Toward an anthropological perspective of fairy tales

Prevalent theories premise that the popular Western fairy tale whose predominant motif is one of cruelty toward children by their closest kin or guardian is an expression of repressed parent-child hostility and sexual complexes. This paper presents an alternative approach: fairy tales may also serve to introduce the child to the world of strangers and the noncommitted modes of behavior which often typify social encounters in Western society. In this respect they have an educational role in the growing-up process similar to that of folklore in nonliterate societies.     

Futures studies versus planning

The growing interest in the study of the future and the increasing number of organizations and commissions in this field, raises the question of how this area of study is to be distinguished from conventional planning. One may wonder about this question, since there would appear to be correspondence, or at least similarity, in that both are future-oriented and express thinking about the future. The thesis of this paper is that despite the similarity between planning and futures studies and their inter-relationship, it is possible and even desirable to distinguish between them, a distinction which has both analytical and practical significance. A conceptual framework based on this distinction will be presented and its implications examined.     

A comparison of the independent-samples t-test and the paired-samples t-test when the observations are nonnegatively correlated pairs

An account of the behavior of the independent-samples t-test when applied to homoschedastic bivariate normal data is presented, and a comparison is made with the paired-samples t-test. Since the significance level is not violated when applying the independent-samples t-test to data which consist of positively correlated pairs and since the estimate of the variance is based on a larger number of ‘degrees of freedom’, the results suggest that when the sample size is small, one should not worry much about the possible existence of weak positive correlation. One may do better, powerwise, to ignore such correlation and use the independent-samples t-test, as though the samples were independent.     

Social Networks and Innovation in the Division of Labour between Men and Women in the Family and in the Community: A Study of Moroccan Immigrants in Israel*

L'auteur verifie l'hypothese d'E. Bott (concernant les relations entre la connexite des reseaux sociaux et le niveau de segregation dans les roles conjugaux) dans une situation ou les families d'immigrants - provenant de milieux traditionnels enra-cines dans des reseaux sociaux fortement integres et viables - subissent de fortes pressions pour permettre aux femmes de participer avec leurs maris dans les activites economiques. Les modeles antecedents de segregation dans les roles conjugaux et autres roles sociaux persistent dans la communaute. Mais de nouveaux modeles de relations conjugates conjointes dans les activites de loisir se developperent en dehors de la communaute, au-dela des limites des reseaux sociaux integres de ces couples. The paper tests E. Bolt's hypothesis (about the relations between the connectedness of social networks and the degree of segregation in conjugal roles) in a situation where families of immigrants from a traditional background still imbedded within close-knit and viable social networks were under pressure to let women participate with their spouses in economic activities. The previous patterns of segregation in conjugal and other roles were found to continue intact within the community. But new patterns of joint conjugal relationship in leisure activities were developed outside the community, beyond the range of those couples' closely-knit social networks.     

Positive dependence of random variables with a common marginal distribution

In this paper we review some notions of positive dependence of random variables with a common univariate marginal distribution and describe the related moment and probability inequalities. We first present a comparison between i.i.d. random variables and exchangeable random variables via an application of de Finetti's theorem, then describe some useful probability inequalities via partial orderings of the strength of their positive dependence. Finally, we state a result for random variables which are not necessarily exchangeable. Special applications to the multivariate normal distribution will be discussed, and the results involve only the correlation matrix of the distribution.     

Fooled by Local Robustness

One would have expected the considerable public debate created by Nassim Taleb’s two best selling books on uncertainty, Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, to inspire greater caution to the fundamental difficulties posed by severe uncertainty. Yet, methodologies exhibiting an incautious approach to uncertainty have been proposed recently in a range of publications. So, the objective of this short note is to call attention to a prime example of an incautious approach to severe uncertainty that is manifested in the proposition to use the concept radius of stability as a measure of robustness against severe uncertainty. The central proposition of this approach, which is exemplified in info‐gap decision theory, is this: use a simple radius of stability model to analyze and manage a severe uncertainty that is characterized by a vast uncertainty space, a poor point estimate, and a likelihood‐free quantification of uncertainty. This short discussion serves then as a reminder that the generic radius of stability model is a model of local robustness. It is, therefore, utterly unsuitable for the treatment of severe uncertainty when the latter is characterized by a poor estimate of the parameter of interest, a vast uncertainty space, and a likelihood‐free quantification of uncertainty.     

Britain and the Jewish community of Iraq, 1948–51: An aspect of British policy in the Middle East

British policy after the Second World War was designed to maintain her influence in the Middle East. As a result, she worked to prevent any destabilization of the region's nations and especially to preserve the existent pro‐British regimes.

The Iraqi royal government was weak, depending mainly on its army. The riots of January 1948 proved how tenuous the government's position was. Here Britain invested great efforts in preventing conditions from damaging the regime or destroying it. This explains why the British were not active on behalf of the Jewish community, which at the time suffered from a policy of discrimination and persecution.

The British assumed that the problem of the Jewish minority in Iraq could not be divorced from overall Jewish‐Arab relations or those between Israel and the Arab states, and that the Iraqi Jewish community's fate was inevitable given the events in Palestine. Moreover, despite the pressure from extremist quarters in Iraq to banish all the Jews and expropriate their property, the Iraqi government's policy was not that extreme, and it sought at least to defend their lives and prevent a recurrence of the June 1941 pogrom. Despite this, Israel exploited the Iraqi Jewish community's situation to attain her own political and economic ends.     

The Jewish community in Iraq, 1920–50: A failed attempt at integration

At the end of the First World War, the Iraqi Jewish community numbered about 85,000. With the establishment of the Arab Iraqi state in 1920, the leaders of the community advocated the integration of Iraqi Jewry into the national Arab society. Jews held important positions in all fields ‐ economic, social and cultural. Compared to Israel, Iraq was for them a paradise. There they hoped to build their future, which then promised to be bright. Arab Iraqi society, too, expected the Jewish minority to become a part of it and to contribute its talents to the consolidation and strengthening of the state.

The pogrom of 1941 was a turning point in the history of Iraqi Jewry, leading to the establishment of a Jewish underground. The worsening situation in Palestine prompted the Iraqi government to adopt a policy of repression and discrimination against the Jews, putting an end to the attempt by the Jewish minority to integrate into Arab Iraqi society. Jews began to seek ways to leave the country. The underground proved instrumental in helping some 121,000 Jews to flee Iraq and make their way to Israel.     

Computer network scheduling

This paper presents a method for solving the scheduling problem of a computer-network. There are three possible criteria for optimality: (1) Maximum number of jobs to be processed per given period. (2) Minimum idle time for each of the computers in the network, or in other words, maximum utilization. (3) Optimizing an objective function which combines 1 and 2 and which may consider additional factors.     

Effects of Community on Status Attainment*

The major objective of the research reported here is to investigate the significance and meaning of the contextual effects of communities on individuals’ opportunities for socioeconomic attainment. A model which incorporates both individuals and their communities is proposed and tested. The empirical test was done by using samples of the Israeli labor force population. The findings demonstrate that community has significant effects on individuals’ attainment. Community seems to be an additional factor that affects social mobility and as such an important dimension of the stratification system. Characteristics defining the social context of the community as an opportunity structure are identified and their significance discussed.