This paper aims at investigating comparatively the ethical orientation of information technology professionals in the Middle East and the United States. It tests for attitudes toward and awareness of ethically-related issues, namely intellectual property, privacy and other general ethical IT aspects. In addition, through a comparison between the two regions, this paper intends to examine whether differences in IT professional demographics and characteristics, including gender and academic level, have any impact on attitudes to business ethics. A ttest is used to (...) establish significant differences between the targeted samples, while an ANOVA F-test is conducted to determine significant differences among the sample countries on a group basis. The results show a general awareness of ethical issues concerning information technology, and no significant differences are found between the two samples. However, different ethical attitudes are reported among respondents in terms of their reactions to the targeted IT ethical aspects. On an individual sample basis, the results about gender support the claim that male and female respondents are different, while mixed results are revealed for the influence of academic level on attitudes towards IT ethics. For intellectual property, the results are significant regarding ethical attitude differences between Middle-Eastern professionals and their counterparts in the US, while no significance differences are reported in terms of privacy. (shrink)

Mobile app stores provide an extremely rich source of information on app descriptions, characteristics, and usage, and analyzing these data provides insights and a deeper understanding of the nature of apps. However, manual analysis of this vast amount of information on mobile apps is not a simple and straightforward task; it is costly in terms of human effort and time. Computational methods such as topic modeling can provide an efficient and satisfactory approach to mobile app information analysis. Topic modeling is (...) a type of statistical modeling technique for discovering abstract topics that occur in a set of documents. This study explores the relationship between features of Arabic apps and investigates how well the current predefined Google Play app categories represent the type and genre of Arabic mobile apps. Based on the textual app description analysis, we aim to design and develop a sustainable classification system using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation method of topic modeling in order to cover the Arabic apps classification in Google Play app store. Our study supports the hypothesis that the textual app descriptions are effective in suggesting new categories for Arabic mobile apps in Google Play app store. Also, the results indicated that the current classification on Google Play app store is not suitable for our case study “Arabic apps,” as well as it is not sustainable, as it can not cover the new app types including Arabic apps. This study offers an important contribution to Arabic app analysis and design, to improve app search and exploration in several domains such as business, marketing, and technical development. Furthermore, it provides insights for the future of Arabic app research and provides guidance for the development of an Arabic app dashboard that will support users on how to select an app based on their specific needs. (shrink)

Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469-1527; political views; political science; international relations; philosophy.

Nationalism; Arab countries; Islamic philosophy.

Classical work on logic by a Muslim scholar ; includes comments and explanations by Sheikh Muḥammad ʻAbduh, edited and introduced by a modern scholar.

Interpretation of Śaṅkarācārya's Vākyasudha; includes original text.

Automatic synonym extraction plays an important role in many natural language processing systems, such as those involving information retrieval and question answering. Recently, research has focused on extracting semantic relations from word embeddings since they capture relatedness and similarity between words. However, using word embeddings alone poses problems for synonym extraction because it cannot determine whether the relation between words is synonymy or some other semantic relation. In this paper, we present a novel solution for this problem by proposing the (...) SynoExtractor pipeline, which can be used to filter similar word embeddings to retain synonyms based on specified linguistic rules. Our experiments were conducted using KSUCCA and Gigaword embeddings and trained with CBOW and SG models. We evaluated automatically extracted synonyms by comparing them with Alma’any Arabic synonym thesauri. We also arranged for a manual evaluation by two Arabic linguists. The results of experiments we conducted show that using the SynoExtractor pipeline enhances the precision of synonym extraction compared to using the cosine similarity measure alone. SynoExtractor obtained a 0.605 mean average precision for the King Saud University Corpus of Classical Arabic with 21% improvement over the baseline and a 0.748 MAP for the Gigaword corpus with 25% improvement. SynoExtractor outperformed the Sketch Engine thesaurus for synonym extraction by 32% in terms of MAP. Our work shows promising results for synonym extraction suggesting that our method can also be used with other languages. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to articulate and defend the epistemological foundations of international human rights education from the perspective of a hermeneutical interpretive methodology. Fuad Al-Daraweesh and Dale Snauwaert argue here that this methodology potentially alleviates the challenges that face the cross-cultural implementation of human rights education. While acknowledging the necessity of global human rights awareness, the authors maintain that local cultural conceptualization is imperative to the negotiated, local embrace of human rights. A critical, interpretive pedagogy emerges (...) from grounding human rights education in a hermeneutic methodology. Thus, Al-Daraweesh and Snauwaert advocate taking a hermeneutical approach in order to enlarge the scope and meaning of international human rights education. (shrink)

al-juzʼ 1. al-Manṭiqīyāt -- al-juzʼ 2. al-Ṭabīʻīyāt -- al-juzʼ 3. al-Ilāhīyāt.

al-juz 1.-3. [without special title] -- al-juzʼ 4. Fī mabāḥith al-ḥudūth wa-al-qidam wa-asrār al-dahr wa-al-azl -- al-juzʼ 5. Fī al-zamān wa-al-makān -- al-juzʼ 6. Fī al-hayūlī -- al-juzʼ 7. Fī al-arwāḥ al-ʻāliyah wa-al-sāfilah -- al-juzʼ 8. Fī al-nubūwāt wa-ma yataʻalaqu biha -- al-juzʼ 9. Fī al-jabr wa-al-qudar, aw, al-Qadāʼ wa-al-qadar.

The essential objective of this research is to develop a linear exponential loss function to estimate the parameters and reliability function of the Weibull distribution based on upper record values when both shape and scale parameters are unknown. We perform this by merging a weight into LINEX to produce a new loss function called the weighted linear exponential loss function. Then, we utilized WLINEX to derive the parameters and reliability function of the WD. Next, we compared the performance of the (...) proposed method in this work with Bayesian estimation using the LINEX loss function, Bayesian estimation using the squared-error loss function, and maximum likelihood estimation. The evaluation depended on the difference between the estimated parameters and the parameters of completed data. The results revealed that the proposed method is the best for estimating parameters and has good performance for estimating reliability. (shrink)

ʻAyyānī, Yaḥyá ibn Ḥumaydān, ca. 12th century; Muslim scholars; Yemen; views on Islamic philosophy.

The current study aimed to highlight the factors that may influence teachers' psychological resistance to digital technologies in entrepreneurship and business schools. Theoretically grounded in the diffusion of innovations theory and the theory of planned behavior, the current research investigates teachers' psychological resistance to digital innovation, school culture and climate, and moderation of teacher attitudes toward educational technologies. A cross-sectional field survey of 600 business and entrepreneurship school teachers was conducted in Jordan. In this study, partial least square-structural equation modeling (...) was used to assess the variables' “direct and moderating impacts” using the Smart PLS software 3.0. According to the results, school culture and school innovation climate had a considerable positive impact on teachers' resistance to digital innovation. Additionally, teachers' attitudes toward educational technologies moderated the relationship between study constructs in the framework. The study is a significant advance to the literature related to entrepreneurship, business education, and digital innovation. Several key policy insights and recommendations for further research, as well as theoretical and practical implications, are suggested. (shrink)