Bar-Ilan University

About: Bar-Ilan University is a education organization based out in Ramat Gan, Israel. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 12835 authors who have published 34964 publications receiving 995648 citations. The organization is also known as: Bar Ilan University & BIU.

Text Mining at the Term Level

Abstract: Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) focuses on the computerized exploration of large amounts of data and on the discovery of interesting patterns within them. While most work on KDD has been concerned with structured databases, there has been little work on handling the huge amount of information that is available only in unstructured textual form. Previous work in text mining focused at the word or the tag level. This paper presents an approach to performing text mining at the term level. The mining process starts by preprocessing the document collection and extracting terms from the documents. Each document is then represented by a set of terms and annotations characterizing the document. Terms and additional higher-level entities are then organized in a hierarchical taxonomy. In this paper we will describe the Term Extraction module of the Document Explorer system, and provide experimental evaluation performed on a set of 52,000 documents published by Reuters in the years 1995–1996.

Second-harmonic microscopy of biological tissue.

Abstract: We present the first reported optical second-harmonic microscope images of a biological sample—rattail tendon—and discuss, also for the first time, the need to distinguish between coherent and incoherent second-harmonic imaging. Our data show that the currently unexplained macroscopic polar order of this classic representative of connective tissue is due both to a coherent network containing a large number of fine, polar, filamentlike structures that permeate the entire tendon volume and to a small number of intensely polar surface patches.

Childless in the Land of Imperative Motherhood: Stigma and Coping Among Infertile Israeli Women

Abstract: Drawing on Goffman's stigma framework, this in-depth study explored the experiences of 26 infertile Jewish women in Israel, the country with a strong pronatalist ideology, both institutional and popular. The findings are in line with the key postulates of the stigma concept: women's coping strategies included selective disclosure, avoidance of exposure of their “hidden disability,” and other information management techniques. Infertility became a “master status” for these women, undermining any other merits and achievements they might have. Most women fully internalized and endorsed the pronatalist discourse by way of pursuing long-term and burdensome infertility treatments, at any personal cost. The paper argues that resistance to stigma of infertility is only possible where women dare question the motherhood imperative, which is clearly not the case with most Israelis. Material and mental resources needed for resisting the stigma of infertility are found among few educated professional women. The paper suggests three theoretical inferences: (a) stigma as a psychological response is graded by the extent of individual's conformity with the dominant norms; (b) the stigma of childlessness is most devastating for the less educated women without career or other nonfamilial aspirations; and (c) in pronatalist societies, the coping and management approach to the study of infertility is more relevant than the resistance approach suggested by some authors.