PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to assess the efforts made by Jordan in the direction of e‐governance and people's perception of corruption, trust, and e‐governance.Design/methodology/approachDesk research was conducted using secondary data sources followed by a field survey conducted with 412 sample respondents in three major cities of Jordan. Following the triangulation approach, the responses of university professors and the common people were also secured.FindingsThe Jordanian government's efforts towards e‐governance are commendable in the Middle East. However, there are certain impediments (...) that are witnessed in the form of the digital divide, corruption, social bottlenecks, the stage of democratization, the lack of marketing to stakeholders, and the citizen's lack of adoption of technology. Educated people are aware of the merit of e‐governance contrary to the uneducated ones and perceive that corruption in the Jordanian public sector is increasing.Research limitations/implicationsThe study mainly reflects the views of the educated people. The views of the uneducated ones are secured through basic interactions as they expressed their inability to respond to the questionnaires. Somehow, the respondents are not very open to freely share their opinions or have abstained from participation‐since they consider this a sensitive issue within the Jordanian cultural and political setup. Further, asking opinions of members of the public might not be the ideal way of judging the level of corruption, or changes in it.Originality/valuePeople's perception is that Jordan is affected by a low level of corruption and that its citizens lack awareness of e‐governance. To remedy this, its citizens need to be motivated to trust and to participate in the process of e‐governance and to increase their understanding of the tools and technologies available. (shrink)

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

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

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)

Nationalism; Arab countries; Islamic philosophy.

Interpretation of Śaṅkarācārya's Vākyasudha; includes original text.

In this paper, I examine the three interpretations of sections 65-67 in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, where he answers the question “do we call different things by the same word because of a common feature?” Interpretation A holds that we call different things by the same word because of overlapping similarities between them; Interpretation B adopts a socio-historical reading, where concepts evolved and extended historically on the basis of some similarities; and interpretation C includes aspects of the first two interpretations, but (...) sees similarities as just one of several kinds of relations and affinities between concepts which explain why we call different things by the same word. Through an investigation of Wittgenstein’s answer and the objections made to interpretation A, I argue that interpretation C, although not prominent in the secondary literature, provides better answers to the objections raised. (shrink)

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)

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

Socio-philosophical work in response to the philosophy of Pitirim Aleksandrovich Sorokin.

Hādī ilá al-ḥaqq, Yaḥyá ibn al-Ḥusayn, 859-910; view on Islamic philosophy; Islam; doctrines.

Religious life; Islam; Islam and social problems; Islamic ethics; security.