Irreconcilable: The Story of the Palestinian and Israeli Future Visions Since 1967

Thesis advisor: Eve SpanglerAt the conclusion of the 1967 War, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict returned to a contest between two national movements, Palestinian and Israeli, making competing claims to the same piece of territory. Over the ensuing 45 years, the discourse of each national movement has been littered with explicit and implicit references, acknowledgements and denunciations of the other. This study takes a critical reading approach to political discourse of each national movement with the goal of finding the place of the other in the imagined future of each group. By understanding the evolving place of the other in national movements that make exclusive claim to the same piece of territory, we are able to understand the irreconcilability that has characterized the Palestinian-Israeli conflict since the start of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 and the failure of the Oslo Process to bring about a negotiated solution.Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2013.Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Islamic Civilization and Society Honors Program.Discipline: Islamic Civilizations

Why We Read Wikipedia

Wikipedia is one of the most popular sites on the Web, with millions of users relying on it to satisfy a broad range of information needs every day. Although it is crucial to understand what exactly these needs are in order to be able to meet them, little is currently known about why users visit Wikipedia. The goal of this paper is to fill this gap by combining a survey of Wikipedia readers with a log-based analysis of user activity. Based on an initial series of user surveys, we build a taxonomy of Wikipedia use cases along several dimensions, capturing users' motivations to visit Wikipedia, the depth of knowledge they are seeking, and their knowledge of the topic of interest prior to visiting Wikipedia. Then, we quantify the prevalence of these use cases via a large-scale user survey conducted on live Wikipedia with almost 30,000 responses. Our analyses highlight the variety of factors driving users to Wikipedia, such as current events, media coverage of a topic, personal curiosity, work or school assignments, or boredom. Finally, we match survey responses to the respondents' digital traces in Wikipedia's server logs, enabling the discovery of behavioral patterns associated with specific use cases. For instance, we observe long and fast-paced page sequences across topics for users who are bored or exploring randomly, whereas those using Wikipedia for work or school spend more time on individual articles focused on topics such as science. Our findings advance our understanding of reader motivations and behavior on Wikipedia and can have implications for developers aiming to improve Wikipedia's user experience, editors striving to cater to their readers' needs, third-party services (such as search engines) providing access to Wikipedia content, and researchers aiming to build tools such as recommendation engines.Comment: Published in WWW'17; v2 fixes caption of Table

Non-communicable diseases in emergencies: a call to action

Recent years have demonstrated the devastating health consequences of complex emergencies and natural disasters and thereby highlighted the importance of comprehensive and collaborative approaches to humanitarian responses and risk reduction. Simultaneously, noncommunicable diseases are now recognised as a real and growing threat to population health and development; a threat that is magnified by and during emergencies. Noncommunicable diseases, however, continue to receive little attention from humanitarian organisations in the acute phase of disaster and emergency response. This paper calls on all sectors to recognise and address the specific health challenges posed by noncommunicable diseases in emergencies and disaster situations. This publication aims to highlight the need for: • Increased research on morbidity and mortality patterns due to noncommunicable diseases during and following emergencies; • Raised awareness through greater advocacy for the issue and challenges of noncommunicable diseases during and following emergencies; • Incorporation of noncommunicable diseases into existing emergency-related policies, standards, and resources; • Development of technical guidelines on the clinical management of noncommunicable diseases in emergencies; • Greater integration and coordination in health service provision during and following emergencies; • Integrating noncommunicable diseases into practical and academic training of emergency workers and emergency-response coordinators

Measures for simulator evaluation of a helicopter obstacle avoidance system

The U.S. Army Aeroflightdynamics Directorate (AFDD) has developed a high-fidelity, full-mission simulation facility for the demonstration and evaluation of advanced helicopter mission equipment. The Crew Station Research and Development Facility (CSRDF) provides the capability to conduct one- or two-crew full-mission simulations in a state-of-the-art helicopter simulator. The CSRDF provides a realistic, full field-of-regard visual environment with simulation of state-of-the-art weapons, sensors, and flight control systems. We are using the CSRDF to evaluate the ability of an obstacle avoidance system (OASYS) to support low altitude flight in cluttered terrain using night vision goggles (NVG). The OASYS uses a laser radar to locate obstacles to safe flight in the aircraft's flight path. A major concern is the detection of wires, which can be difficult to see with NVG, but other obstacles--such as trees, poles or the ground--are also a concern. The OASYS symbology is presented to the pilot on a head-up display mounted on the NVG (NVG-HUD). The NVG-HUD presents head-stabilized symbology to the pilot while allowing him to view the image intensified, out-the-window scene through the HUD. Since interference with viewing through the display is a major concern, OASYS symbology must be designed to present usable obstacle clearance information with a minimum of clutter

Fluid and Diffusion Limits for Bike Sharing Systems

Bike sharing systems have rapidly developed around the world, and they are served as a promising strategy to improve urban traffic congestion and to decrease polluting gas emissions. So far performance analysis of bike sharing systems always exists many difficulties and challenges under some more general factors. In this paper, a more general large-scale bike sharing system is discussed by means of heavy traffic approximation of multiclass closed queueing networks with non-exponential factors. Based on this, the fluid scaled equations and the diffusion scaled equations are established by means of the numbers of bikes both at the stations and on the roads, respectively. Furthermore, the scaling processes for the numbers of bikes both at the stations and on the roads are proved to converge in distribution to a semimartingale reflecting Brownian motion (SRBM) in a $N^{2}$-dimensional box, and also the fluid and diffusion limit theorems are obtained. Furthermore, performance analysis of the bike sharing system is provided. Thus the results and methodology of this paper provide new highlight in the study of more general large-scale bike sharing systems.Comment: 34 pages, 1 figure

E-learning and health inequality aversion : A questionnaire experiment

In principle, questionnaire data on public views about hypothetical trade-offs between improving total health and reducing health inequality can provide useful normative health inequality aversion parameter benchmarks for policymakers faced with real trade-offs of this kind. However, trade-off questions can be hard to understand, and one standard type of question finds that a high proportion of respondents-sometimes a majority-appear to give exclusive priority to reducing health inequality. We developed and tested two e-learning interventions designed to help respondents understand this question more completely. The interventions were a video animation, exposing respondents to rival points of view, and a spreadsheet-based questionnaire that provided feedback on implied trade-offs. We found large effects of both interventions in reducing the proportion of respondents giving exclusive priority to reducing health inequality, though the median responses still implied a high degree of health inequality aversion and-unlike the video-the spreadsheet-based intervention introduced a substantial new minority of non-egalitarian responses. E-learning may introduce as well as avoid biases but merits further research and may be useful in other questionnaire studies involving trade-offs between conflicting values

User-Based Solutions for Increasing Level of Service in Bike-Sharing Transportation Systems

International audienceBike-sharing transportation systems have been well studied from a top-down viewpoint, either for an optimal conception of the system , or for a better statistical understanding of their working mechanisms in the aim of the optimization of the management strategy. Yet bottom-up approaches that could include behavior of users have not been well studied so far. We propose an agent-based model for the short time evolution of a bike-sharing system, with a focus on two strategical parameters that are the role of the quantity of information users have on the all system and the propensity of user to walk after having dropped their bike. We implement the model in a general way so it is applicable to every system as soon as data are available in a certain format. The model of simulation is parametrized and calibrated on processed real time-series of bike movements for the system of Paris. After showing the robustness of the simulations by validating internally and externally the model, we are able to test different user-based strategies for an increase of the level of service. In particular, we show that an increase of user information can have significant impact on the homogeneity of repartition of bikes in docking stations, and, what is important for a future implementation of the strategy, that an action on only 30% of regular users is enough to obtain most of the possible amelioration