This article analyzes the Hamas-Israel controversy through 253,925 Spanish-language YouTube comments posted between October 2023 and January 2024, following the October 7 attack that escalated the conflict. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the study combines the analysis of controversies from Science and Technology Studies (STS) with advanced computational methodologies, specifically Natural Language Processing (NLP) using the BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) model. Using this approach, the comments were automatically classified into seven categories, reflecting pro-Palestinian, pro-Israeli, anti- Palestinian, anti-Israeli positions, among others. The results show a predominance of pro- Palestinian comments, although pro-Israeli and anti-Palestinian comments received more "likes." This study also applies the agenda-setting theory to demonstrate how media coverage significantly influences public perception, observing a notable shift in public opinion, transitioning from a pro- Palestinian stance to a more critical position towards Israel. This work highlights the importance of combining social science perspectives with technological tools in the
This study explores the prevalence of hate speech (HS) and sentiment in YouTube video comments concerning the Israel-Palestine conflict by analyzing content from both public and private news sources. The research involved annotating 4983 comments for HS and sentiments (neutral, pro-Israel, and pro-Palestine). Subsequently, machine learning (ML) models were developed, demonstrating robust predictive capabilities with area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) scores ranging from 0.83 to 0.90. These models were applied to the extracted comment sections of YouTube videos from public and private sources, uncovering a higher incidence of HS in public sources (40.4%) compared to private sources (31.6%). Sentiment analysis revealed a predominantly neutral stance in both source types, with more pronounced sentiments towards Israel and Palestine observed in public sources. This investigation highlights the dynamic nature of online discourse surrounding the Israel-Palestine conflict and underscores the potential of moderating content in a politically charged environment.
We propose a semi-structural DSGE model for the Israeli economy, as a small open economy, which contains a financial friction in the household sector credit market. Such a friction is reflected in a positive relationship between households' leverage ratio and their interest rate (credit spread) on debt, as evident in the Israeli data. Our main purpose is to evaluate the implications of such a friction on the implementation of monetary policy and macroprudential policy. Our two main findings are: First, it is important that the monetary policy will react also to developments in the credit market, such as credit spread widening, to increase effectiveness in achieving its main goals of stabilizing inflation and real activity. Second, macroprudential policy may increase the sensitivity of households' credit spread to their leverage. Thus, this policy can mitigate or even prevent over-borrowing and reduce the risk of a debt deleveraging crisis. Moreover, in a case of demand weakness and debt deleveraging, in addition to accommodative monetary policy, the macroprudential policy may contribute to stimulating demand due to a corresponding reduction in credit spread.
We report empirical evidence of web defacement and DDoS attacks carried out by low-level cybercrime actors in the Israel-Gaza conflict. Our quantitative measurements indicate an immediate increase in such cyberattacks following the Hamas-led assault and the subsequent declaration of war. However, the surges waned quickly after a few weeks, with patterns resembling those observed in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The scale of attacks and discussions within the hacking community this time was both significantly lower than those during the early days of the Russia-Ukraine war, and attacks have been prominently one-sided: many pro-Palestinian supporters have targeted Israel, while attacks on Palestine have been much less significant. Beyond targeting these two, attackers also defaced sites of other countries to express their war support. Their broader opinions are also largely disparate, with far more support for Palestine and many objections expressed toward Israel.
We present the first fully nonlinear causality constraints in $D = 3 + 1$ dimensions for Israel-Stewart theory in the presence of energy and number diffusion in the Eckart and Landau hydrodynamic frames, respectively. These constraints are algebraic inequalities that make no assumption on the underlying geometry of the spacetime or the equation of state. In order to highlight the distinct physical and structural behavior of the two hydrodynamic frames, we discuss the special ultrarelativistic ideal gas equation of state considered in earlier literature in $D = 1 + 1$ dimensions, and show that our general $D = 3 + 1$ constraints reduce to their results upon an appropriate choice of angles. For this equation of state in both $D = 1 + 1$ and $D = 3 + 1$ dimensions one can show that: (i) there exists a region allowed by nonlinear causality in which the baryon current transitions into a spacelike vector in the Landau frame, and (ii) an analogous argument shows that the solutions of the Eckart frame equations of motion never violate the dominant energy condition, assuming nonlinear causality holds. We then compare our results with those from linearized Israel-Stewart theory and show that
Significant shifts in the composition of consumer spending as a result of the COVID-19 crisis can complicate the interpretation of official inflation data, which are calculated by the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) based on a fixed basket of goods. We focus on Israel as a country that experienced three lockdowns, additional restrictions that significantly changed consumer behavior, and a successful vaccination campaign that has led to the lifting of most of these restrictions. We use credit card spending data to construct a consumption basket of goods representing the composition of household consumption during the COVID-19 period. We use this synthetic COVID-19 basket to calculate the adjusted inflation rate that should prevail during the pandemic period. We find that the differences between COVID-19-adjusted and CBS (unadjusted) inflation measures are transitory. Only the contribution of certain goods and services, particularly housing and transportation, to inflation changed significantly, especially during the first and second lockdowns. Although lockdowns and restrictions in developed countries created a significant bias in inflation weighting, the inflation bias remained
In February 2024, Israel's Ministry of Health released microdata of live births in Israel in 2014. The dataset is based on Israel's National Registry of Live Births and offers substantial value in multiple areas, such as scientific research and policy-making, while providing pure differential privacy guarantee with $\varepsilon = 9.98$ for 2014's mothers and newborns. The release was co-designed by the authors along with stakeholders from both inside and outside the Ministry of Health. This paper presents the methodology used to obtain that release, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first of its kind in the world. The design process has been challenging and required flexibility and open-mindedness on all sides involved, along with substantial technical innovation. In particular, we introduce new concepts regarding the desiderata from dataset releases in a microdata format, as well as a way to bundle together multiple quantitative desiderata for a differentially private release using the private selection algorithm of Liu and Talwar (STOC 2019). We hope that the experiences reported here will be useful to future differentially private releases.
We study the images of black holes by gluing two Schwarzschild spacetimes with a thin shell where the Israel junction conditions are satisfied. By studying the refraction law for null geodesics at the spherical shell, and taking account of the light travel time delay, the images are obtained by ray tracing a geometrically and optically thin accretion disk. For a static shell we identify three signatures: a redshift cusp at the shell, a V-shaped profile of the transfer function $r(b)$, and a loss of the one-to-one correspondence between photon spheres and photon rings on the observer's screen. During the collapse of the shell, the spacetime evolves from a stage with a single photon sphere inside the shell, through an intermediate stage with double photon spheres, and finally to a spacetime with a single photon sphere outside the shell. However, when the shell is released from a large distance, the corresponding images never show two separate photon rings, even in the stage with two photon spheres. In addition, the motion of the shell leads to a discontinuity in the redshift factor. These signatures provide a practical basis for testing the Israel junction in black hole spacetimes.
The global financial crisis (GFC) triggered the use of macroprudential policies imposed on the banking sector. Using bank-level panel data for Israel for the period 2004-2019, we find that domestic macroprudential measures changed the composition of bank credit growth but did not affect the total credit growth rate. Specifically, we show that macroprudential measures targeted at the housing sector moderated housing credit growth but tended to increase business credit growth. We also find that accommodative monetary policy surprises tended to increase bank credit growth before the GFC. We show that accommodative monetary policy surprises increased consumer credit when interacting with macroprudential policies targeting the housing market. Accommodative monetary policy interacted with nonhousing macroprudential measures to increase total credit.
In this article, we consider the Israel-Stewart equations of relativistic viscous fluid dynamics with bulk viscosity. We investigate the evolution of the equations linearized about solutions that satisfy the physical vacuum boundary condition and establish local well-posedness of the corresponding Cauchy problem.
The conflict between Israel and Palestinians significantly escalated after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack, capturing global attention. To understand the public discourse on this conflict, we present a meticulously compiled dataset-IsamasRed-comprising nearly 400,000 conversations and over 8 million comments from Reddit, spanning from August 2023 to November 2023. We introduce an innovative keyword extraction framework leveraging a large language model to effectively identify pertinent keywords, ensuring a comprehensive data collection. Our initial analysis on the dataset, examining topics, controversy, emotional and moral language trends over time, highlights the emotionally charged and complex nature of the discourse. This dataset aims to enrich the understanding of online discussions, shedding light on the complex interplay between ideology, sentiment, and community engagement in digital spaces.
Using analytical tools from linear response theory, we systematically assess the accuracy of several microscopic derivations of Israel-Stewart hydrodynamics near local equilibrium. This allows us to "rank" the different approaches in decreasing order of accuracy as follows: Inverse Reynolds Dominance (IReD), Denicol-Niemi-Molnár-Rischke (DNMR), second-order gradient expansion, and 14-moment approximation. We find that IReD theory is far superior to Navier-Stokes, being very accurate both in the asymptotic regime (i.e., for slow processes) and in the transient regime (i.e., on timescales comparable to the relaxation time). Also, the high accuracy of DNMR is confirmed, but neglecting second-order terms in the Knudsen number, which would render the equations parabolic, introduces serious systematic errors. Finally, in most cases, the second-order gradient expansion (a.k.a. non-resummed BRSSS) is found to be more inaccurate than Navier-Stokes in the transient regime. Overall, this analysis shows that Israel-Stewart hydrodynamics is falsifiable, and the relaxation time is observable, shedding new light on the debate on the viability of transient hydrodynamics as a well-defined physical
Static spherically symmetric spacetimes with vanishing second Ricci invariant constitute an important class of solutions to Einstein's equations and more generally as archetypes of regular black holes. When studying completeness one is most often presented with the Kruskal - Szekeres procedure. However, this procedure only works if the spacetime admits a single non-degenerate Killing horizon (a single bifurcation two-sphere). Here we generalize the Israel procedure to examine a constructive approach to completeness based entirely on the static spherically symmetric nature of spacetimes with a vanishing second Ricci invariant. It is shown by "block gluing" that the Israel procedure can cover two bifurcation two-spheres, but can fail with three. No coordinate transformations are used in this work.
We present the results of an analysis of three maximal extensions of the Vaidya metric in Israel coordinates, a spherically symmetric solution to the Einstein field equations for the energy momentum tensor of pure radiation in the high-frequency approximation. This metric is necessary for various applications, such as describing the exterior geometry of a radiating star in astrophysics and studying possible formation of naked singularities in the geometry of spacetime. Contrary to the common Eddington-Finkelstein-like (EFL) coordinates, these maximal extensions, in Israel coordinates, are complete and cover the entirety of the Vaidya manifold. We develop three mass functions, one for each extension, and consider the qualitative characteristics of the three mass models and the surfaces of constant (dynamical) radius. We demonstrate that each maximal extension is null geodesically complete, which we assess by solving the radial null geodesics equation and forming the Penrose conformal diagram for each extension.
We obtain stability criteria for diffusive inviscid multicomponent Israel-Stewart hydrodynamics with and without background or dynamic electromagnetic fields. Our analysis is grounded on the maximum entropy principle, and it provides stability conditions that are valid around all thermodynamic equilibria, including rotating equilibria, charged equilibria, and equilibria in a background gravitational field. We prove that the electromagnetic part of the information current is stable and causal by construction and, therefore, the stability criteria found for Israel-Stewart theories of hydrodynamics automatically extend to similar formulations of magnetohydrodynamics.
This work compares cosmological matching conditions used in approximating generic pre-inflationary phases of the universe. We show that the joining conditions for primordial scalar perturbations assumed by Contaldi et al. are inconsistent with the physically motivated Israel junction conditions, however; performing general relativistic matching with the aforementioned constraints results in unrealistic primordial power spectra. Eliminating the need for ambiguous matching, we look at an alternative semi-analytic model for producing the primordial power spectrum allowing for finite duration cosmological phase transitions.
Given the severe impact of COVID-19 on several societal levels, it is of crucial importance to model the impact of restriction measures on the pandemic evolution, so that governments are able to take informed decisions. Even though there have been countless attempts to propose diverse models since the raise of the outbreak, the increase in data availability and start of vaccination campaigns calls for updated models and studies. Furthermore, most of the works are focused on a very particular place or application and we strive to attain a more general model, resorting to data from different countries. In particular, we compare Great Britain and Israel, two highly different scenarios in terms of vaccination plans and social structure. We build a network-based model, complex enough to model different scenarios of government-mandated restrictions, but generic enough to be applied to any population. To ease the computational load we propose a decomposition strategy for our model.
Following Dirac's brane variation prescription, the brane must not be deformed during the variation process, or else the linearity of the variation may be lost. Alternatively, the variation of the brane is done, in a special Dirac frame, by varying the bulk coordinate system itself. Imposing appropriate Dirac style boundary conditions on the constrained 'sandwiched' gravitational action, we show how Israel junction conditions get relaxed, but remarkably, all solutions of the original Israel equations are still respected. The Israel junction conditions are traded, in the $Z_2$-symmetric case, for a generalized Regge-Teitelboim type equation (plus a local conservation law), and in the generic $Z_2$-asymmetric case, for a pair of coupled Regge-Teitelboim equations. The Randall-Sundrum model and its derivatives, such as the Dvali-Gabadadze-Porrati and the Collins-Holdom models, get generalized accordingly. Furthermore, Randall-Sundrum and Regge-Teitelboim brane theories appear now to be two different faces of the one and the same unified brane theory. Within the framework of unified brane cosmology, we examine the dark matter/energy interpretation of the effective energy/momentum devia
On the basis of the Carter-Israel conjecture, today we believe that some compact and massive objects in the Galaxy and in the Universe are Kerr black holes. However, this idea cannot yet be confirmed by observations. We can currently obtain reliable estimates of the masses of these objects, but we do not know if the space-time around them is described by the Kerr metric and if they have an event horizon. A fundamental limit for a Kerr black hole is the Kerr bound $|a_*| \le 1$. Here I discuss some astrophysical implications associated with the violation of this bound, which can thus be used to test the Carter-Israel conjecture.
The aim of this work is to address the description of hyperinflation regimes in economy. The spirals of hyperinflation developed in Brazil, Israel, and Nicaragua are revisited. This new analysis of data indicates that the episodes occurred in Brazil and Nicaragua can be understood within the frame of the model available in the literature, which is based on a nonlinear feedback (NLF) characterized by an exponent $β>0$. In the NLF model the accumulated consumer price index carries a finite time singularity of the type $1/(t_c-t)^{(1- β)/β}$ determining a critical time $t_c$ at which the economy would crash. It is shown that in the case of Brazil the entire episode cannot be described with a unique set of parameters because the time series was strongly affected by a change of policy. This fact gives support to the "so called" Lucas critique, who stated that model's parameters usually change once policy changes. On the other hand, such a model is not able to provide any $t_c$ in the case of the weaker hyperinflation occurred in Israel. It is shown that in this case the fit of data yields $β\to 0$. This limit leads to the linear feedback formulation which does not predict any $t_c$.