News
Yad Hanadiv congratulates the recipients of the 2014 Michael Bruno Memorial Awards. They are: Professors Naama Friedmann, Cognitive Science, Tel Aviv University; Yuval Oreg, Physics, Weizmann Institute; and Ran Spiegler, Economics, Tel Aviv University. The Awards, established by Yad Hanadiv in 1999 to recognize mid-career Israeli scholars and scientists, whose achievements suggest promise of future breakthroughs, have been administered by the Institute for Advanced Studies (IIAS) at The Hebrew University since 2012.
The National Library has signed a contract with the academic publisher Brill to issue a catalogue of Arabic, Persian and Turkish manuscripts from the National Library’s Abraham Shalom Yahuda Collection. It will be based on a scientific catalogue compiled by National Library expert and paleographer Ephraim Wust. The catalogue of the 1,184 manuscripts in the Yahuda Collection was written in Arabic in order to make the material accessible to scholars of and from the Arab world. The published version will include introductions in Arabic and English, English bibliographical summaries of each entry and colour illustrations. The first volume is scheduled to appear in 2014. A future online version of the Yahuda Collection is planned.
Illustration: Poem of the Mantle (al-Burda), a mystical poem written by Muhammad al-Busiri (d. 1295). The manuscript was copied in Jerusalem before the year 1362 by Muhammad al-Fairuzabadi (d. 1414). Courtesy of the National Library of Israel.
On 22 December JSTOR launched its Hebrew Journals collection. The collection currently comprises 27 academic journals with some 350,000 pages of text. The Hebrew JSTOR project, a partnership among the National Library, the Planning and Budgeting Committee of the Council for Higher Education (VATAT) and Yad Hanadiv, will provide access to Hebrew language academic journal content through participating institutions, in addition to providing free access for all Israeli users through the NLI website. JSTOR is a not-for-profit digital library which currently comprises more than 2,000 academic journals and digitizes three million pages annually.
The Open University of Israel, offering hundreds of courses to tens of thousands of paying students in Israel and around the world, has launched Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) free of charge, in English, Hebrew, Arabic and Russian.
The Centre For Educational Technology (CET) has translated one of the leading applications in the augmentative communication field worldwide, TouchChat, into Hebrew. The application gives people who lack the ability to communicate verbally, to do so via an electronic touch pad. Read more about the application in Maariv [Hebrew].
The Selection Committee of the Rothschild Prizes Organization, Chaired by Professor Etan Kohlberg, decided today, 13 November 2013, on the winners of the 2014 Rothschild Prizes:
The Rothschild Prize in Life Sciences
Professor Eli Keshet from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The Rothschild Prize in Chemical Sciences and Physical Sciences
Professor Shlomo Havlin from Bar-Ilan University
The Rothschild Prize in Mathematics / Computer Sciences and Engineering
Professor Shlomo Shamai from The Technion – Israel Institute of Technology
The Rothschild Prize in Social Sciences
Professor Avner de Shalit from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The prize will be awarded in Jerusalem in March 2014.
Read more about the Rothschild Prize.
The Environment and Health Fund (EHF) will hold its annual conference, Pollution, Diabetes and Obesity, on 18 December 2013. For more information and registration visit the EHF website.
The National Library announced the creation of an archive of Israeli websites. Read more about ARCHINET in HAARETZ [Hebrew].
The Initiative for Applied Education Research has uploaded a new report: ‘How Can Teachers Learn From Video-Recorded Lessons?’ to their website.