Arutz 7
Family court judge Assaf Zagury said Thursday that “in 99 percent of the polygraph tests to which I sent the two sides in requests for restraining orders, the woman turned out to be lying”.
Judge Zagury is the Deputy President for Family Matters in the Northern District Magistrates’ Court, which is based in Nazareth.
He spoke at a conference dedicated to false complaints within the family, which took place Thursday at the Carlton Hotel in Tel Aviv.
Zagury was replying to a question by Attorney Moran Samon, Head of the Committee for False Complaints in the Bar Association.
He said that there is real difficulty in assessing the truth of complaints regarding domestic abuse, because the deliberations tend to be very short in time and are based on “a balance of probabilities.”
The phenomenon of false complaints “creates an unprecedented workload on the system,” he added, “because it precludes the discussion of the other matters that need to be discussed.”
Also speaking at the conference, Judge Nahshon Fisher, Family Court Judge in the Rishon Letzion Family Court, argued that “not every complaint that is not true is necessarily a false complaint.”
“Sometimes,” he explained, “you find that you are dealing with a complaint that is not true and a different interpretation of events by one of the sides. A false complaint, in my view, is one in which besides the harmful statements, there is malicious intent.”[...]
Monday, August 15, 2016
Sunday, August 14, 2016
Haredi father who blocked son’s divorce given prison sentence
A haredi man who urged his son to withhold a divorce from his wife must serve time in prison, after he lost his appeal to Israel’s highest rabbinical court.
The High Rabbinical Court in Jerusalem on Monday reaffirmed the father’s 30-day prison sentence, which is precedent-setting in that it punishes a third party to a divorce dispute, the news site NRG reported.
The father, whose name was not published, was the driving force behind his son’s refusal for years to grant his disabled wife a divorce, according to an independent investigation of the case carried out by the Regional Rabbinical Court of Tel Aviv before it sentenced the father in March.
In Israel, marital issues are under the jurisdiction of religious tribunals that act as family courts.[...]
The case reviewed Monday in Jerusalem involved a haredi couple who married 19 years ago and who lived in the United States with their two children. The wife was rendered disabled a decade ago after suffering a severe stroke when she was in Israel for a visit with her husband and children. The husband returned to the United States; his wife remained in Israel with their children. He has consistently refused her requests to be divorced, allegedly because of his father’s objection.
An injunction preventing the father from leaving Israel was issued earlier this year, when the father was in that country on a family visit. He is currently in Israel and the injunction will remain in force pending a final decision on his case, according to the news site Walla.
The court also ordered the father to pay $23,600, half of which will go to the chained wife. [...]
Tisha B'av; Why We Long To Bring Karbanos by Rabbi Shlomo Pollak
WITH A VERY INSPIRING AND TRUE STORY AS OUR METAPHOR, we attempt to understand and appreciate the great loss and sorrow that Jews the world over have always felt over the destruction of the Beis Hamikdash and the cessation of the Karbanos...
For questions or comments, please email us at salmahshleima@gmail.com
Friday, August 12, 2016
Science and Occam's Razor: The Tyranny of Simple Explanations
The history of science has been distorted by a longstanding conviction that correct theories about nature are always the most elegant ones.
Imagine you’re a scientist with a set of results that are equally well predicted by two different theories. Which theory do you choose?
This, it’s often said, is just where you need a hypothetical tool fashioned by the 14th-century English Franciscan friar William of Ockham, one of the most important thinkers of the Middle Ages. Called Ochkam’s razor (more commonly spelled Occam’s razor), it advises you to seek the more economical solution: In layman’s terms, the simplest explanation is usually the best one.
Occam’s razor is often stated as an injunction not to make more assumptions than you absolutely need. What William actually wrote (in his Summa Logicae, 1323) is close enough, and has a pleasing economy of its own: “It is futile to do with more what can be done with fewer.”
Isaac Newton more or less restated Ockham’s idea as the first rule of philosophical reasoning in his great work Principia Mathematica (1687): “We are to admit no more causes of natural things, than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.” In other words, keep your theories and hypotheses as simple as they can be while still accounting for the observed facts.
This sounds like good sense: Why make things more complicated than they need be? You gain nothing by complicating an explanation without some corresponding increase in its explanatory power. That’s why most scientific theories are intentional simplifications: They ignore some effects not because they don’t happen, but because they’re thought to have a negligible effect on the outcome. Applied this way, simplicity is a practical virtue, allowing a clearer view of what’s most important in a phenomenon.
But Occam’s razor is often fetishized and misapplied as a guiding beacon for scientific enquiry. It is invoked in the same spirit as that attested by Newton, who went on to claim that “Nature does nothing in vain, and more is in vain, when less will serve.” Here the implication is that the simplest theory isn’t just more convenient, but gets closer to how nature really works; in other words, it’s more probably the correct one.
There’s absolutely no reason to believe that. But it’s what Francis Crick was driving at when he warned that Occam’s razor (which he equated with advocating “simplicity and elegance”) might not be well suited to biology, where things can get very messy. While it’s true that “simple, elegant” theories have sometimes turned out to be wrong (a classical example being Alfred Kempe’s flawed 1879 proof of the “four-color theorem” in mathematics), it’s also true that simpler but less accurate theories can be more useful than complicated ones for clarifying the bare bones of an explanation. There’s no easy equation between simplicity and truth, and Crick’s caution about Occam’s razor just perpetuates misconceptions about its meaning and value.
The worst misuses, however, fixate on the idea that the razor can adjudicate between rival theories. I have found no single instance where it has served this purpose to settle a scientific debate. Worse still, the history of science is often distorted in attempts to argue that it has. [...]
We’re So Confused: The Problems With Scientific Food and Exercise Studies
Nearly everything you have been told about the food you eat and the exercise you do and their effects on your health should be met with a raised eyebrow.
Dozens of studies are publicized every week. But those studies hardly slake people’s thirst for answers to questions about how to eat or how much to exercise. Does exercise help you maintain your memory? What kind? Walking? Intense exercise? Does eating carbohydrates make you fat? Can you prevent breast cancer by exercising when you are young? Do vegetables protect you from heart disease?
The problem is one of signal to noise. You can’t discern the signal — a lower risk of dementia, or a longer life, or less obesity, or less cancer — because the noise, the enormous uncertainty in the measurement of such things as how much you exercise or what exactly you eat, is overwhelming. The signal is often weak, meaning if there is an effect of lifestyle it is minuscule, nothing like the link between smoking and lung cancer, for example.
And there is no gold standard of measurement, nothing that everyone agrees on and uses to measure aspects of lifestyle.
The result is a large body of studies whose conclusions are not reproducible. “We don’t know how to measure diet or exercise,” said Dr. Barnett Kramer, director of the National Cancer Institute’s division of disease prevention.
His division is working on ways to sort out inconsistencies in research used to generate health advice, hoping to improve what has become a real mess: “You can ask people how many times a week or how many times a month they eat bread or berries or ask them to keep a diary of what they ate in the last 24 hours.” But, he said, it should be no surprise that people misremember or give researchers an answer they think makes them sound good.
“I can’t remember what meals I ate a week ago,” Dr. Kramer said. “Now ask me what meals I had as an adolescent, or how much I exercised.”
David Allison, director of the nutrition obesity research center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, says the same problems plague obesity research, with only two things known with certainty. All other things being equal, if you eat more calories, you will gain weight. And all other things being equal, if you exercise enough, you will lose a small amount of weight.
Adding to the confusion is a cacophony of poorly designed research, the tendency for different researchers studying the same effect to use different measurements and report outcomes differently, and researchers’ tendency to selectively report positive or “interesting” results.
The result is what Dr. Kramer calls whipsaw literature. “One week drinking coffee is good for you, and the next week it is lethal,” he says.
The situation is so bad that what gets published tends to be what the scientists believe ahead of time, says Dr. John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine and of health research and policy at Stanford University’s medical school. “There are so many nutrients and so many diets,” he said. “So many outcomes — heart disease, cancer, stroke. What kind of data do you collect? A follow-up at two months, six months, two years, 10 years? You end up having millions of choices.”
And the scientists get to pick the one they want. “I can get you any result you want in any observational data set,” he said.[...]
Then there are the seemingly contradictory but well-done studies. One large federal study found that — contrary to all assumptions — diet and weight loss did not prevent heart attacks and strokes in people with Type 2 diabetes. Another large federal study found that people at risk for Type 2 diabetes could stave it off by losing a modest amount of weight and exercising.[...]
Some medical experts say the problems with lifestyle studies are so overwhelming — and the chance of finding anything reproducible and meaningful so small — that it might be best to just give up on those questions altogether.
“They may not be worth studying,” said Dr. Vinay Prasad, a cancer researcher at Oregon Health and Science University. “People want certainty, but, boy, we have no good answers.”
As for Dr. Kramer, he has not given up on rigorous research. What is needed at the point, he says, is a little more humility among researchers in interpreting and reporting the implications of their own evidence.
Kaminetsky-Greenblatt Heter: Tisha B'Av - The consequence of the Destruction of the Temple
Trump touts childcare programs, but they're for guests, not employees
When Donald Trump vowed this week to make child care more accessible and affordable, it was just the second time during his White House campaign that he's talked about an issue that affects millions of working Americans with young children.
The first came months ago in Iowa, when the eventual Republican nominee touted his own record as a business owner during a candidate Q&A, telling voters he provided on-site child-care service for his employees.
There is no evidence, however, that any such programs exist.
The billionaire real estate mogul, who previously voiced his opposition to government-funded universal pre-K programs, said in Newton, Iowa, in November 2015 that he had visited many companies that offered workers on-site child-care centers - and added that he offered such programs himself.
"You know, it's not expensive for a company to do it. You need one person or two people, and you need some blocks, and you need some swings and some toys," Trump said. "It's not an expensive thing, and I do it all over. And I get great people because of it. Because it's a problem with a lot of other companies."
Trump pointed specifically to two programs: "They call 'em Trump Kids. Another one calls it Trumpeteers, if you can believe it. I have 'em. I actually have 'em, because I have a lot of different businesses."
Trump went on to describe "a room that's a quarter of the size of this. And they have all sorts of - you know, it's beautiful - they have a lot of children there, and we take care of them. And the parent when they leave the job - usually in my case it's clubs or hotels - when they leave the job, they pick up their child and their child is totally safe."
"They even come in during the day during lunch to see their child. It really works out well," he said.
But the two programs Trump cited - "Trump Kids" and "Trumpeteers" - are programs catering to patrons of Trump's hotels and golf club. They are not for Trump's employees, according to staff at Trump's hotels and clubs across the country.
"Trump Kids" is described on the Trump Hotel Collection website as "a special travel program designed to help make your next family vacation a big hit." Its offerings include "kid-friendly amenities like kiddie cocktails, coloring books and no-tear bath amenities."
"The Trumpeteer Program" is described on the website of Trump National Golf Club in Charlotte, North Carolina, as "a program created specifically for our youngest members, ages three to twelve, which offers daily and evening child care, monthly newsletters and weekly events!"
When asked about on-site child care, employees at Trump's hotels and clubs across the country expressed confusion and explained the two programs are for guests and members only.
"No, there's no child care," said Maria Jaramillo, 36, a housekeeper at Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, where workers have been pushing Trump to sign a union contract.[...]
Devarim; Eretz Yisroel Could Have Been A Lot Larger
Moshe Rabbeinu tells us to leave Har Sinai, and head straight for Eretz
Yisroel, and settle in הר אמורי ואל כל שכניו.. which Rashi explains to
mean עמון ומואב והר שעיר....
The obvious problem is, that we are forbidden to conquer those lands....
The
answer that many give, is that before the "Meraglim" we would have been
permitted to take those lands too. This answer needs a lot of
explanation, and is also contradicted by Rashi himself in Parshas
Beshalach....
[Note: One of the questions we discussed in another Shiur, but answered it differently.]
For questions and comments please email us at salmahshleima@gmail.com
Thursday, August 11, 2016
Donald Trump Calls Obama ‘Founder of ISIS’ and Says It Honors Him
NY Times A day after remarks that appeared to suggest that gun rights advocates harm Hillary Clinton, Donald J. Trump sprayed his fire at President Obama on Wednesday, accusing him of creating the Islamic State and saying the terrorist group “honors” him.
“In many respects, you know, they honor President Obama,” Mr. Trump told a raucous and rowdy crowd in Florida on Wednesday night. “He’s the founder of ISIS. He’s the founder of ISIS. He’s the founder. He founded ISIS.” He added, “I would say the co-founder would be crooked Hillary Clinton.” During an extended riff on the crisis in Crimea, Mr. Trump added extra emphasis on the president’s full name, saying that it occurred “during the administration of Barack Hussein Obama.”
Mr. Trump’s statement was an escalation in his recent criticism of the Obama administration’s handling of the terror threat, as he had previously accused only Mrs. Clinton of having a “founding” role in the terror group. His suggestion that the president was honored by ISIS recalled an earlier controversy when Mr. Trump seemingly implied that the president had some connection to the terrorist massacre of 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.
“He doesn’t get it, or he gets it better than anybody understands,” Mr. Trump told Fox News in June. And the use of the president’s middle name recalled Mr. Trump’s questioning of Mr. Obama’s faith during his crusade several years ago to prove that Mr. Obama, who is Christian, was not born in the United States.
Mr. Trump also found himself in an awkward camera framing immediately after criticizing the Clinton campaign for the appearance of Seddique Mir Mateen, the father of the Pulse gunman, at Mrs. Clinton’s campaign event this week. “Wasn’t it terrible when the father of the animal that killed these wonderful people in Orlando was sitting with a big smile on his face right behind Hillary Clinton?” Mr. Trump said.
Yet sitting behind Mr. Trump was Mark Foley, a former Republican congressman who resigned after being confronted with sexually explicit messages he had sent to underage congressional pages. Mr. Trump seemed not to be aware of the disgraced former congressman’s presence as he tried to cast doubt on the Clinton campaign’s account that it had not known who Mr. Mateen was. “When you get those seats, you sort of know the campaign,” Mr. Trump said.[...]
Tuesday, August 9, 2016
An Alternative Form of Mental Health Care Gains a Foothold
NY Times Some of the voices inside Caroline White’s head have been a lifelong comfort, as protective as a favorite aunt. It was the others — “you’re nothing, they’re out to get you, to kill you” — that led her down a rabbit hole of failed treatments and over a decade of hospitalizations, therapy and medications, all aimed at silencing those internal threats.
At a support group here for so-called voice-hearers, however, she tried something radically different. She allowed other members of the group to address the voice, directly:
What is it you want?
“After I thought about it, I realized that the voice valued my safety, wanted me to be respected and better supported by others,” said Ms. White, 34, who, since that session in late 2014, has become a leader in a growing alliance of such groups, called the Hearing Voices Network, or HVN.
At a time when Congress is debating measures to extend the reach of mainstream psychiatry — particularly to the severely psychotic, who often end up in prison or homeless — an alternative kind of mental health care is taking root that is very much anti-mainstream. It is largely nonmedical, focused on holistic recovery rather than symptom treatment, and increasingly accessible through an assortment of in-home services, residential centers and groups like the voices network Ms. White turned to, in which members help one another understand each voice, as a metaphor, rather than try to extinguish it.
For the first time in this country, experts say, psychiatry’s critics are mounting a sustained, broadly based effort to provide people with practical options, rather than solely alleging abuses like overmedication and involuntary restraint.
“The reason these programs are proliferating now is society’s shameful neglect of the severely ill, which creates a vacuum of great need,” said Dr. Allen Frances, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at Duke University.
Dr. Chris Gordon, who directs a program with an approach to treating psychosis called Open Dialogue at Advocates in Worcester, Mass., calls the alternative approaches a “collaborative pathway to recovery and a paradigm shift in care.” The Open Dialogue approach involves a team of mental health specialists who visit homes and discuss the crisis with the affected person — without resorting to diagnostic labels or medication, at least in the beginning.
Some psychiatrists are wary, they say, given that medication can be life-changing for many people with mental problems, and rigorous research on these alternatives is scarce.[....]
I was told by one psychiatrist at age 13 or 14 that if I didn’t take the meds, my brain would become more and more damaged,” said Ms. White, who began hearing voices in grade school. “Of course I believed it. And I became hopeless, because the drugs just made me feel worse.”
On a recent Tuesday, Ms. White and seven others who hear voices gathered at the Holyoke Center of the Western Massachusetts Recovery Learning Community, which hosts weekly 90-minute hearing voices groups, to talk about what happens in those sessions. The group meetings themselves, guided by a person who hears voices, sometimes accompanied by a therapist, are open to family members but closed to the news media.
The culture is explicitly nonpsychiatric: No one uses the word “patient” or refers to the sessions as “treatment.” [...]
Most of the people in the room had extensive experience being treated in the mainstream system. “I was told I was a ticking time bomb, that I’d never finish college, never have a job, never have kids, and always be on psychiatric medication,” said Sarah, a student at Mount Holyoke who for years has heard a voice — a child, crying — and in college started having suicidal thoughts. She was given diagnoses of borderline personality disorder and put on medications that had severe side effects. She asked that her last name not be used, to preserve her privacy.
In the group, other members prompted her to listen to the child’s cries, to ask whose they were, and why the crying? Those questions led, over a period of weeks, to a recollection of a frightening experience in her childhood, and an effort to soothe the child. This altered her relationship with the voice, she said, and sometimes the child now laughs, whispers, even sings.
“That is the way it works here,” said Sarah, who is set to graduate from college with honors. “In the group, everyone’s experience is real, and they make suggestions based on what has worked for them.”
Like many of the other alternative models of care, Hearing Voices Network is not explicitly anti-medication. Many people who regularly attend have prescriptions, but many have reduced dosages.[...]
Rabbinic ordination or Talmudic Studies qualify for municipal jobs that demand college degrees
New government regulations will enable Israelis with only a religious education to be considered for jobs offered by municipal governments even if the job requirements demand an academic degree.
Interior Minister Aryeh Deri spearheaded the change, calling it a “revolution” in employment prospects for ultra-Orthodox men that would allow them to better integrate into key positions in local authorities, Haaretz reported Monday.
However, critics reportedly said the move diminished the value of an academic education and the range of skills that it endows, and would create an opening for inappropriate appointments. [...]
The new guidelines would apply to anyone who holds rabbinical ordination from the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, or a certificate testifying that he studied for at least six years starting from age 18 in a yeshiva and has passed three tests set by the Chief Rabbinate. In effect, the change applies only to men.[...]
Experts at the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem-based think-tank, lamented the development.
Gilad Malach, head of the institute’s Haredi program and developer of a master plan for ultra-Orthodox employment, criticized the move for not taking into consideration the breadth of skills that academic education provides but that do not feature in religious studies, the report said.
“Rabbinical ordination or study… for six years doesn’t include the writing of academic papers, knowledge of English, or the study of statistics,” Malach noted. “If there are specific positions in local authorities that don’t require these skills, then an academic degree wouldn’t have been required for them” in the first place.
Republican foreign policy officials sign anti-Trump letter
Dozens of former Republican national security officials have signed a letter on Monday saying a Donald Trump presidency would "put at risk our country's national security and well-being."
"None of us will vote for Donald Trump," the letter, which was published Monday by the New York Times, says. The authors then go on to characterize the billionaire as unfit for the Oval Office, saying he lacks the moral authority, judgement and foreign policy expertise.
"Unlike previous Presidents who had limited experience in foreign affairs, Mr. Trump has shown no interest in educating himself," the letter said. "He continues to display an alarming ignorance of basic facts of contemporary international politics."
The letter features the signatures of many former George W. Bush cabinet members and policy advisors, including former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden, former intelligence chief John Negroponte and former Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge. [...]
"A President must be disciplined, control emotions, and act only after reflection and careful deliberation," the letter said. "In our judgement, Mr. Trump has none of these critical qualities. He is unable or unwilling to separate truth from falsehood. He does not encourage conflicting views. He lacks self-control and acts impetuously."[...]
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