פרסומים

The 2020 Holding Foreign Companies Accountable (HFCA) Act will force China-based firms to delist from U.S. exchanges if China fails to permit audit inspections during a two-year period. The Act also requires such firms, as soon as China blocks such inspections, to disclose ties to the Chinese party-state. We first explain why the delisting provisions, while well-intentioned, may well harm U.S. investors. We then turn to the disclosure provisions, explaining that they appear to be motivated by a desire to name-shame Chinese firms rather than to protect investors. While China-based firms do pose unique risks to U.S. investors, the Act fails to mitigate—and may well exacerbate—these risks.

This article takes a fresh look at the various Hebrew inscriptions of the pre-exilic period, which are to be understood as letters, model letters, or dedicatory inscriptions. In particular, letter introductions and letter endings are examined. Not all elements of the earlier model letter introductions are found in later periods. Military-style letters between superiors and their subordinates are very brisk but nevertheless use various idiomatic and syntactic devices to express their objectives. Letters between colleagues or friends emphasize the blessing of YHWH they wish for their recipients but still differ from dedicatory inscriptions. The unprovenanced Hebrew ostraca published so far employ the same basic greeting formulas known from provenanced materials. Some letters from Arad and Lachish seem to have peculiar endings due to important information being kept for the last sentence.

This article tells the story of one of the first Israeli anti-occupation groups, Women for Political Prisoners (WOFPP), through an ethnography that follows the process of re-assembling the NGO’s scattered archive. The concept of ethno-archiving is used to describe the process of gathering oral histories and assembling documents from the groups’ emergence phase (1988–1993). Focusing on the organisation’s historical importance and its idiosyncratic documentation of Israel’s gender-based violence (GBV) against Palestinian women, including sexual violence, the article chronicles their emergence and early impact, and explains why they were gradually forgotten – partly due to their own strategy of stealth-ness and self-silencing, and partly due to their marginalisation by mainstream liberal activism and NGO professionalism. The article shows that the human rights archival gap of Women for Political Prisoners’ unique materials, as the first NGO to define Israeli practices as torture and the only one to focus on Palestinian women, is inextricably tied to the overall silencing of GBV in Israel/Palestine.

A well-known observation in repeated-choice experiments is that a tendency to prefer one response over the others emerges if the feedback consistently favors that response. Choice bias, a tendency to prefer one response over the others, however, is not restricted to biased-feedback settings and is also observed when the feedback is unbiased. In fact, participant-specific choice bias, known as idiosyncratic choice bias (ICB), is common even in symmetrical experimental settings in which feedback is completely absent. Here we ask whether feedback-induced bias and ICB share a common mechanism. Specifically, we ask whether ICBs reflect idiosyncrasies in choice-feedback associations prior to the measurement of the ICB. To address this question, we compare the long-term dynamics of ICBs with feedback-induced biases. We show that while feedback effectively induced choice preferences, its effect is transient and diminished within several weeks. By contrast, we show that ICBs remained stable for at least 22 months. These results indicate that different mechanisms underlie the idiosyncratic and feedback-induced biases.

Hybrid perovskites show piezoelectric properties due to polarization and centro-symmetry breaking of PbX₆ pyramids (X = I-, Br-, Cl-). This study examines the piezoelectric response of quasi-2D perovskites using various barrier molecules: benzyl amine (BzA), phenylethyl amine (PEA), and butyl diamine (BuDA). Utilizing piezoelectric force microscopy measurements, we determine the piezoelectric coefficient (d₃₃) where BuDA exhibits a substantial response with values of 147 pm V^–1 for n = 5, better than the other quasi-2D and 3D perovskite counterparts. Density functional theory calculations reveal distorted bond angles in the PbBr₆ pyramids for quasi-2D perovskites, enhancing symmetry breaking. Additionally, polarizabilities and dielectric constants, derived from ab initio many-body perturbation theory, are highest for BuDA, followed by PEA and BzA, aligning with experimental results. We demonstrate pressure sensor performance, emphasizing the quicker capacitance decay time of the quasi-2D perovskite based on BuDA. This research underscores the impact of perovskite dimensionality on piezoelectricity, paving the way for the development of sensitive and wide-ranging pressure sensors.

Congenital cytomegalovirus (cCMV) is the most common intrauterine infection, leading to neurodevelopmental disabilities. Universal newborn infant screening of cCMV has been increasingly advocated. In the absence of a high-throughput screening test, which can identify all infected newborn infants, the development of an accurate and efficient testing strategy has remained an ongoing challenge. Here we assessed the implementation of pooled saliva polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests for universal screening of cCMV, in two hospitals of Jerusalem from April 2022 through April 2023. During the 13-month study period, 15,805 infants (93.6% of all live newborn infants) were screened for cCMV using the pooled approach that has since become our routine screening method. The empirical efficiency of the pooling was six (number of tested newborn infants per test), thereby sparing 83% of the saliva tests. Only a minor 3.05 PCR cycle loss of sensitivity was observed for the pooled testing, in accordance with the theoretical prediction for an eight-sample pool. cCMV was identified in 54 newborn infants, with a birth prevalence of 3.4 per 1,000; 55.6% of infants identified with cCMV were asymptomatic at birth and would not have been otherwise targeted for screening. The study demonstrates the wide feasibility and benefits of pooled saliva testing as an efficient, cost-sparing and sensitive approach for universal screening of cCMV.