Publications

In Press
L. Bogaerts, R. Frost, and M.H. Christiansen. In Press. “Integrating statistical learning in cognitive science.” Journal of Memory and Language.
Y. Ganot, R. Holtzman, N. Weisbrod, A. Bernstein, H. Siebner, Y. Katz, and D. Kurtzman. In Press. “Managed aquifer recharge with reverse-osmosis desalinated seawater: modeling the spreading in groundwater using stable water isotopes.” Hydrology and Earth System Sciences. URL
Zulma Gazit, Gadi Pelled, Dmitriy Sheyn, Doron Cohn Yakubovich, and Dan Gazit. In Press. “Mesenchymal Stem Cells.” In Principles of Regenerative Medicine, 3rd ed. Elsevier.
Joseph Yellin. In Press. “The Origin of Tel Batash-Timna Pottery of the Late Bronze Age.” In Tell it in Gath: Studies in the History and Archaeology of Israel . Essays in Honor of A. M. Maeir on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday.” Munster: Ugarit - Verlag.
J.Yellin, M. T. Boulanger, and M. D. Glascock. In Press. “Provenience of LBA II Pottery from the Cultic Repository of Tel Qashish.” Atiqot.
Odelia Oshri, Liran Harsgor, Reut Itzkovich Malka, and Or Tuttnauer. In Press. “Risk Aversion and the Gender Gap in the Vote for Populist Radical Right Parties.” American Journal of Political Science. Abstract

 

Previous research has established that men are more likely to vote for populist radical right parties (PRRPs) than women. This article shows how cross-national and temporal variations in PRRPs’ electoral success interact with individuals’ risk propensity to affect this gender gap. We hypothesize that gender differences in the electoral support of PRRPs stem from disparities in risk-taking. We conceptualize risk in terms of two components, social and electoral, and demonstrate that women are more risk-averse regarding both. Our analysis is based on public opinion data from 14 countries (2002–2016) combined with macro-level data on PRRPs’ past parliamentary fortunes. To distinguish between the social and the electoral component in risk-taking, we use the illustrative case study of Germany. Findings demonstrate that gender differences in risk-taking and, by implication, the differences between women’s and men’s responses to the electoral context, are key to understanding the voting gender gap.

 

Beenstock Michael, Felsenstein Daniel, and Xieer Dai. In Press. “Spatial econometric analysis of spatial general equilibrium.” Spatial Economic Analysis.
L. Bogaerts, N. Siegelman, and R. Frost. In Press. “Statistical learning and language impairments:Towards more precise theoretical accounts.” Perspectives in Cognitive Science.
In Preparation
Jack Copeland and Oron Shagrir. In Preparation. Very Short Introduction to Computability. Oxford University Press.
Submitted

This paper characterizes the preferences over bounded infinite utility streams that satisfy the time value of money principle and an additivity property, and preferences that in addition are impatient. Based on this characterization, the paper introduces a concept of optimization that is robust to a small imprecision in the specification of the preference, and proves that the set of feasible streams of payoffs of a finite Markov decision process admits such a robust optimization.

paper February 25 2021
Offer Kella and Andreas Löpker. Submitted. “On binomial thinning and mixing”.
bino_submitted.pdf
Royi Jacobovic and Offer Kella. Submitted. “A characterization of normality via convex likelihood ratios”.
normalfin.pdf
Rebekah Baglini. Submitted. “Direct causation: A new approach to an old question.” PLC U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 26, Pp. 19-28. Publisher's Version Abstract

 

Causative constructions come in lexical and periphrastic variants, exemplified in English by Sam killed Lee and Sam caused Lee to die. While use of the former, the lexical causative, entails the truth of the latter, an entailment in the other direction does not hold.  The source of this asymmetry is commonly ascribed to the lexical causative having an additional prerequisite of “direct causation", such that the causative relation holds between a contiguous cause and effect (Fodor 1970, Katz 1970).  However, this explanation encounters both empirical and theoretical problems (Nelleman & van der Koot  2012). To explain the source of the directness inferences (as well as other longstanding puzzles), we propose a formal analysis based on the framework of Structural Equation Models (SEMs) (Pearl 2000) which provides the necessary background for licensing causal inferences. Specifically, we provide a formalization of a 'sufficient set of conditions' within a model and demonstrate its role in the selectional parameters of causative descriptions. We argue that “causal sufficiency” is not a property of singular conditions, but rather sets of conditions, which are individually necessary but only sufficient when taken together (a view originally motivated in the philosophical literature by Mackie 1965). We further introduce the notion of a “completion event” of a sufficient set, which is critical to explain the particular inferential profile of lexical causatives. 

 

baglini.bar-ashersiegal2019.pdf
Eytan Balken, Daniel Khaykelson, Itai Ben-Nun, Yael Levi-Kalisman, Lothar Houben, Boris Rybtchinski, and Uri Raviv. Submitted. “E+: Software for Hierarchical Modeling of Electron Scattering from Complex Structures.” Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, Pp. null. Publisher's Version
Ariel Shisha-Halevy. Submitted. “Notes de voyage: Shenoute’s Puns, Alliteration, Paronomasia, “Disiunctio”.” Journal of Coptic Studies.
Elitzur A. Bar-Asher Siegal and Rebekah Baglini. Submitted. “Modelling linguistic causation”. Abstract

This paper introduces a systematic way of analyzing the semantics of causative linguistic expressions, and of how causal relations are expressed in natural languages. The starting point for this broad agenda is to provide an explanation for the asymmetrical inferential relationship between two causative constructions: change-of-state (CoS) verbs and the verb cause, commonly ascribed to the former having an additional prerequisite of direct causation. The direct causation hypothesis, however, is fraught with empirical and theoretical challenges. At the theoretical level, capturing the felicity conditions specific to CoS verbs and the notion of direct causation requires a means of modelling complex causal structures. This is on no account a trivial task, as it necessitates, inter alia, modelling causation in a way that is germane to the linguistic expressions designating such relations. Hence, the main objective of this paper is to develop a framework for modelling the  semantics of causal statements. For this purpose, this paper makes use of the framework
of Structural Equation Modelling (SEM), and it demonstrates how this approach provides tools for a rigorous model-theoretic treatment of the differential semantics of causal  expressions. This paper introduces formal logical definitions of different types of conditions  using SEM networks, and show how this proposal and the formal tools it employs allow us to make sense of the asymmetric entailment relationship between the two constructions. In our proposal, CoS verbs do not require contiguity between cause and effect at all, but instead they require that its subject is set by default to a participant in completion event, the event which “completes” a sufficient set of conditions, such that following this event (but not before) the values of the set of conditions in the sufficient set entail that the effect occurs. According to this, the intuition of direct causation arises (epiphenomenally) from contrasting CoS verbs with overt cause sentences: the stronger selection pattern of the former - which requires a completion event - may exclude more temporally distant conditions, while the latter admits any necessary condition. 

journal_manuscript_working_2_28_1.pdf
Ariel Cohen, Itai Ben-Nun, Raviv Dharan, Tamar Tayri-Wilk, Asaf Shemesh, Avi Ginsburg, Abigail Millgram, Yael Levi-Kalisman, Israel Ringel, and Uri Raviv. Submitted. “Modulating the Curvature of Protein Self-Assembled Spiral Nanotubules.” ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, Pp. null. Publisher's Version
Stochastically bundled dissipators for the quantum master equation
Sayak Adhikari and Roi Baer. Submitted. “Stochastically bundled dissipators for the quantum master equation.” arXiv.2408.12507. Publisher's Version Abstract

The evolution of open quantum systems is a fundamental topic in various scientific fields. During time propagation, the environment occasionally makes measurements, forcing the system's wave function to collapse randomly. The von Neumann density matrix incorporates the statistics involved in these random processes, and its time development is often described by Markovian quantum master equations that incorporate a dissipator. For large systems, the complexity of the dissipator grows with the increasing number of possible measurements, posing conceptual and severe computational challenges. This article introduces a stochastic representation of the dissipator, using bundled measurement operators to address this complexity. Taking the Morse oscillator as an example, we demonstrate that small samples of bundled operators capture the system's dynamics. This stochastic bundling is different from the stochastic unraveling and the jump operator formalism and offers a new way of understanding quantum dissipation and decoherence.

Stella Kapodistria, Mayank Saxena, Onno J. Boxma, and Offer Kella. Submitted. “Workload analysis of a two-queue fluid polling model”.
fluid_polling_model_ht_2021.pdf
Forthcoming
K. A. Hansen, R. Ibsen-Jensen, and A. Neyman. Forthcoming. “Absorbing games with a clock and two bits of memory.” Games and Economic Behavior. Abstract

 An absorbing game is a two-person zero-sum repeated game. Some of the entries are ``absorbing'' in the sense that, following the play of an absorbing entry, with positive probability all future payoffs are equal to that entry's payoff. The outcome of the game is the long-run average payoff.
 We prove that a two-person zero-sum absorbing game, with either finite or compact action sets, has, for each e>0, e-optimal strategies with finite memory. In fact, we show that there is an e-optimal strategy that depends on the clock and three states of memory.

submitted_paper_2020.pdf

Pages