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The purpose of this paper is to understand the use of Facebook by Israeli party leaders during an election period by examining four elements: the type of Aristotelian language of persuasion; the level of online engagement measured by three different types of feedback: likes, comments and shares; the use of personalization elements as engagement strategies; and the vividness features used in the post (text, photographs and video).

All of the posts from the Facebook pages of ten Israeli party leaders were collected for 45 days prior to the 2015 general elections. The number of posts, likes, comments and shares in each post were captured and the data were analyzed looking for elements of Aristotelian persuasion and of online engagement with the users.

The dominance of pathos was a salient element in the data demonstrating the politicians’ need to create an affective alliance with the public and it was the element that resulted in a higher number of likes, shares and comments. Only a few relationships were found and these do not point to a clear relationship between multimedia use and social media engagement. The interactive, open and free nature of social networking sites contributes to their development as a new type of political podia that allow politicians to produce a different kind of political communication. Instead of using these sites as platforms to disseminate their ideas, plans and strategies, politicians focus their interactions with the audience on the creation and maintenance of affective alliances.

The study contributes to the existing literature on the subject by examining four characteristics of the politicians’ personal profiles on social networks simultaneously while most of the past studies have focused on only one or two of these characteristics.

This study explores faculty members' outputs and citations by gender and academic rank in Israeli academia. The study focuses on the connection between research productivity and underrepresentation of women in academia. To this end, four fields were chosen, each representing a different discipline: Psychology (social sciences), Public Health (health sciences), Linguistics (humanities), and Chemistry (Exact sciences).

The name, the rank and the gender of the researchers were collected from the researchers' websites and those of their departments. The number of publications and citations were retrieved from Scopus.

Findings revealed that there is a significant difference between the median number of men and women in Chemistry concerning publications and citations and in Psychology concerning citations. Moreover, in all four disciplines, females' average number of publications was lower than that of males', and that in three out of the four disciplines (Psychology, Public Health and Chemistry), men published more in top journals (the top 5%) than females, while the reverse was true of Linguistics. Furthermore, in three disciplines (Public Health, Linguistics and Chemistry), there is an increase in the average citations per female researchers between 2015 and 2019. Further, in all disciplines, women collaborated more than men.

As only a few studies in Israel have explored faculty members' outputs and citations, this study contributes and enlarges the Israeli research concerning this topic.

The purpose of this paper is to examine participation in online social platforms consisting of information exchange, social network interactions, and political deliberation. Despite the proven benefits of online participation, the majority of internet users read social media data but do not directly contribute, a phenomenon called lurking.

A survey was administered electronically to 507 participants and consisted of ten sections in a questionnaire to gather data on the relationship between online participation and the following variables: anonymity, social value orientation, motivations, and participation in offline activities, as well as the internet’s political influence and personality traits.

Findings show that users with high levels of participation also identify themselves, report higher levels of extroversion, openness, and activity outside the internet, the motivations being an intermediary variable in the relationship between the variables value.

The study shows that participation in online social platforms is not only related to personality traits, but they are impacted by the nature of the motivations that drive them to participate in the particular social platform, as well as by the interest toward the specific topic, or the type or nature of the social group with whom they are communicating.

Discusses the results of a case study in which 20 random queries were presented for ten consecutive days to Hotbot and Snap, two search tools that draw their results from the database of Inktomi. The results show huge daily fluctuations in the number of hits retrieved by Hotbot, and high stability in the hits displayed by Snap. These findings are to alert users of Hotbot of its instability as of October 1999, and they raise questions about the reliability of previous studies estimating the size of Hotbot based on its overlap with other search engines.

A large number of potential sites are given and we have to choose k sites in order to set up information centres, where each centre is able to serve a limited number of clients. The price a client pays for accessing a centre is proportional to the distance between the client and the centre. This problem belongs to a class of problems for which most theoretical computer scientists believe that there is no fast algorithm for finding an optimal solution. We therefore look for algorithms that produce an approximate solution. In this paper we present a fast algorithm that chooses k sites and assigns the clients to the centres in such a way that the maximum price a client pays is at most nine times the maximum price in an optimal solution. This algorithm works under the assumption that the number of chosen sites is small in comparison to the number of possible sites.

In this paper we discuss some basic notions of modern cryptography: public key systems and digital signatures. We show how theoretical modern cryptography can come to the rescue of the Internet, offering solutions to its security problems.

The purpose of this study was to compare the ease of use and the effectiveness of several interfaces for retrieving tagged images.

A number of participants were randomly assigned to one of four retrieval interfaces: tag search in a search box; faceted tag search in a search box; selecting terms from the tag cloud of all the tags in the database; and selecting concepts from an ontology created from the tags assigned to the images. Each interface was tested by 21 users.

The results show that the highest recall on average was achieved by users of the ontology interface, for seven out of the ten tasks, however, users were more satisfied with the textbox‐based search than the cloud or the ontology.

The experiment was rather specific, and more studies are needed in order to generalize the findings.

With the widespread use of tagging on the web it is of importance to examine whether tagging enables resource discovery. This study shows that in addition to the tags, the retrieval interface also influences user satisfaction and retrieval success.

The aim of this paper is to develop a methodology for assessing search results retrieved from different sources.

This is a two phase method, where in the first stage users select and rank the ten best search results from a randomly ordered set. In the second stage they are asked to choose the best pre‐ranked result from a set of possibilities. This two‐stage method allows users to consider each search result separately (in the first stage) and to express their views on the rankings as a whole, as they were retrieved by the search provider. The method was tested in a user study that compared different country‐specific search results of Google and Live Search (now Bing). The users were Israelis and the search results came from six sources: Google Israel, Google.com, Google UK, Live Search Israel, Live Search US and Live Search UK. The users evaluated the results of nine pre‐selected queries, created their own preferred ranking and picked the best ranking from the six sources.

The results indicate that the group of users in this study preferred their local Google interface, i.e. Google succeeded in its country‐specific customisation of search results. Live Search was much less successful in this aspect.

Search engines are highly dynamic, thus the findings of the case study have to be viewed cautiously.

The main contribution of the paper is a two‐phase methodology for comparing and evaluating search results from different sources.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a general framework that incorporates collaborative social tagging with a novel ontology scheme conveying multiple perspectives.

This paper proposes a framework where multiple users tag the same object (an image in this case) and an ontology is extended based on these tags while being tolerant of different points of view. Both the tagging and the ontological models are intentionally designed to suit the multi‐perspective environment. The paper develops a method based on a set of rules that determine how to associate new concepts to predefined perspectives (in addition to determining relations to topics or other concepts as typically done in previous research) and how to insert and maintain multiple perspectives.

This case study experiment, with a set of selected annotated images, indicates the soundness of the proposed ontological model.

The proposed framework characterises the underlying processes for controlled collaborative development of a multi‐perspective ontology and its application to improve image annotation, searching and browsing. The significance of this research is that it focuses on exploring the impact of creating a constantly evolving ontology based on collaborative tagging. The paper is not aware of any other work that has attempted to devise such an environment and to study its dynamics.

This paper seeks to describe and discuss a tagging experiment involving images related to Israeli and Jewish cultural heritage. The aim of this experiment was to compare freely assigned tags with values (free text) assigned to predefined metadata elements.

Two groups of participants were asked to provide tags for 12 images. The first group of participants was asked to assign descriptive tags to the images without guidance (unstructured tagging), while the second group was asked to provide free‐text values to predefined metadata elements (structured tagging).

The results show that on the one hand structured tagging provides guidance to the users, but on the other hand different interpretations of the meaning of the elements may worsen the tagging quality instead of improving it. In addition, unstructured tagging allows for a wider range of tags.

The recommendation is to experiment with a system where the users provide both the tags and the context of these tags.

Unstructured tagging has become highly popular on the web, thus it is important to evaluate its merits and shortcomings compared to more conventional methods.