Successful Adaptation of Immigrants from the former Soviet Union to Project Renewal Neighborhoods: The Influential Factors

Migration has been an international phenomenon for centuries. The widespread trend toward migration in recent years has resulted in efforts to examine the factors involved in the adaptation of immigrants to life in the host country. This study examines the factors that effect immigrant adaptation and integration in urban neighborhoods in Israel that are undergoing a process of rehabilitation. Adaptation is defined by the variables: contact with neighbors, participation in community activities, sense of belonging to the community and well-being. These mediator and dependent variables were found to be directly effected by home and host related variables. These variables were not found to directly effect well-being. Proximity of family and ability to converse in Hebrew were found to have an indirect effect on well-being, constructed using community variables, which themselves directly effect well-being. The discussion of the findings refers both to Project Renewal for the Rehabilitation of Neighborhoods, and the role of professional community workers as planners and movers in the neighborhoods incorpororated in the project

Colored E-Graph: Equality Reasoning with Conditions

E-graphs are a prominent data structure that has been increasing in popularity in recent years due to their expanding range of applications in various formal reasoning tasks. Often, they are used for equality saturation, a process of deriving consequences through repeatedly applying universally quantified equality formulas via term rewriting. They handle equality reasoning over a large spaces of terms, but are severely limited in their handling of case splitting and other types of logical cuts, especially when compared to other reasoning techniques such as sequent calculi and resolution. The main difficulty is when equality reasoning requires multiple inconsistent assumptions to reach a single conclusion. Ad-hoc solutions, such as duplicating the e-graph for each assumption, are available, but they are notably resource-intensive. We introduce a key observation is that each duplicate e-graph (with an added assumption) corresponds to coarsened congruence relation. Based on that, we present an extension to e-graphs, called Colored E-Graphs, as a way to represent all of the coarsened congruence relations in a single structure. A colored e-graph is a memory-efficient equivalent of multiple copies of an e-graph, with a much lower overhead. This is attained by sharing as much as possible between different cases, while carefully tracking which conclusion is true under which assumption. Support for multiple relations can be thought of as adding multiple "color-coded" layers on top of the original e-graph structure, leading to a large degree of sharing. In our implementation, we introduce optimizations to rebuilding and e-matching. We run experiments and demonstrate that our colored e-graphs can support hundreds of assumptions and millions of terms with space requirements that are an order of magnitude lower, and with similar time requirements

Initial report on Object Spreadsheets

There is a growing demand for data-driven web applications that help automate organizational and business processes of low to medium complexity by letting users view and update structured data in controlled ways. We present Object Spreadsheets, an end-user development tool that combines a spreadsheet interface with a rich data model to help the process administrators build the logic for such applications themselves. Its all-in-one interface with immediate feedback has the potential to bring more complex tasks within reach of end-user developers, compared to existing approaches. Our data model is based on the structure of entity-relationship models and directly supports nested variable-size collections and object references, which are common in web applications but poorly accommodated by traditional spreadsheets. Object Spreadsheets has a formula language suited to the data model and supports stored procedures to specify the forms of updates that application users may make. Formulas can be used to assemble data in the exact structure in which it is to be shown in the application UI, simplifying the task of UI building; we intend for Object Spreadsheets to be integrated with a UI builder to provide a complete solution for application development. We describe our prototype implementation and several example applications we built to demonstrate the applicability of the tool

SMT Sampling via Model-Guided Approximation

We investigate the domain of satisfiable formulas in satisfiability modulo theories (SMT), in particular, automatic generation of a multitude of satisfying assignments to such formulas. Despite the long and successful history of SMT in model checking and formal verification, this aspect is relatively under-explored. Prior work exists for generating such assignments, or samples, for Boolean formulas and for quantifier-free first-order formulas involving bit-vectors, arrays, and uninterpreted functions (QF_AUFBV). We propose a new approach that is suitable for a theory T of integer arithmetic and to T with arrays and uninterpreted functions. The approach involves reducing the general sampling problem to a simpler instance of sampling from a set of independent intervals, which can be done efficiently. Such reduction is carried out by expanding a single model - a seed - using top-down propagation of constraints along the original first-order formula

Hebrew as a Gendered Language and an Oppressive Mechanism against Women in the Israeli Society

Wherever you look, whether reading a textbook, scrolling through wanted ads, looking at job requirements, or just watching the news on the television – the effects of the gendered nature of Hebrew are noticeable everywhere. For many years I have been fascinated by the fact that Hebrew is a gendered language in a way that promotes patriarchy by using the unmarked masculine form of words as a default. Some claim that the language as we know it today is neutral, and not discriminatory, while others, including women which interviews you can find in this paper, do not experience it as a neutral language. In fact, the way that the language is structured makes them feel excluded and make them experience a world that is male dominated. In this thesis paper, I am looking at Hebrew in its two main variations, Ancient (or biblical) Hebrew and Modern Hebrew. Chapter 1 explores the first stories ever told in the Jewish Torah – the creation of Adam and Eve, and the untold story of Adam’s first wife – Lilith, in a search for possible explanations as to why Hebrew has developed as a gendered language. Later, I explore the revival of the Hebrew language, a linguistic, social, and a bit of a political event that dates back to the late 19th century and considered until today as a special and rare one, as I am trying to find more reasons as to why Hebrew stayed so gendered even when it had to be developed. My research will also focus on the involvement and importance women had in the revival of Hebrew, if any. By that, I am looking for any patterns of this gendering that can infer on social processes (men’s superiority over women for generations and to this day). There is also an extensive review of modern Hebrew, while it also looks at the intersections of feminism, gender, linguistics, and the way they interact. In chapter 4, I explore the Modern Hebrew as it is used today, still being a gendered and oppressive language. I do so partly by analyzing interviews I made with native Hebrew-speaking women. It is my hope to inspire a conversation about this issue and the need for a change of Hebrew in order to promote a more inclusive society in Israel and other large Hebrew-speaking communities

Depression and PTSD Co-Morbidity: What are We Missing?

Background: Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression comorbidity is highly common. Many hypotheses concerning this relation have been raised but the pertinent issues, including the wide clinical picture of this comorbidity, are still not clear. The current study aims to bridge these gaps. Method: We assessed PTSD, depression and comorbid indicators including dissociation, somatization, self- destructive behavior and suicidality among Israeli Yom Kippur war veterans at three time points (N = 349, 287, 301). Results: Dissociation, somatization, self-destructive behavior and suicidality were predicted separately by group (PTSD, depression and comorbidity) and time of measurement using ANOVA and Chi squared analyses. The ‘comorbidity’ group expressed significantly higher dissociation, somatization, self-destructive behavior and suicidality, revealing high vulnerability of this group. Somatization presented a curvilinear-like development, increasing between T1 and T2 and slightly declining at T3, especially among the ‘comorbidity’ group. Suicidality showed a constant increase along the three measurements, especially among the comorbidity group. Conclusions: A PTSD/depression comorbidity is both highly prevalent and long lasting and is often expressed concurrently with other related symptomatology, which causes further suffering and makes it more complicated for treatment. Implications for policy makers are briefly discussed

AmiGo: Computational Design of Amigurumi Crochet Patterns

We propose an approach for generating crochet instructions (patterns) from an input 3D model. We focus on Amigurumi, which are knitted stuffed toys. Given a closed triangle mesh, and a single point specified by the user, we generate crochet instructions, which when knitted and stuffed result in a toy similar to the input geometry. Our approach relies on constructing the geometry and connectivity of a Crochet Graph, which is then translated into a crochet pattern. We segment the shape automatically into chrochetable components, which are connected using the join-as-you-go method, requiring no additional sewing. We demonstrate that our method is applicable to a large variety of shapes and geometries, and yields easily crochetable patterns.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, SCF 202

On the Automated Verification of Web Applications with Embedded SQL

A large number of web applications is based on a relational database together with a program, typically a script, that enables the user to interact with the database through embedded SQL queries and commands. In this paper, we introduce a method for formal automated verification of such systems which connects database theory to mainstream program analysis. We identify a fragment of SQL which captures the behavior of the queries in our case studies, is algorithmically decidable, and facilitates the construction of weakest preconditions. Thus, we can integrate the analysis of SQL queries into a program analysis tool chain. To this end, we implement a new decision procedure for the SQL fragment that we introduce. We demonstrate practical applicability of our results with three case studies, a web administrator, a simple firewall, and a conference management system

Spatial Interpolants

We propose Splinter, a new technique for proving properties of heap-manipulating programs that marries (1) a new separation logic-based analysis for heap reasoning with (2) an interpolation-based technique for refining heap-shape invariants with data invariants. Splinter is property directed, precise, and produces counterexample traces when a property does not hold. Using the novel notion of spatial interpolants modulo theories, Splinter can infer complex invariants over general recursive predicates, e.g., of the form all elements in a linked list are even or a binary tree is sorted. Furthermore, we treat interpolation as a black box, which gives us the freedom to encode data manipulation in any suitable theory for a given program (e.g., bit vectors, arrays, or linear arithmetic), so that our technique immediately benefits from any future advances in SMT solving and interpolation.Comment: Short version published in ESOP 201

Deriving divide-and-conquer dynamic programming algorithms using solver-aided transformations

We introduce a framework allowing domain experts to manipulate computational terms in the interest of deriving better, more efficient implementations.It employs deductive reasoning to generate provably correct efficient implementations from a very high-level specification of an algorithm, and inductive constraint-based synthesis to improve automation. Semantic information is encoded into program terms through the use of refinement types. In this paper, we develop the technique in the context of a system called Bellmania that uses solver-aided tactics to derive parallel divide-and-conquer implementations of dynamic programming algorithms that have better locality and are significantly more efficient than traditional loop-based implementations. Bellmania includes a high-level language for specifying dynamic programming algorithms and a calculus that facilitates gradual transformation of these specifications into efficient implementations. These transformations formalize the divide-and conquer technique; a visualization interface helps users to interactively guide the process, while an SMT-based back-end verifies each step and takes care of low-level reasoning required for parallelism. We have used the system to generate provably correct implementations of several algorithms, including some important algorithms from computational biology, and show that the performance is comparable to that of the best manually optimized code.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (CCF-1139056)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (CCF- 1439084)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (CNS-1553510