Background The global COVID-19 pandemic has challenged nurse leaders in ways that one could not imagine. Along with ongoing priorities of providing high quality, cost-effective and safe care, nurse leaders are also committed to promote an ethical climate that support nurses’ moral courage for sustaining excellence in patient and family care. Aim This study is directed to develop a structure equation model of crisis, ethical leadership and nurses’ moral courage: mediating effect of ethical climate during COVID-19. Ethical consideration Approval was (...) obtained from Ethics Committee at Faculty of Nursing, Alexandria University, Egypt. Methods A cross-sectional design was used to conduct this study using validated scales to measure the study variables. It was conducted in all units of two isolated hospitals in Damanhur, Egypt. A convenient sample of 235 nurses was recruited to be involved in this study. Results This study revealed that nurses perceived a moderate mean percent (55.49 ± 3.46) of overall crisis leadership, high mean percent (74.69 ± 6.15) of overall ethical leadership, high mean percent (72.09 ± 7.73) of their moral courage, and moderate mean percent of overall ethical climate (65.67 ± 12.04). Additionally, this study declared a strong positive statistical significant correlation between all study variables and indicated that the independent variable (crisis and ethical leadership) can predict a 0.96, 0.6, respectively, increasing in the dependent variable (nurses’ moral courage) through the mediating impact of ethical climate. Conclusion Nursing administrators should be conscious of the importance of crisis, ethical leadership competencies and the role of ethical climate to enhance nurses’ moral courage especially during pandemic. Therefore, these findings have significant contributions that support healthcare organizations to develop strategies that provide a supportive ethical climate. Develop ethical and crisis leadership competencies in order to improve nurses' moral courage by holding meetings, workshops, and allowing open dialogue with nurses to assess their moral courage. (shrink)

Background The wide proliferation of Covid-19 has impacted billions of people all over the world. This catastrophic pandemic outbreak and ostracism at work have posed challenges for all healthcare professionals, especially for nurses, and have led to a significant increase in the workload, several physical and mental problems, and a change in behavior that is more negative and counterproductive. Therefore, leadership behaviors that are moral in nature serve as a trigger and lessen the adverse workplace effects on nurses’ conduct. Aim (...) this research is directed to explore the impact of post-COVID-19 workplace ostracism on nurses’ counterproductive behavior and examine the role of moral leadership as a mediating factor in post-COVID-19 workplace ostracism and nurses’ counterproductive behavior. Ethical consideration Ethical review and approval Was received from Ethical Committee at the Faculty of Nursing, Alexandria University, Egypt. Methods A cross-sectional and correlation study was implemented in all units of medical, surgical, critical and intensive care units by using three tools; moral leadership questionnaire, Workplace Ostracism Instrument (WOS), and Counterproductive Work Behaviors Questionnaire (CWBs). A convenient sample of 340 from 699 bedside nurses was granted. Results This study revealed that nurses’ perceived moderate mean percent (55.49 ± 3.46) of overall workplace ostracism and counterproductive behavior (74.69 ± 6.15). However, they perceived a low mean percentage of moral leadership. There was a significant positive correlation between workplace ostracism and counterproductive behavior. Otherwise, a significant negative correlation was found between moral leadership, workplace ostracism and counterproductive behavior. Also, this study proved the mediating effect of moral leadership in decreasing workplace ostracism by 79.3% and counterproductive behavior by 36.7%. Conclusion Hospital administrators need to be aware of the significance of moral leadership and apply integrity in the clinical setting to reduce the drawback of isolation on nurses' conduct and increase value for the organization as a whole and nurses in particular. (shrink)

We report on the first stage of a project on the representations of gender in the coverage of the Arab Spring by Western media. We focus on designing comparable corpora to examine Arab women’s depiction in English and German news during the uprisings. The English corpus is composed of reports published by _The Guardian and The New York Times_. The German corpus consists of articles collected from _Der Spiegel, Die Welt_, _Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,_ and _Süddeutsche Zeitung_. The datasets (...) were processed through Sketch Engine to identify the terms collocating with _women_ in the English corpus and _Frau_ in the German one. Then, the themes reflected by these expressions in the two corpora were compared. The results show that both news media feature two types of topical frames linked to Arab women; one is associated with the uprisings while the other is related to their recurrent stereotypes in Western news discourse. Yet, there are discrepancies between their focus on related issues to each type. Other differences between the two sets of news outlets include intensity of reporting on Arab women and stressing their nationalities. These findings suggest that although Arab women’s negative stereotypes continued to feature in western news discourse during the Arab Spring, new positive images emerged and contributed to changing their depictions in global media. (shrink)

Amyloid beta precursor protein (APP) and prion protein (PrP) are cell membrane elements implicated in neurodegenerative diseases. Both proteins undergo endoproteolysis. Evidence is adduced from the literature hinting that the process in the two proteins could be related, their functions may overlap and their distributions coincide. It is proposed that PrP catalyses its own cleavage, the C-terminal fragment functions as an α secretase and the N-terminal segment chaperones the active site; the α secretase releases anticoagulant and neurotrophic ectodomains from APP. (...) The proposals explain some features of spongiform encephalopathies. BioEssays 23:456–462, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to propose and develop an intelligent e-learning system based on advanced document management techniques at Al-Quds Open University. In this article, we focus on a case using e-mail contents as supplement educational materials at QOU. We describe how the interactive classification system based on concept hierarchy can simplify this task. This system provides the functions to index, classify, and retrieve a collection of e-mail messages based on user profiles. By automatically indexing e-mail messages using (...) our E-mail Classification System for e-Learning, instructors and/or students can easily find their messages and find the topics. The test results of our system evaluation showed that a good classification quality has been achieved, with a precision of 77.4%, recall of 90%, and F-measure of 82.8. (shrink)

Cet article présente, dans une première partie, les fondements éthiques de la gestion de crise qui s’apparentent au pragmatisme et à l’écologie humaniste et s’appliquent dans une approche systémique axée sur l’apprentissage et le dialogue. Dans une deuxième partie, il discute de quelques questions éthiques dans le domaine de la sécurité civile en s’appuyant principalement sur les observations empiriques de l’auteur au Québec. Dans le cadre de sa mission en tant que boursier du Programme canadien de bourses de la Francophonie, (...) l’auteur termine par un examen des défis culturels relatifs à son aspiration d’établir une éthique et une culture de gestion de crise dans son pays, l’Égypte. (shrink)

RésuméTard dans sa vie intellectuelle, Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī a adopté une position dualiste sur la nature de l’âme, niant que l’âme est en tout sens un corps matériel. Ce point de vue, qui, de manière générale, concorde avec celui d’Avicenne, oppose al-Rāzī à la position matérialiste des théologiens. Pour clarifier sa position, dans son dernier ouvrage, Al-maṭālib, al-Rāzī expose un argument approfondi en faveur du matérialisme des théologiens, avant de critiquer cette position. Cet article offre une reconstruction des arguments d’al-Rāzī (...) en faveur du matérialisme des théologiens, offrant une perception des arguments dans la philosophie de l’esprit pendant le Moyen Âge islamique. (shrink)

We present a fully relativistic formulation of the theory of electron-nucleus Bremsstrahlung, within the context of self-field QED, as advanced recently by Barut and his co-workers. The Bremsstrahlung emission cross-section, reported here, is also shown to reduce to the standard correct nonrelativistic limit, in the dipole approximation.

Within the context of the time-reversed S-matrix approach to photoionization, and employing a recently proposed strong-field solution to the Schrödinger equation, analytic expressions for the atomic photoionization rates are obtained here without using the dipole approximation. We show that the absorbed photon momentum shows up as a forward-directed momentum component for the photoelectron. All the expressions reported in this work have the correct limits when the dipole approximation is used.

In this article, I developed the CSR-19 scale to assess the perceptions company executives have of CSR actions during the COVID-19 pandemic and to conceptualize the economic, legal, social, and environmental aspects of CSR actions as a high-order construct. This paper's findings suggest that the legal, environmental, and social aspects of CSR actions are being perceived to positively contribute to companies' CSR actions, but the economic aspect of CSR actions is deemed to contribute negatively to companies' CSR actions. The 16-item (...) CSR-19 scale shows strong evidence of reliability as well as content, convergent, and discriminant validity in a sample of 211 Jordanian companies. Managerial implications and suggestions for applying the CSR-19 scale in future research are presented. (shrink)

The paper describes the design of an intelligent tutoring system for teaching Introduction to Computer Science-a compulsory curriculum in Al-Azhar University of Gaza to students who attend the university. The basic idea of this system is a systematic introduction into computer science. The system presents topics with examples. The system is dynamically checks student's individual progress. An initial evaluation study was done to investigate the effect of using the intelligent tutoring system on the performance of students enrolled in computer science (...) curriculum at Al-Azhar University, Gaza. The results showed a positive impact on the evaluators. (shrink)

This essay examines Wolfhart Pannenberg’s defense of metaphysics’ foundational importance for philosophy and theology. Among all the modern philosophers whose claims Pannenberg challenges, Martin Heidegger’s discourse against Western metaphysics receives the major portion of criticism. The first thing one concludes from this criticism is an affirmation of a wide intellectual gap that separates Pannenberg’s thought from Heidegger’s, as if each stands at the very opposite corner of the other’s school of thought. The questions this essay tackles are: is this seemingly (...) irreconcilable difference between Pannenberg and Heidegger fully justifiable? What if there is a reading of Panneberg’s and Heidegger’s view of metaphysics that can reveal deeper similarities between the two thinkers than the first reading of Pannenberg’s criticism of Heidegger allows us to see? It then answers these questions by showing that both thinkers actually share a common emphasis on the concepts of ‘time/history’, ‘self-disclosure’ and ‘anticipation’, and their reliance on these notions reveals that Heidegger’s and Pannenberg’s approaches to the phenomenon of understanding and to metaphysical ontology are not fully contradictory but rather hold noticeable hermeneutical similarities. (shrink)

Arabic fiction; 20th century; history and criticism.

Tracing out the origins of the Trinitarian 'revivial' in the modern era, through to the destabilizing effects of postmodernity on Trinitarian discourse, the author provides a critical hermeneutic for the evaluation and implementation of Trinitarian theology in the contemporary world.

Muslims women; conduct of life; Islam; customs and practices.

Local places, such as communities, cities, and towns, host many cross-cross sector partnerships, many geared primarily toward alleviating local social and environmental issues. Yet, existing literatures focus predominantly on largescale systemic impact and global challenges such as climate change, paying scant attention to the role of local, geographically bounded dynamics in shaping these partnerships. In this article, I conceptualize places as geographic locations imbued with specific meaning systems and material resources to unpack how local embeddedness shape the structure of cross-sector (...) partnerships. Specifically, I investigate how place-based conflict, arising from tensions between the moral and material aspects of a partnership, can shape formalized aspects of organizational structure. These include the scope of operations, partners’ roles, and shared resources. I unpack these relationships using a case study of Occupy Medical, a local partnership between the civic society and the local government in Eugene, Oregon, tackling the problem of providing healthcare to the homeless and other marginalized and disenfranchised communities. The analysis covers the nine-year period of 2011–2020 and spans three major restructurings of the organization, the latest prompted by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. I theorize two forms of structural arrangements for cross-sector partnerships, confined and leveraged, and further elaborate on the role of cross-sector partnerships in crises response on the local level. (shrink)

A decade has passed since the breaking out of the ‘Arabic Spring’ revolutionary phenomena all over the Arab World’s societies. Many challenging and radically intriguing developments and ramifications have eventuated out of that era and led the Arab World’s context into unchartered territories of existence and self-understanding. This essay pauses at one of the particular challenges that faces this Sitz im Leben, namely the question of identity-formation and self-perception processes. It argues that the Arab states do manifest in their political (...) and statehood situations a political situation of democracy that is run by ‘non-democrats’. The essay then suggests that this democracy of non-democrats is the outcome of the prevalence of an identity-formation and self-perception rationales that are rooted in crudely religious Weltanschauung that, far from maintaining distinction and particularity individually and communally, turns alterity into a self-otherizing dogma expressive of contrariety and stark divisive and discriminative relatedness to the other. The essay, finally, suggests that liberating the identity-formation process from the dogmatic attempt at turning religion into ‘identity’ per se is the first required step towards a more cross-pollinating and symbiotic relationality between the different persons and groups who live in that context. (shrink)

Do people hold robots responsible for their actions? While Clark and Fischer present a useful framework for interpreting social robots, we argue that they fail to account for people's willingness to assign responsibility to robots in certain contexts, such as when a robot performs actions not predictable by its user or programmer.

The aim of this research was to set a proposed strategy for achieving institutional integrity in the University of Ha’il (UoH), Saudi Arabia, in the light of the National Centre of Assessment and Academic Accreditation (NCAAA) Standards. This was accomplished through acknowledging theoretical and philosophical frameworks of institutional integrity and their obstacles in university educational institutions and displaying the institutional standards of the National Centre of Assessment and Academic Accreditation. This research depended on the descriptive method and employed the (SWOT) (...) Analysis to examine the status of UoH. The research confirmed that UoH implemented policies to support institutional values and research integrity. Furthermore, the university has employed mechanisms and procedures for institutional values and mentorships and has a declared policy for disclosure of information and access of necessary information to all beneficiaries. The university needs to set some mechanisms in place to ensure fairness and equality in performance assessments or to implement integrity standards in processes of employment and recruitment. (shrink)

ObjectiveThe scarcity of research on associations between inflammatory markers and symptoms of depression and anxiety during adolescence has yielded inconsistent results. Further, not all studies have controlled for potential confounders. We explored the associations between baseline inflammatory markers and psychological distress including moderators at follow-up in a Norwegian adolescent population sample.MethodsData was derived from 373 girls and 294 boys aged 15–18 years at baseline, in the Fit Futures Study, a large-scale 2-year follow-up study on adolescent health. Baseline data was gathered (...) from 2010 to 2011 and follow-up data from 2012 to 2013. Psychological distress was measured with Hopkins Symptom Checklist. Serum levels of the following inflammatory markers were measured: C-reactive protein, Interleukin 6, Transforming growth factor alpha, Tumor necrosis factor alpha variant 1, and variant 2. Independent associations between baseline inflammatory markers and HSCL-10 at follow-up were explored by linear regressions, in sex-stratified analyses.ResultsIn girls, analyses showed positive associations between all inflammatory markers and HSCL-10, except for TRANCE. However, all associations were non-significant in crude as well as in adjusted analyses. In boys, CRP and TGF-α showed significant associations with HSCL-10, that remained significant after adjustment. Additionally, moderators were found. In boys, CRP was associated with HSCL-10 in those with high body fat and those being physical inactive, and the association between TWEAK and HSCL-10 was dependent upon sleep duration.ConclusionThere were significant prospective associations between CRP, TFG-α, and HSCL-10 in boys aged 15–18 years at baseline. (shrink)

Ambiguity affects decisions of people who exhibit a distaste of and require a premium for dealing with it. Do ambiguity-neutral subjects completely disregard ambiguity and react to any vague news? Online vending platforms often attempt to affect buyer’s decisions by messages like “20 people are looking at this item right now” or “The average score based on 567 reviews is 7.9/10”. We augment the two-color Ellsberg experiment with similarly worded signals about the unknown probability of success. All decision-makers, including ambiguity-neutral, (...) recognize and account for ambiguity; ambiguity-neutral subjects are less likely to respond to vague signals. The difference between decisions of ambiguity-neutral and non-neutral subjects vanishes for high precision signals; still less than 60% subjects choose the ambiguous urn, even for high communicated probabilities of success. We conjecture participants may discard information, if they see no contradiction between it and their prior beliefs, hence the latter are not updated. Higher confidence makes subjects more likely to discard the news, and empirically ambiguity-neutral subjects appear more confident than those ambiguity-averse. (shrink)

This study examines the topical frames reflected in articles published about Syrian refugees by German, British and American news websites in 2016. We analyze these for terms associated with Syrian refugees and the themes they address then relate them to those we identified for 2015 and to those indicated by German students in expressing their attitudes towards them. The results show that, despite discrepancies in the occurrence of Syrian refugees’ collocates in our 2016 news corpora, they still reflect, at a (...) lower rate, the themes identified for 2015: humanitarianism, conflict, dehumanization, security, economic burden, political responsibility, and integration. The survey results confirm humanitarianism and integration as particularly prominent themes for our participants, too. While our findings provide further discursive evidence for the variation in refugees’ representations in news discourse and for the influence of media on public opinion, they suggest that this impact may be balanced out by other factors including an audience’s critical reading and thinking skills. (shrink)

While individuals presented in central texts of the period are indeed often alone or separated from others, Yousef regards this isolation as a problem the texts attempt to illuminate, rather than a condition they construct as normative or ...

All geopolitical change represents the creation of a new order and this entails the alteration of the spatial conditions and, therefore, the modification of the way of understanding borders. Carl Schmitt, especially in his last stage, aimed at delineating a new international configuration made up of large spaces (Grossräume), once the time of sovereignties typical of the Ius publicum europaeum was over. The goal of this study is to analizy to which extent and how Schmitt 's analytical tools around borders (...) can be useful to understand the current state of globalization. Todo cambio geopolítico representa la creación de un nuevo orden y ello conlleva la alteración de las condiciones espaciales y, por tanto, la modificación de la manera de entender las fronteras. Carl Schmitt, especialmente en su última etapa, apuntó al delineamiento de una nueva configuración internacional conformada por grandes espacios (Grossräume), una vez que el tiempo de las soberanías propias del Ius publicum europaeum había terminado. El objetivo de este estudio es analizar hasta qué punto y de qué manera las herramientas analíticas de Schmitt en torno a las fronteras pueden ser útiles para comprender el estado actual de la globalización. (shrink)