In recent years there has been an increase in research conducted in the Middle East, with a corresponding increase in the challenges faced by members of the Research Ethics Committees. This study compares the structures of Omani and Jordanian RECs and investigates the perceptions of the challenges affecting the work of the REC members in Oman and Jordan. A convenience sample of 34 Omani and 66 Jordanian participants from 21 universities was recruited in this cross-sectional study. Almost 70% disagreed that (...) the members of RECs are unqualified, providing comments without justification; half believed that members have limited experience in research, and almost three-quarters that they have different opinions regarding some ethical issues. No significant differences were found between Omani and Jordanian REC members regarding their perception of the challenges, except for the perception that reviewing proposals is a time-consuming task and that multi-REC centres are less available. The regression model showed that there were significantly more male members of Jordanian RECs, and that Jordanian members were less likely to receive formal training. In conclusion, the current structure of RECs and the challenges faced by members need to be re-evaluated by decision makers to improve the overall quality of research activities, and to ensure that current REC members’ practices adhere to international standards. (shrink)

Background and AimPsycho-oncology is a cross-disciplinary and collaborative sub-specialty of oncology that focuses on the psychological, behavioral, ethical, and social aspects of cancer in clinical settings. The aim of this bibliometric study was to analyze and characterize the research productivity and trends in psycho-oncology between 1980 and 2021.MethodologyIn May 2022, the Scopus® database was searched for psycho-oncology-related publications using predetermined search keywords with specific restrictions. Lotka’s law was applied to check the authors’ productivity, while Bradford’s law was used to assess (...) the core journals in this field. The data was analyzed for different bibliometric indicators in the Biblioshiny package, an RStudio tool for bibliometric analysis.ResultsThe initial search resulted in a total of 2,906 publications. Of which, 1,832 publications were included in the final analysis, published between 1980 and 2021. The analyzed publications were written by 7,363 authors from 74 countries and published in 490 journals. There has been a significant increase in psycho-oncology-related publications after 2010. The most productive year was 2021. The annual scientific growth rate was found to be 13.9%. The most relevant leading author in terms of publications was Luigi Grassi from the University of Ferrara, Italy. Lotka’s law found that the number of authors declined as the number of papers written increased. The core journals were Psycho-Oncology, Supportive Care in Cancer, and Journal of Psychosocial Oncology. The most frequently used author’s keywords other than searching keywords were cancer, oncology, quality of life, depression, and anxiety. Recent psycho-oncology-related topics included mental health, COVID-19 infection in humans, people, pandemic, and tumor. The University of Sydney was the top-ranked institution. The leading country in terms of publications, citations, corresponding author country, and international collaboration was the United States of America. The United States had the strongest collaboration with Australia and Canada.ConclusionThe research hotspots include mental health conditions and interventions in cancer patients. We identified international collaboration and research expenditure to be strongly associated with psycho-oncology research productivity. Researchers’ collaboration, which is visible among developed countries, should be extended to low-income countries in order to expand psycho-oncology-related research and understanding. (shrink)

Sufism and Psychoanalysis have the potential to create a synergy of Eastern spiritual traditions and Western psychological frameworks. This paper examines the similarities and differences between Sufism and psychoanalytic self-psychology, particularly of Heinz Kohut, and emphasizes the mutual appreciation of psychoanalytical self-psychology approaches and patients’ religious beliefs, demonstrating that they are not in opposition and can work in harmony. The data was collected through literature reviews and documentation study. The results reveal that Sufi practices such as dhikr (remembrance of God) (...) and spiritual guidance from a sheik are equally self-psychological concepts, equipped with empathy and self-object transference, capable of producing a more complete and culturally sensitive therapeutic encounter. It was also revealed that such a mental health environment can be created in which the spiritual and cultural dimensions of diverse patient populations can be recognized. A blend of Sufi and psychoanalytical values can lead to innovative, culturally sensitive, and effective mental health interventions to enhance the understanding of the spiritual heritage of Islam and address individuals' psychological and spiritual needs. This study’s implications lie in the fact that it encourages concerns of cross-cultural psychoanalysis by providing a blending platform to understand Islamic spirituality as well as western psychological theories and practices. Future studies may further explore the role of such a cross-cultural psychoanalysis to understand various healthcare practices across inter-disciplinary faiths and communities. (shrink)

The study investigates the effect of board characteristics and firm performance on disclosure tones by considering DICTION five master variables namely activity, optimism, certainty, realism and commonality tones using a sample of 779 annual reports of GCC listed firms (2012 to 2018). Disclosure tones of the sampled GCC firms were measured through corporate narrative disclosures by DICTION 7.0 software. Then, the ordinary least square regression analysis was conducted. The main findings of the study show that firm performance has a significant (...) effect on disclosure tones in terms of activity, optimism, certainty, and realism tones except for commonality reported tone. Board characteristics have different effects on the five disclosure tones. The study offers a unique contribution to accounting literature as it is one of the first studies in the Gulf region that seeks to examine the relationship between disclosure tones and firm performance as well as board governance. (shrink)

Decision trees learning is one of the most practical classification methods in machine learning, which is used for approximating discrete-valued target functions. However, they may overfit the training data, which limits their ability to generalize to unseen instances. In this study, we investigated the use of instance reduction techniques to smooth the decision boundaries before training the decision trees. Noise filters such as ENN, RENN, and ALLKNN remove noisy instances while DROP3 and DROP5 may remove genuine instances. Extensive empirical experiments (...) were conducted on 13 benchmark datasets from UCI machine learning repository with and without intentionally introduced noise. Empirical results show that eliminating border instances improves the classification accuracy of decision trees and reduces the tree size, which reduces the training and classification times. In datasets without intentionally added noise, applying noise filters without the use of the built-in Reduced Error Pruning gave the best classification accuracy. ENN, RENN, and ALLKNN outperformed decision trees learning without pruning in 9, 9, and 8 out of 13 datasets, respectively. The datasets reduced using ENN and RENN without built-in pruning were more effective when noise was intentionally introduced in different ratios. (shrink)

This is the first comprehensive monograph on the theology of Abū l-Qāsim al-Kaʿbī al-Balkhī, a leading Muʿtazilī who flourished at the end of the Baghdādī school and at the beginning of the scholastic phase of Muʿtazilī history.

The Human Agenda is the first Special Edition of The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art (CJLPA), an interdisciplinary journal founded at the University of Cambridge. Focused on the unique intersections of law, politics and art in the context of human rights, contributors to the Special Edition include David Baragwanath, Luis Moreno Ocampo, Nadia Murad, Nancy Hollander, Andrew Clapham, Vladimir Osechkin, Mansour al-Omari, and many others. A full table of contents is available through the publication's own page.

After more than 40 years of practice, the Islamic finance industryis composed of products with claim of Islamicity but questionable on theirShariʽah credentials. The industry is increasingly exposed to cynicism anddecline in popular interest. This paper restates the essence of riba prohibitionfrom an economic perspective. It evaluates the Shariʽah scholars approach tovalidation of contracts as well as the monetary authorities’ attitude towards theShariʽah content of Islamic finance transactions. It points out the advantagesof Islamic finance within an Islamic macroeconomic environment. It (...) looks intothe problem of convergence of Islamic finance to conventional finance, andreasons behind the convergence. This study finds that several violations of thetrue paradigm of Islamic finance are because of its advantages being all externaland impossible to internalize. The paper concludes with some proposals forchecking the convergence. (shrink)

[1] Lev Yehudah ḥeleḳ 1, u-vo ḥidushim u-veʼurim be-ʻinyanim shonim. Lev Yehudah ḥeleḳ 2, u-vo heʻarot ṿe-heʼarot ḳetsarot. Boʼu ḥeshbon, u-vo heʻarot be-ḥeshbonot u-midot Ḥazal -- [2] Ḳunṭres Boʼu ḥeshbon ḥeleḳ 2.

This work is about the deceptive nature of psychotherapy. In particular, it is about those therapies that claim to provide the client with insight and self-knowledge when in practice they are a means of social control absorbing clients into socially acceptable norms. Through a philosophical analysis of key concepts such as knowledge, insight, and subjectivity, and through an examination of mechanisms intrinsic to psychotherapeutic practice, such as power, interpretation, and suggestion, this monograph unveils how psychotherapy deludes clients into believing they (...) have discovered their true self. Rather than gaining self-knowledge and insight into their true or core self, clients are subtly reconstructed and reconfigured along prevailing social values. Furthermore, the very epistemological and metaphysical world-view clients are deceived into believing is highly suspect and founded upon a fascistic understanding of knowledge. As an alternative to such domination, psychotherapy needs to reconstruct itself along Nietzschean-Deleuzian lines where the focus is on multiple identities, difference, and creativity. Rather than focusing on an analysis of past memories to alleviate symptoms such as anxiety or depression, therapeutic intervention should aim for a non-repressive conception of self-knowledge and insight based upon a creative future and not a regretful past. This entails a different understanding of knowledge and reality that is not based on subjugating the world to what we know about it, but on immersing ourselves within reality in all of its concrete richness. And such an approach is preferable not because it is “true” but because it is more liberating. (shrink)

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

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 European Enlightenment in the latter half of the eighteenth century heralded a grave conflict between theological and scientific modes of thought, starkly revealing the ancient tensions between spiritual knowledge and rationalism. Yet there was another, lesser-known movement during this time---a "covert" Enlightenment---that sought to bring fresh perspectives on the soul, and by extension, on the human mind and on consciousness. This work examines the influence of Emanuel Swedenborg and Anton Mesmer on the budding movement toward psychology in the late-eighteenth (...) century and also spiritualism and millennialism in the nineteenth century. (shrink)

Humanity is under siege with Covid-19. Whilst the crisis aggravates, the world is also grappling with yet another challenge - a global misinformation conundrum. This arises from the spread of contagious conspiracy theories that obfuscate understanding the pandemic at best. Incidentally, the conspiracy theories have gone as viral as Covid-19 itself, spreading just as swiftly digitally as the virus does physically. The outcome has been a spectrum of attitudinal patterns, ranging from cynicism and skepticism to outright denialism and fatalism. Using (...) a conversational analysis that is predicated on extant literature and personal insights, the paper examines the import of conspiracy theories as a major complication of the Covid-19 challenge. The paper posits that the theories have produced narratives and attitudinal outcomes that not only misrepresent the pandemic but also complicate its mitigation. (shrink)

PurposeDigital and social inclusion are becoming more talked about as approaches to what has been discussed as the digital divide. But what is digital or social inclusion? The purpose of this paper is to explore the notion of social exclusion as a variety of, sometimes conflicting, social programmes which embody ideas of what society should be. Becoming more aware of this variety of approach can give insights into programmes addressing the digital divide and the political, cultural and social aspects of (...) policies of social inclusion.Design/methodology/approachThe paper analyses the notion of social inclusion as a variety of social policies to address social exclusion and develop the nation state. It uses an example of a telecentre in Jordan's knowledge station programme to illustrate and extend this analysis.FindingsThe analysis and discussion of the KS initiative shows how different notions of social and digital inclusion are important features of strengthening the Jordanian state and are useful in analysing the relative success of this programme.Originality/valueThe paper argues that analyses of digital divides and digital exclusion could be strengthened by a closer understanding of policies of social inclusion. In this way it is possible to move from technological connection as a measure of a digital divide to a more thorough understanding using social inclusion policy which illuminates social, political and cultural aspects of technological change. (shrink)