Services for the Elderly in Israel: Privatization or Nationalization-An Unending Dilemma-A Reflection

The world in which we live is aging at a dizzying pace and expressions like “70 is the new 50” or the creation of concepts such as the “Silver Tsunami”, a nickname for the aging baby-boomer generation, have become an inseparable part of the reality in our society.On the one hand, the spread of aging is a welcome phenomenon – a sort of solution to the great human effort to reach immortality. On the other hand, however, old age can be perceived as a period burdened by economic, social and health-related challenges and it is becoming more and more clear that throughout the world, and in Israel in particular – the focus of this article - we must begin to prepare systems and services for the provision of rapid and comprehensive solutions for the tsunami of aging that befalls us. This stems from an understanding that the services we have in place today are not sufficiently prepared to handle the range of challenges and issues that will arise as a side effect of this phenomenon.The dilemmas that come hand in hand with the aging of our population are innumerable, however five particular issues stand out: the first is who should be responsible for the elderly and their care – the government or the person’s family? The second: Should all of the elderly receive the same care or should the treatment assistance vary differentially – meaning each elderly person should receive care according to his or her economic, social and health status and receive only according to their needs? The third is, should we provide assistance to the elderly directly (e.g. specific medications) or should the elderly receive financial assistance equivalent to the value of their needs and should we hope that they purchase the relevant medications, for example, and not something else instead? The fourth dilemma is: should we provide assistance for specific projects or should we work on long-term solutions through legislation to provide care and assistance to the elderly? Fifth, which is also the main questions, is should the services provided be privatized or should the treatment be the responsibility of the state and its institutions?The question of privatization or nationalization is the main focus of this article, and while we do not pretend to offer a firm stance on the issue, the authors offer to shed some light on the basic concepts associated with our aging population and how we as a society might handle these issues from the perspective of comparison between privatization versus nationalization of services rendered. The main focus of this article will be around the issue of the residential arrangements for the elderly: Mainly - should the elderly move into what are typically called “old age homes” or should we allow for “Aging in Place” – an approach that favors allowing the elderly to remain in their own homes for the remainder of their lives. Which is the most favorable solution? This issue also falls under the dilemma of whether or not homes for the aging as one possible solution should be a state-provided service or if “aging in place” will result in the privatization of the services granted to the elderly.The focus of this article is the situation in Israel, a country in which a significant portion of the population is elderly and where, by 2035, 15% of the population will be considered senior citizens. We will present the dilemma through the lens of the situation in Israel. The article shall begin with an introduction offering an in-depth examination of the dilemma presented. We will continue by presenting basic concepts from the general literature in the field of gerontology available today. We will then examine the situation in Israel between the years 2017-2019 and conclude by examining the concepts of privatization and nationalization in regards to services for the elderly, while once again emphasizing that comprehensive solutions to these dilemmas are unlikely to be reached in the near future

RadArnomaly: Protecting Radar Systems from Data Manipulation Attacks

Radar systems are mainly used for tracking aircraft, missiles, satellites, and watercraft. In many cases, information regarding the objects detected by the radar system is sent to, and used by, a peripheral consuming system, such as a missile system or a graphical user interface used by an operator. Those systems process the data stream and make real-time, operational decisions based on the data received. Given this, the reliability and availability of information provided by radar systems has grown in importance. Although the field of cyber security has been continuously evolving, no prior research has focused on anomaly detection in radar systems. In this paper, we present a deep learning-based method for detecting anomalies in radar system data streams. We propose a novel technique which learns the correlation between numerical features and an embedding representation of categorical features in an unsupervised manner. The proposed technique, which allows the detection of malicious manipulation of critical fields in the data stream, is complemented by a timing-interval anomaly detection mechanism proposed for the detection of message dropping attempts. Real radar system data is used to evaluate the proposed method. Our experiments demonstrate the method's high detection accuracy on a variety of data stream manipulation attacks (average detection rate of 88% with 1.59% false alarms) and message dropping attacks (average detection rate of 92% with 2.2% false alarms)

Operations-informed incident response playbooks

Cyber security incident response playbooks are critical for establishing an effective incident response capability within organizations. We identify a significant conceptual gap in the current research and practice of cyber security playbook design: the lack of ability to communicate the operational impact of an incident and of incident response on an organization. In this paper, we present a mechanism to address the gap by introducing the operational context into an incident response playbook. This conceptual contribution calls for a shift from playbooks that consist only of process models to playbooks that consist of process models closely linked with a model of operations. We describe a novel approach to embed a model of operations into the incident response playbook and link it with the playbook's incident response activities. This allows to reflect, in an accurate and systematic way, the interdependencies and mutual influences of incident response activities on operations and vice versa. The approach includes the use of a new metric for evaluating the change in operations in coordination with critical thresholds, supporting decision-making during cyber security incident response. We demonstrate the application of the proposed approach to playbook design in the context of a ransomware attack incident response, using a newly developed open-source tool

Dissecting the Autocrine and Paracrine Roles of the CCR2-CCL2 Axis in Tumor Survival and Angiogenesis

The CCL2 CCR2 axis is likely to contributes to the development and progression of cancer diseases by two major mechanisms; autocrine effect of CCL2 as a survival/growth factor for CCR2+ cancer cells and, the attraction of CCR2+ CX3CR1+tumor associated macrophages that in the absence of CCR2 hardly migrate. Thus far no in vivo system has been set up to differentiate the selective contribution of each of these features to cancer development. Here we employed a chimera animal model in which all non-malignant cells are CCR2−/−, but all cancer cells are CCR2+, combined with an adoptive transfer system of bone marrow (BM) CX3CR1+ cells from CCR2+ mice harboring a targeted replacement of the CX3CR1gene by an enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) reporter gene (cx3cr1gfp), together with the CD45.1 congene. Using this system we dissected the selective contribution of CX3CR1+CCR2+ cells, which comprise only about 7% of CD11b+ BM cells, to tumor development and angiogenesis. Showing that aside for their direct pro-angiogenic effect they are essential for the recruitment of other CD11b+ cells to the tumor site. We further show that the administration of CCR2-Ig, that selectively and specifically neutralize CCL2, to mice in which CCR2 is expressed only on tumor cells, further suppressed tumor development, implicating for the key role of this chemokine supporting tumor survival in an autocrine manner. This further emphasizes the important role of CCL2 as a target for therapy of cancer diseases

Barbarians at the British Museum: Anglo-Saxon Art, Race and Religion

A critical historiographical overview of art historical approaches to early medieval material culture, with a focus on the British Museum collections and their connections to religion

Modeling for Rapid Systems Prototyping: Hospital Situational Awareness System Design

The COVID-19 pandemic caught hospitals unprepared. The need to treat patients remotely and with limited resources led hospitals to identify a gap in their operational situational awareness. During the pandemic, Israeli Aerospace Industries helped hospitals to address the gap by designing a system to support their effective operation, management and decision making. In this paper, we report on the development of a functional, working prototype of the system using model-based engineering approach and tools. Our approach relies on domain-specific modeling, incorporating metamodeling and domain-specific representations based on the problem domain’s ontology. The tools practiced are those embedded into the Eclipse Modeling Framework—specifically, Ecore Tools and Sirius. While these technological tools are typically used to create dedicated, engineering-related modeling tools, in this work, we use them to create a functional system prototype. We discuss the advantages of our approach as well as the challenges with respect to the existing tools and their underlying technology. Based on the reported experience, we encourage practitioners to adopt model-based engineering as an effective way to develop systems. Furthermore, we call researchers and tool developers to improve the state-of-the-art as well as the existing implementations of pertinent tools to support model-based rapid prototyping

Requirements for Model-Based Development Process Design and Compliance of Standardized Models

The planning of system development efforts is crucial to the successful realization of projects. However, development planning typically lacks systematic, engineering discipline, and consequently risks project and business success. Model-based process design is a potential information systems approach to addressing the increasing complexity of such planning. We characterize the ontology of development process design, based on real-life observations and scientific publications. We then synthesize the required ontology with the desirable characteristics of models, and derive key requirements for model-based development process design. Next, these requirements are used to evaluate the adequacy of three prominent, standardized model-based process design approaches—BPMN, OPM and SPEM. The findings reveal that the surveyed models are a partial fit, and do not promote sound process design. Finally, by generalizing the categorical evaluation results, possible root causes for the identified inadequacies are proposed. A new model design, which should rely on the formulated requirements set, is called for, in pursuit of a wider adoption of model-based design paradigms and better information systems realization to support the development of complex systems