This book is the first major sociological analysis of the characteristics and interrelationships of ethnicity, religion, and socio-economic class in Israeli society. Although much has been written about the various distinctions between Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews, this volume argues for a more sophisticated approach than the rather crude divisions that have formed the basis of most works on the subject. The authors include categories largely overlooked in sociological studies on Israel such as middle class Israelis from Asia and Africa, and working-class Israelis from Europe. The data acquired from this rich ethnic mix leads to the analysis of a wide range of theoretical issues that casts fresh light on social cleavages within Israel in particular and society in general.
The emergence of Positive Psychology has highlighted the importance of studying the good life and how to attain it. Positive life outcomes, such as well-being, thriving, flourishing, and happiness were discussed and investigated. Among them, different orientations to happiness were identified, such as a life of pleasure, life of meaning, and life of engagement. Other outcomes, such as subjective and objective fulfillment in life or societal recognition have been less studied. Among the characteristics that facilitate positive outcomes, the VIA-classification of strength and virtues distinguishes 24 strengths with humor/playfulness being one of them. Only a small segment of humor entered the definition of humor as character strengths, namely the parts that contain some “goodness”. Humor as a character strength facilitates a lot of positive outcomes, such as positive emotions and positive relationships, and there is a “lightness” accompanying humor/playfulness. The field is broader though and transcends the definition of humor as used in positive psychology, in at least two ways. First, there is actually a family of overlapping but still distinct concepts with different research traditions. We include next to humor (and types of humor), also laughter, playfulness, and cheerfulness. We think that more research is needed on how they do overlap and what makes them distinct. Second, while positive psychology is interested in the goodness of we do want to stress that there is the need to study the non-virtuous parts as well. That is, laughter may not only be expressing amusement but scorn directed at people, humor may be benevolent but there is also sarcasm, and playfulness may elicit positive emotions but also risk-prone and immature types of behavior. Therefore, the aim of this Research Topic was to collect current perspectives on humor, playfulness, laughter, and cheerfulness in both adults and children, to study their full diversity but also interrelations and overlapping features, to introduce new instruments or ways for their assessment in future studies, and to study their causes and consequences in a variety of life domains. We encouraged studies on differences due to gender or nationality, the embodiment in different groups (e.g., class clowns, psychiatric patients), or whether or not they can be trained. We also welcomed contributions from adjacent disciplines (e.g., education, leisure studies, or therapy/counseling) and different regions of the earth. The outcome is a set of 33 manuscripts from altogether 101 authors. Not all areas are covered and not all aims were met; while we made progress there is much left to do. In this sense, the merging of these topics may be the first milestone but like every milestone, it only marks the beginning of a long journey.
These post-proceedings contain the revised versions of the papers presented at the \Symposium on Objects and Databases" which was held in Sophia-Antipolis, France, June 13, 2000, in conjunction with the Fourteenth European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, ECOOP 2000. This event continued the t- dition established the year before in Lisbon (Portugal) with the First Workshop on Object-Oriented Databases. The goal of the symposium was to bring together researchers working in various corners of the eld of objects and databases, to discuss the current state of research in the eld and to critically evaluate existing solutions in terms of their current usage, their successes and limitations, and their potential for new applications. The organizing committee received 21 papers which were reviewed by a p- gram committee of people active in the eld of objects and databases. There were 3 reviews for each paper, and nally the organizing committee selected 9 long papers, 2 short papers, and a demonstration to be presented and discussed at the symposium. The selected papers cover a wide spectrum of topics, including data modeling concepts, persistent object languages, consistency and integrity of persistent data, storage structures, class versioning and schema evolution, query languages, and temporal object-oriented databases. In addition to the regular papers, the symposium included an invited p- sentation, given by Prof. Malcolm Atkinson from the University of Glasgow (Scotland) where he heads the Persistence and Distribution Group.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery, DaWaK 2006, held in conjunction with DEXA 2006. The book presents 53 revised full papers, organized in topical sections on ETL processing, materialized view, multidimensional design, OLAP and multidimensional model, cubes processing, data warehouse applications, mining techniques, frequent itemsets, mining data streams, ontology-based mining, clustering, advanced mining techniques, association rules, miscellaneous applications, and classification.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery, DaWak 2007, held in Regensburg, Germany, September 2007. Coverage includes ETL processing, multidimensional design, OLAP and multidimensional model, cubes processing, data warehouse applications, frequent itemsets, ontology-based mining, clustering, association rules, miscellaneous applications, and classification.
The foundational reason for why we find it so difficult to rebuild school curricula around the needs of the modern world is that we lack an organizing framework that can help prioritise educational competencies, and systematically structure the conversation around what individuals should learn at various stages of their development. Four-dimensional education provides a clear and actionable first-of-its-kind organizing framework of competencies needed for this century. Its main innovation lies in not presenting yet another one-size-fits-all list of what individuals should learn, but in crisply defining the spaces in which educators, curriculum planners, policymakers and learners can establish what should be learned, in their context and for their future.
Database research and development has been remarkably successful over the past three decades. Now the field is facing new challenges posted by the rapid advances of technology, especially the penetration of the Web and Internet into everyone's daily life. The economical and financial environment where database systems are used has been changing dramatically. In addition to being able to efficiently manage a large volume of operational data generated internally, the ability to manage data in cyberspace, extract relevant information, and discover knowledge to support decision making is critical to the success of any organization. In order to provide researchers and practitioners with a forum to share their experiences in tackling problems in managing and using data, information, and knowledge in the age of the Internet and Web, the First International Conference on Web-Age Information Management (WAIM 2000) was held in Shanghai, China, June 21-23. The inaugural conference in its series was well received. Researchers from 17 countries and regions, including Austria, Australia, Bahrain, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, The Netherlands, Poland, Singapore, Spain, Taiwan, UK, and USA submitted their recent work. Twenty-seven regular and 14 short papers contained in these proceedings were presented during the two-day conference. These papers cover a large spectrum of issues, from classical data management such as object-oriented modeling, spatial and temporal databases to recent hits like data mining, data warehousing, semi-structured data, and XML.
