social movements. The first part of the article focuses on the multiple factors, the combination of which finally brought about the mediated educational transfer of the English teachers centres into Spain. The second part analyses the role played by the pedagogical movements during the implementation of this new initiative. The article concludes by evaluating how the interaction between the bottom-up and top-down processes gave impulse to the rapid establishment of a grand variety of innovative teachers centres, in the first stage, but ultimately brought about a consolidation of a single, hegemonic model, very different from the original object of educational transfer.