Dr. Anat Ben-David, Sociology, Political Science and Communication, the Open University

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Data in doubt: Epistemic challenges to the study of political manipulation on Facebook

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Social media platforms have recently been scrutinized for allowing political actors to spread disinformation and to manipulate public opinion through their affordances and policies. Practices such as astroturfing – the organization and sponsoring of fake publics to support politicians or their agenda – are conducted out of the public eye and their data traces are not available via platforms’ APIs. These, instead, grant limited access to data that are already public. If so, is it useful at all to use API data to detect invisible practices enabled by social media?

 

This talk offers a critique of social media data as a source for studying online political manipulation and proposes ways for generating alternative public knowledge spaces from Facebook data. It presents findings from recent research conducted before and during the recent election in Israel.

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Dr. Anthony S. Travis, Sidney M. Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Safra Campus, Givat Ram, Jerusalem

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Driver of Innovation: The Case of the Chemical Industry

 

The modern science-based chemical industry emerged in the late 1850s with the discovery and introduction of synthetic, or coal tar, dyes, starting with mauve. By the 1870s, this new industry, based on organic (carbon) chemistry, was dominated by Germany, and to a lesser Switzerland. Research in industrial and academic laboratories led by 1900 to pharmaceutical products, such as aspirin, followed in the 20th century by salvarsan, sulfa drugs, and beta blockers. Diversification also involved soil nutrients, in particular, nitrogen fertilizers, in order to keep up with population growth. The nitrogen industry, involving fixation of atmospheric nitrogen as ammonia, emerged through cutting edge research in physical chemistry and engineering. The ammonia process was first proved in practice, not in feeding populations but in production of explosives, such as TNT, during World War I. Around 1930, research in chemistry set the stage for other products. They included plastics, such as melamine, polythene, and nylon. Leaded gasoline (antiknock) was introduced as a result of in house industrial research. By the 1920s, chemical production was an international industry, encompassing Europe, the United States, and Japan. In Nazi Germany strategic ersatz materials were manufactured, including synthetic rubber and fuel. The image of the chemical industry changed after 1945. Dye production became associated with river and soil pollution and carcinogenic intermediates. The problems of chlorinated hydrocarbons, such as DDT were highlighted by Rachel Carson in the 1960s. Disposal of plastic materials threatens the oceans. As for fertilizers, runoff of active nitrogen results in deoxygenation of surface waters.

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Ofer Bartal, a software engineer at Google, working on helping other companies develop like Google. He volunteers at The Public Knowledge Workshop, and you can find him there every Monday, hacking away at public data.

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Data, software, government, the public - stories and ideas on how they all integrate together

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Data and software are important in today's society. They can be used to increase transparency and The Public Knowledge Workshop, a non-profit with the goal of making government data accessible to the public, is using mechanisms to make that happen. One such project that The Public Knowledge Workshop started, the OpenTrain project, will be discussed in detail. This project analyses Israel Railways data and provides insights to the public. We will also discuss future directions of how the dissemination of government data could impact society. For example, imagine that we could create automated ways to monitor public services such as transportation to know the performance level of the service in real time.

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Alessandra Passariello, Post-doc Fellow at Jacques Loeb Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

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Against parasites, for the sake of crops: the birth of embryological research in Israel​

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Teaching of embryology was introduced at the Hebrew University in 1955 with the appointment of Hefzibah Eyal-Giladi, the begetter of Israeli developmental biology (Frank, Sela-Donenfeld 2017).

 

A closer look at the history of embryology in Israel, however, reveals a rich prehistory of developmental studies, a sort of “generation 0” of scientists working in the Zoology and Parasitology departments of the Hebrew University, who tackled developmental questions in order to solve ecological and epidemiological issues.

 

This talk selectively explores this range of developmental studies as they are mirrored in the scientific training and early research of the Israeli developmental biologist Aron Moscona (1922-2009). Before devoting his career to the study of cell interaction mechanisms during morphogenesis, Moscona trained in zoology at the Hebrew University where he became acquainted with embryological research.

 

Here he worked with the entomologist Friedrich Bodenheimer, surveying histological and biochemical changes accompanying developmental stages of rodents and insects to control population increase; with the paleontologist Georg Haas, comparing embryological processes in different species of reptiles to build more reliable evolutionary trees. Finally, he assisted the parasitologist Oskar Theodor in his attempt to identify embryological changes in membrane resistance to toxic agents.

 

Moscona’s case study helps reconstructing the rise of developmental biology as an independent discipline in Israel out of a well-established tradition in applied (ecologically and epidemiologically oriented) embryological research.

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Anat Rosenthal, PhD, The Department of Health Systems Management The School of Public Health Faculty of Health Sciences And The Tamar Golan Africa Center Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

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The People Science: an old-new perspective in studying epidemics

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The study of epidemics and outbreaks has been largely associated with the fields of epidemiology, medicine, and basic sciences. Abandoning the historical role of the humanities in the study of diseases, and overlooking the contribution of the social sciences, the scientific community has often forgot to include the People Science in the study of epidemics. Drawing from lessons learned during the AIDS epidemic and the West African Ebola Outbreak, the lecture will discuss the role of People Science in the study of epidemics, and the call for a renewed partnership between sciences.

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Prof. Sheizaf Rafaeli, The Center for Internet Research Faculty of Management, University of Haifa and Samuel Neaman Institute for National Policy Research, Technion

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Encyclopedias - Do we still have them on our shelves? Should we?

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Some of us still remember the collection of two dozen or more heavy tomes, dominating the bookshelf. Is it nostalgia, or a sense of relief? Nowadays, most of us just flip open a smartphone and check Wikipedia or Google. Where did encyclopedias come from, and where have they gone? And what is that WHOOSHING sound they made while passing through here? What are using in lieu of the old, respectable "Queens of Knowledge"? How do we make and use the online alternatives? What does this all mean for knowledge, science, and society?

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Encyclopedias are a fascinating (and iconic?) case study in the effects of the digital on our lives. Is the tangible dead? Is the printed book anachronistic? Where have learning, authority, and truth gone? From the Encyclopedists of the late eighteenth century to Jimmy Wales in the early twenty-first century, and from Voltaire, Diderot and D'Alambert to the unwashed masses: how wise is the crowd? What are the mechanisms of knowing that we trust?

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Dr. Uri Roll, Marco and Louise Mitrani Department of Desert Ecology (MDDE), Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

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Conservation culturomics – harnessing the power of large online data-sets to gain insights on human-nature interactions

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Recent years have seen a huge increase in the quantity and breadth of digital information available to us pertaining to most facets of modern human lives. These also include insights in how people interact with the natural environment or its components – known as conservation culturomics. Thus, through the analysis of digitized texts, images, videos, and sounds. we can gain a better understanding of the patterns of interest and consequent valuation that people have towards particular species, landscapes, nature reserves, and natural phenomena in general. I will present some examples of my recent work dedicated to this field pertaining to drivers of popularity amongst reptiles, seasonal trends in human-nature interactions, links between real and digital representations of species, and tracking trends of interest of different environmental narratives using culturomics. This newly emerging field has great potential in elucidating perceptions and biases humans have towards nature and thus promoting more sound conservation actions.

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Prof. Evyatar Erell, Bona Terra Department of Man in the Desert SIDEER, BIDR Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

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Complexity and contradiction in environmental design of the built environment

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Fifty-three years ago Robert Venturi challenged the prevailing philosophy of modern architecture, which was based on the writings of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. Instead of rationality and minimalism, he posited complexity and contradiction as the guiding principles of post-modern architecture. Seeking to provide the scientific basis for designing a built environment in the desert, I too have found that simple, clear-cut solutions have eluded me. Rather, I have found, repeatedly, that widely held prescriptions that seemed superficially logical were in fact fundamentally flawed when examined in depth. Not because they were ‘wrong’, per se, but because they were framed in response to the wrong questions. Light colored pavement can reduce both surface and air temperature, yet rather than mitigate intense daytime heat may actually increase thermal stress for pedestrians. Adding floors to low-rise buildings will undoubtedly intensify the nocturnal urban heat island, but may still reduce energy demand in buildings, even in Israel. Windows can provide daylight, fresh air and passive heating (in winter), but may frequently result in increased energy consumption for lighting, air conditioning, and heating. My talk will use these examples to argue that environmental design of the built environment must embrace these apparent contradictions and seek to understand the full complexity of the processes involved. In doing so, we may need to accept that designing the built environment is an inherently ‘wicked problem’, with no correct answer, only better or worse ones.

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Noa Sophie Kohler, PhD, The Jacques Loeb Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

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Human population genetics and the quest for the “real” identity

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Occasionally, the Israeli and the world-wide Jewish public is informed by popular media outlets about yet another genetic research paper allegedly shedding new light on Jewish history or culture. The latest example was on February 28th, 2019, when The Jerusalem Post reported that rabbinical courts are currently demanding that couples from the former Soviet Union take DNA tests to prove their Jewish heritage. 1 However, the validity of genetic genealogy for questions of history, religion or identity has been contested by humanities scholars, by geneticists and even by Rabbis.

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I will introduce the audience to the above-mentioned case and others, and discuss them in their Israeli, but also in the international context. I will explain why results from genetic population history seem exact, they are in fact underdetermined, subjective and based on interpretation.

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Dr. Omri Allouche, Head of research at Gong.io and lecturer at Bar-Ilan University

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You're fired! A robot will replace you tomorrow

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Recent advances in Deep Learning challenge the old perception that robots are good at repetitive and dull tasks. In this talk, I will describe the basic theory behind these recent advances and will discuss how they might change our work and life in the future.

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Dr. Edo Bar-Zeev, The Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research, The Department of Environmental Hydrology & Microbiology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

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Seawater Desalination: From Water Production to Environmental Impacts

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