The Financial Crisis of the Local Authorities in Israel: A Resource-Based Analysis

The financial crisis affecting many of the local authorities in Israel has a significant influence on their ability to supply municipal services of an appropriate amount and quality. So far, studies have been addressed to the financial crisis from a political approach by discussing aspects such as the problematic interrelation between central and local governments together with resource allocation. In this paper we investigate the financial crisis of many local authorities in Israel from a strategic point of view. However, this is by no means to argue that other approaches such as institutional and political ones are not important. Rather, the paper investigates whether the financial crisis affecting many Israeli local authorities is a result of their own strategies and practices.
Specifically, we have used the resource-based approach to explore the nature of their joint crises and the potential strategic responses that the local authorities should adopt in order to move into a more favourable state. In particular, we examine three resource-based systems: customer-oriented, organizational culture, and human resources, as the strategic roots of this crisis. We also examine the way they could produce a sustainable competitive advantage and could lead local authorities from the present position to a better one. The article recommends that the heads of local authorities should move to a resource-based strategy in order to perform both more efficiently and effectively.     

Radiation safety for the NOMAD portable X-ray system in a temporary morgue setting

The purpose of this study was to determine the radiation levels resulting from leakage and scatter encountered by the forensic dental personnel using the Nomad at St. Gabriel, LA, following Hurricane Katrina. Using a Keithley Radiation Survey Meter and Lucite head phantom, radiation levels were measured at various distances and angles from the Nomad corresponding to the positions occupied by the dental personnel at St. Gabriel. The measurements were used to approximate the maximum total radiation dose from the Nomad to each team member for a 2- and a 4-week deployment. The results show that the maximum scatter radiation dose to any team member was 4.4 microR per X-ray or 0.253 millisieverts (mSv) for a 2-week deployment and 0.506 mSv for a 4-week deployment. Therefore, the leakage and scatter radiation dose from the Nomad was insignificant compared with established radiation safety guidelines of 50 mSv per year for all team members.     

Towards a Grotesque Phenomenology of Ethical Eroticism

Abstract: Over the course of this article, the author argues that ethics and the erotic are interrelated. The author also contends that the way subjectivities are constructed has a strong impact on the development of the ethical and the erotic character of these same subjectivities. Against this backdrop, the author postulates that envisioning or creating oneself as a grotesque subject promises to facilitate one's own development into a moral and erotic human being by triggering a process of inner estrangement that enables one to recognize the otherness within oneself. This analysis is based mainly on Mikhail Bakhtin's grotesque as presented in his Rabelais and His World (1965). This self-introspection serves as the basis for an ethical eroticism through which one shall transform oneself into a fully fledged moral and sensual subject. In formulating this argument, the author draws on Simone de Beauvoir's own attempt to link the erotic to the ethical. As will be seen, the same principle that stands at the heart of a phenomenological ethics also steers the author's phenomenological conception of the erotic. The principle in question is carnal intersubjectivity-bodies that penetrate one another and merge, yet never lose themselves in the other's carnality. Put differently, they remain non-objectified subjects. The grotesque subject is presented as a figuration that helps shed light on the way the subject has been conceived by, above all, phenomenological and postmodern theorists. The author then explores some of the ethical ramifications of this conceptualization. Drawing on these insights, the author fashions an ethical eroticism that derives from a grotesque subjectivity.