Due to the huge amount of data being generating from different sources, the analyzing and extracting of useful information from these data becomes a very complex task. The difficulty of dealing with big data optimization problems comes from many factors such as the high number of features, and the existing of lost data. The feature selection process becomes an important step in many data mining and machine learning algorithms to reduce the dimensionality of the optimization problems and increase the performance (...) of the classification or clustering algorithms. In this paper, a set of hybrid and efficient genetic algorithms are proposed to solve feature selection problem, when the handled data has a large feature size. The proposed algorithms use a new gene-weighted mechanism that can adaptively classify the features into strong relative features, weak or redundant features, and unstable features during the evolution of the algorithm. Based on this classification, the proposed algorithm gives the strong features high priority and the weak features less priority when generating new candidate solutions. In the same time, the proposed algorithm tries to more concentrate on unstable features that sometimes appear and sometimes disappear from the best solutions of the population. The performance of proposed algorithms is investigated by using different datasets and feature selection algorithms. The results show that our proposed algorithms can outperform the other feature selection algorithms and effectively enhance the classification performance over the tested datasets. (shrink)

The study aimed to identify the reality of decision-making in the local NGOs in Gaza Strip. In order to achieve the objectives of the study and to test its hypotheses, the analytical descriptive method was used, relying on the questionnaire as a main tool for data collection. The study society was one of the decision makers in the local NGOs in Gaza Strip. The study population reached 78 local NGOs in Gaza Strip. A Census Method of the possible study community (...) was adopted, and the use of the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was mainly based on the analysis and analysis of the data obtained through the survey tool. The study reached a set of results, the most important of which are: NGOs follow a decision-making mechanism. NGOs examine the problems and causes of the organization. Organizations are less concerned with stakeholder participation. Make decision. The main recommendations of the study are: To promote systematic methods of decision-making in NGOs in Gaza Strip: Local NGOs in Gaza Strip should continue to develop their competencies in order to make sound and correct decisions and encourage them to follow the scientific methodologies in the mechanism of taking Decisions. (shrink)

The study aimed to identify Design Thinking and its use in NGOs in Gaza Strip. In order to achieve the objectives of the study and to test its hypotheses, the analytical descriptive method was used, relying on the questionnaire as a main tool for data collection. The study society was one of the decision makers in the local NGOs in the Gaza Strip. The study population reached 78 local NGOs in Gaza Strip. The overall inventory of the possible study community (...) was based mainly on the use of the SPSS in processing and analyzing the data obtained through the survey tool. Smart-PLS was also used to construct the structural equation model (SEM) Analyzing the relationship between study variables. The study found that Design Thinking mediates the relationship between the management of process design and decision making with a holistic effect. The study showed the interest of local NGOs in creating a good mental image in the local community. And the ownership of local NGOs to the expertise and technical skills required to implement the projects, and showed the adoption of local NGOs in their activities to meet the needs of the beneficiaries and their wishes, and local NGOs analyze the problem, and causes, through data relevant to the decision, based on reference data for decision-making. The main recommendations of the study are: The need for senior management in the local NGOs in Gaza Strip to adopt the methodology of design thinking because of its impact on the sustainability of the projects, design the technical feasibility study and meet the wishes of the beneficiaries. (shrink)

The study aimed at identifying the personal variables and their effect in promoting job creation in Gaza Strip through business incubators. The researchers used the descriptive analytical approach to achieve the study objectives. The study population consisted of 92 of the pilot projects benefiting from the three business incubators in Gaza Strip (Palestinian Information Technology Incubator, UCAS Technology Incubator and Business and Technology Incubator). The study reached a number of results, the most important of which are the existence of statistically (...) significant differences on entrepreneurship attributed to each age as most of them are between the ages of 22-30, Gender for males, business incubator, scientific qualification for the specialties of information technology and engineering, and years of experience. Based on the findings, the researchers recommend focusing on university students in guiding them towards entrepreneurship and helping new graduates to start entrepreneurship. And to guide students to scientific disciplines that help them in entrepreneurship after graduation, whether starting a small business or self-employment, support females to entrepreneurship as most of the entrepreneurs are male, in addition to stimulating males as well. (shrink)

This essay develops a detailed account of the features that make a group susceptible to the harm of genocide. If the members of a group consent to a life in common, if the culture of the group is comprehensive, and if the social structure of the group is such that membership cannot easily be renounced, then the flourishing of the group's culture and social ethos will have profound and far‐reaching effects on the well‐being of its individual members. Systematic destruction of (...) cultural and social institutions under these conditions will eventuate in individuals suffering the harms and deprivations peculiar to the crime of genocide. The later sections of the essay illustrate and further defend the thesis that “social death” is the harm that distinguishes genocide from other forms of political violence. (shrink)

Deep learning techniques, which use a massive technology known as convolutional neural networks, have shown excellent results in a variety of areas, including image processing and interpretation. However, as the depth of these networks grows, so does the demand for a large amount of labeled data required to train these networks. In particular, the medical field suffers from a lack of images because the procedure for obtaining labeled medical images in the healthcare field is difficult, expensive, and requires specialized expertise (...) to add labels to images. Moreover, the process may be prone to errors and time-consuming. Current research has revealed transfer learning as a viable solution to this problem. Transfer learning allows us to transfer knowledge gained from a previous process to improve and tackle a new problem. This study aims to conduct a comprehensive survey of recent studies that dealt with solving this problem and the most important metrics used to evaluate these methods. In addition, this study identifies problems in transfer learning techniques and highlights the problems of the medical dataset and potential problems that can be addressed in future research. According to our review, many researchers use pre-trained models on the Imagenet dataset in many applications such as skin cancer, breast cancer, and diabetic retinopathy classification tasks. These techniques require further investigation of these models, due to training them on natural, non-medical images. In addition, many researchers use data augmentation techniques to expand their dataset and avoid overfitting. However, not enough studies have shown the effect of performance with or without data augmentation. Accuracy, recall, precision, F1 score, receiver operator characteristic curve, and area under the curve were the most widely used measures in these studies. Furthermore, we identified problems in the datasets for melanoma and breast cancer and suggested corresponding solutions. (shrink)

Speech is a primary means of human communication and one of the most basic features of human conduct. Voice is an important part of its subsystems. A speech disorder is a condition that affects the ability of a person to speak normally, which occasionally results in voice impairment with psychological and emotional consequences. Early detection of voice problems is a crucial factor. Computer-based procedures are less costly and easier to administer for such purposes than traditional methods. This study highlights the (...) following issues: recent studies, methods of voice pathology detection, machine learning and deep learning (DL) methods used in data classification, main datasets utilized, and the role of Internet of things (IoT) systems employed in voice pathology diagnosis. Moreover, this study presents different applications, open challenges, and recommendations for future directions of IoT systems and artificial intelligence (AI) approaches in the voice pathology diagnosis. Finally, this study highlights some limitations of voice pathology datasets in comparison with the role of IoT in the healthcare sector, which shows the urgent need to provide efficient approaches and easy and ideal medical diagnostic procedures and treatments of disease identification for doctors and patients. This review covered voice pathology taxonomy, detection techniques, open challenges, limitations, and recommendations for future directions to provide a clear background for doctors and patients. Standard databases, including the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Saarbruecken Voice Database, and the Arabic Voice Pathology Database, were used in most articles reviewed in this article. The classes, features, and main purpose for voice pathology identification are also highlighted. This study focuses on the extraction of voice pathology features, especially speech analysis, extends feature vectors comprising static and dynamic features, and converts these extended feature vectors into solid vectors before passing them to the recognizer. (shrink)

Spam electronic mails (emails) refer to harmful and unwanted commercial emails sent to corporate bodies or individuals to cause harm. Even though such mails are often used for advertising services and products, they sometimes contain links to malware or phishing hosting websites through which private information can be stolen. This study shows how the adaptive intelligent learning approach, based on the visual anti-spam model for multi-natural language, can be used to detect abnormal situations effectively. The application of this approach is (...) for spam filtering. With adaptive intelligent learning, high performance is achieved alongside a low false detection rate. There are three main phases through which the approach functions intelligently to ascertain if an email is legitimate based on the knowledge that has been gathered previously during the course of training. The proposed approach includes two models to identify the phishing emails. The first model has proposed to identify the type of the language. New trainable model based on Naive Bayes classifier has also been proposed. The proposed model is trained on three types of languages (Arabic, English and Chinese) and the trained model has used to identify the language type and use the label for the next model. The second model has been built by using two classes (phishing and normal email for each language) as a training data. The second trained model (Naive Bayes classifier) has been applied to identify the phishing emails as a final decision for the proposed approach. The proposed strategy is implemented using the Java environments and JADE agent platform. The testing of the performance of the AIA learning model involved the use of a dataset that is made up of 2,000 emails, and the results proved the efficiency of the model in accurately detecting and filtering a wide range of spam emails. The results of our study suggest that the Naive Bayes classifier performed ideally when tested on a database that has the biggest estimate (having a general accuracy of 98.4%, false positive rate of 0.08%, and false negative rate of 2.90%). This indicates that our Naive Bayes classifier algorithm will work viably on the off chance, connected to a real-world database, which is more common but not the largest. (shrink)

Diabetes is a major public health issue that affects the nations of our time to a large extent and is described as a non-communicable epidemic. Diabetes mellitus is a common disease where there is too much sugar (glucose) floating around in your blood. This occurs because either the pancreas can’t produce enough insulin or the cells in body have become resistant to insulin. The concentration in this paper is on diagnosis diabetes by designing a proposed expert system. The main goal (...) of this expert system is to get the appropriate diagnosing of the illness, dealing with it quickly, and tips for permanent treatment whenever possible is given out. SL5 object expert system language was used for designing and implementing the proposed expert system. (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)

Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a long-term degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that mainly affects the motor system. The symptoms generally come on slowly over time. Early in the disease, the most obvious are shaking, rigidity, slowness of movement, and difficulty with walking. Doctors do not know what causes it and finds difficulty in early diagnosing the presence of Parkinson’s disease. An artificial neural network system with back propagation algorithm is presented in this paper for helping doctors in identifying (...) PD. Previous research with regards to predict the presence of the PD has shown accuracy rates up to 93% [1]; however, accuracy of prediction for small classes is reduced. The proposed design of the neural network system causes a significant increase of robustness. It is also has shown that networks recognition rates reached 100%. (shrink)

Research has shown high levels of housing precarity among government-assisted refugees connected to difficult housing markets, limited social benefits, and other social and structural barriers to positive settlement. The COVID-19 pandemic has likely exacerbated this precarity. Research to date demonstrates the negative consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for refugees and low-income households, including both health-related issues and economic challenges, that may exacerbate their ability to obtain affordable, suitable housing. In this context, we examined Syrian government-assisted refugees’ experiences during the pandemic, (...) asking: how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted Syrian refugees’ experiences of housing stability. To examine this issue, we interviewed 38 families in Calgary, London, and Fredericton. Using a qualitative descriptive methodology for analysis and interpretation, we found the liminality of settling as a GAR has been compounded by isolation, further economic loss, and new anxieties during the pandemic. Ultimately, for many participants, the pandemic has thwarted their housing stability goals and decreased their likelihood of improving their housing conditions. Based on our findings, we discuss potential policy and practice relevant solutions to the challenges faced by refugees in Canada during the pandemic and likely beyond. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION The Background Mid-way through the twelfth century, as the Latin West was introduced to a wealth of previously unknown scientific and ...

In order to reduce the dimensionality of parameter space and enhance out-of-sample forecasting performance, this research compares regularization techniques with Autometrics in time-series modeling. We mainly focus on comparing weighted lag adaptive LASSO with Autometrics, but as a benchmark, we estimate other popular regularization methods LASSO, AdaLASSO, SCAD, and MCP. For analytical comparison, we implement Monte Carlo simulation and assess the performance of these techniques in terms of out-of-sample Root Mean Square Error, Gauge, and Potency. The comparison is assessed with (...) varying autocorrelation coefficients and sample sizes. The simulation experiment indicates that, compared to Autometrics and other regularization approaches, the WLAdaLASSO outperforms the others in covariate selection and forecasting, especially when there is a greater linear dependency between predictors. In contrast, the computational efficiency of Autometrics decreases with a strong linear dependency between predictors. However, under the large sample and weak linear dependency between predictors, the Autometrics potency ⟶ 1 and gauge ⟶ α. In contrast, LASSO, AdaLASSO, SCAD, and MCP select more covariates and possess higher RMSE than Autometrics and WLAdaLASSO. To compare the considered techniques, we made the Generalized Unidentified Model for covariate selection and out-of-sample forecasting for the trade balance of Pakistan. We train the model on 1985–2015 observations and 2016–2020 observations as test data for the out-of-sample forecast. (shrink)

The etiology of schizophrenia remains heavily contested despite extensive research, huge quantities of data, and heavy investment in time and material resources around the world. Not only is there little agreement about the causes of this most devastating of psychiatric conditions, but there is disagreement as to whether the condition exists at all as a coherent entity (Bentall 2006). Evolutionary theorists have had the added problem of explaining how a severe mental illness that causes a significant reproductive disadvantage can continue (...) to exist in human populations, where it is claimed to have a uniform prevalence across the world. Many Darwinian formulations have suggested various forms of tradeoffs where the .. (shrink)

Genocide is a violent process that aims at the liquidation of protected groups. Like individuals, groups can be killed in a variety of ways and for many different reasons. Only the intention of the perpetrator distinguishes genocide from other forms of mass violence. The implications of the account given are striking. Genocide is not in any sense distinctively heinous. Nor is it necessarily immoral. Under certain conditions, settlercolonialism, ethnic cleansing, and forced assimilation will count as instances of the phenomenon. While (...) the argument undermines the orthodox view, it can accommodate the idea that the Holocaust was distinctively heinous. (shrink)

The process of making ethical judgments is much more complex than studying only personal moral philosophy variables (idealism and relativism). The renewed interest in epistemic values (virtue and vice epistemology) in contemporary philosophy has shown significant relevance to understanding ethical behavior and such values may be better predictors than studying only idealism and relativism. The purpose of this exploratory study is to examine employees’ personal moral philosophies, optimism, epistemic values, and various organizational unethical practices as compared to their managers. We (...) used Rawwas’ items of epistemology in this study. The sample consisted of 262 managers and employees. The results revealed that managers were more sensitive to organizational unethical practices, scored less on epistemic vices, less on absolutism, and more on exceptionalism than employees were. However, there was no difference between managers and employees related to moderate and minor unethical organizational practices, situationism, subjectivism, optimism, and epistemic virtues. We provided discussion of the results and implications. (shrink)

In recent years, researchers have paid special attention to religiosity and the practice of religious beliefs. If people put religiosity at the forefront of their affairs and maintain the roots of religion in various aspects of work and family life, they will see God present and watchful in doing all things, and the result of such a vision will be the successful performance of deeds and walking the path of perfection. Having a heartfelt belief in the value of work and (...) adhering to it will result in a greater desire to work. Religiosity is a variable that can be related to job variables. In addition, it can play an important role in the behaviours of employees. In Islam, work is a virtue and is necessary to balance the personal and social life of the individual. Given the importance of this issue, the present study aimed to evaluate the relationship between Islamic religiosity and job satisfaction of Muslim teachers in Malaysia. In total, 2200 Muslim teachers of Kuala Lumpur and Penang were selected for the study by simple random sampling. Data were collected by using standard questionnaires and analysed by Pearson's correlation coefficient in Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). According to the results, there was a significant and positive relationship between teachers' Islamic religiosity and job satisfaction as P = 0.784 and T = 0.000 which was less than the Sig level of 0.05. CONTRIBUTION: According to Islamic teachings, working for a Muslim is like worship. Based on the findings of this research, teachers with higher Islamic religiosity enjoy higher job satisfaction. (shrink)

Argumentation is a very fertile area of research in Artificial Intelligence, and various semantics have been developed to predict when an argument can be accepted, depending on the abstract structure of its defeaters and defenders. When these semantics make conflicting predictions, theoretical arbitration typically relies on ad hoc examples and normative intuition about what prediction ought to be the correct one. We advocate a complementary, descriptive-experimental method, based on the collection of behavioral data about the way human reasoners handle these (...) critical cases. We report two studies applying this method to the case of reinstatement (both in its simple and floating forms). Results speak for the cognitive plausibility of reinstatement and yet show that it does not yield the full expected recovery of the attacked argument. Furthermore, results show that floating reinstatement yields comparable effects to that of simple reinstatement, thus arguing in favor of preferred argumentation semantics, rather than grounded argumentation semantics. Besides their theoretical value for validating and inspiring argumentation semantics, these results have applied value for developing artificial agents meant to argue with human users. (shrink)

Joseph Medill's Chicago Tribune was an influential voice for civil rights and equality in the age of slavery. By 1883, however, when the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the Tribune 's commitment to its moral principles had been compromised. The paper abandoned its editorial support for equality in favor of shoring up the declining fortunes of the Republican Party in the post-Reconstruction era. A content analysis of Tribune news and editorial items on the civil rights (...) law shows strong support for the statute in 1875 when it was passed, and an equally strong support for the Supreme Court decision that annulled it in 1883. (shrink)

This study examines the roles of environmental strategy and accounting in corporate carbon performance, as measured by the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol. A novel interaction model is developed based on legitimacy theory and natural-resource dependence theory to capture the interaction between environmental strategy and accounting. An international sample of 3322 firms from 73 countries is used in the analysis, based on a panel data design for 17 years (2005–2022). The empirical findings reveal an overall reactive role of these environmental initiatives (...) in relation to carbon performance. The marginal effect analysis shows that environmental accounting favourably moderates the effect of environmental strategic functions on carbon performance, indicating that the former facilitates the translation of the latter into practice. Similarly, environmental strategic initiatives improve the impact of environmental accounting information on carbon performance. The main contribution of this study stems from methodologically demonstrating how the synergy between environmental strategic initiatives and environmental information mechanisms can translate into improved carbon performance. This finding has multiple societal, practical and research implications. The interaction effect evidence can be viewed as consistent with recent trends of integrated approaches to thinking and reporting, where interrelated phenomena are integrated into operational and reporting contexts to improve efficiency. This can be of interest to policymakers, investors, corporate managers and providers of assurance services related to carbon performance. (shrink)

Rehabilitation for disabled children requires long-term programmeswhich are expensive to the family. This study aimed to estimate the costincurred by caregivers’ children with disabilities from Pahang, Terengganu andKelantan participating in Community-Based Rehabilitation and cost of seeking alternative rehabilitation. Costanalysis using the Activity-Based Costing method was used to estimatetwelve-months’ expenditure in 2014 institutional year on 297 caregivers ofchildren with disability, aged 0 to 18 years who attended CBR. Data werecollected using a self-administered costing questionnaire and presentedin median. Results showed that the (...) median direct and indirect costs,excluding medications and alternative care were nearly four times as highin Home-Based compared to Centre-Based vs. RM608. Both groups of caregivers spent a significant amount ofresources on alternative rehabilitation. The high costs incurred for alternativerehabilitation is a major economic burden to the family. (shrink)

Soon after the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic outbreak, it became clear that vaccination will be the most useful tool to combat the disease. Despite the apparent safety and efficacy of the developed anti‐COVID‐19 vaccines, relatively high percentages of the population worldwide refused to get vaccinated, including many health workers and health students. The present cross‐sectional study examined the motives, attitudes, and personal characteristics of those who did not get vaccinated against COVID‐19 or vaccinated without complete willingness among nursing students (...) and nursing faculty members in Israel (n = 472). Results show that the vast majority of the study participants (97%) received at least one dose of the anti‐COVID‐19 vaccine. Nearly 37% of the participants indicated that they received the vaccine without complete willingness. As compared to faculty members, nursing students reported lower trust in the efficacy of the vaccine, perceived the COVID‐19 pandemic as a health threat to a lesser extent, exhibited lower institutional and personal trust, and had higher levels of posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms. Non‐Jewish participants were at risk of vaccinating without complete willingness. These findings underscore the need for developing evidence‐based strategies to promote the safety and efficacy of the anti‐COVID‐19 vaccines in nursing schools. (shrink)

This book offers the first comprehensive introduction to one of the most significant Arab thinkers of the late 20th century and the early 21st century: the Moroccan philosopher and social theorist Mohammed Abed al-Jabri. With his intellectual and political engagement, al-Jabri has influenced the development of a modern reading of the Islamic tradition in the broad Arab-Islamic world and has been, in recent years, subject to an increasing interest among Muslims and non-Muslim scholars, social activists and lay men. (...) The contributors to this volume read al-Jabri with reference to prominent past Arab-Muslim scholars, such as Ibn Rushd, al-Ghazali, al-Shatibi, and Ibn Khaldun, as well as contemporary Arab philosophers, like Hassan Hanafi, Abdellah Laroui, George Tarabishi, Taha Abderrahmane; they engage with various aspects of his intellectual project, and trace his influence in non-Arab-Islamic lands, like Indonesia, as well. His analysis of Arab thought since the 1970s as a harbinger analysis of the ongoing “Arab Spring uprising” remains relevant for today's political challenges in the region. (shrink)

The ethical climate in Turkey is beset by ethical problems. Bribery, environmental pollution, tax frauds, deceptive advertising, production of unsafe products, and the ethical violations that involved politicians and business professionals are just a few examples. The purpose of this study is to compare and contrast the ethical beliefs of American and Turkish consumers using the Ethical Position Questionnaire (EPQ) of Forsyth (1980), the Machiavellianism scale, and the Consumer Ethical Practices of Muncy and Vitell questionnaire (MVQ). A sample of 376 (...) subjects that consists of American consumers (n = 188) and Turkish consumers (n = 199) was used to compare the ethical beliefs and practices of the two samples. The MANOVA results for the two nationality groups found that five out of six criterion variables differed between the two groups. The implications of this study are intended to assist marketers to develop strategies that suit a particular market and lessen their risk of entry. (shrink)

Cloud computing (ClC) has become a more popular computer paradigm in the preceding few years. Quality of Service (QoS) is becoming a crucial issue in service alteration because of the rapid growth in the number of cloud services. When evaluating cloud service functioning using several performance measures, the issue becomes more complex and non-trivial. It is therefore quite difficult and crucial for consumers to choose the best cloud service. The user's choices are provided in a quantifiable manner in the current (...) methods for choosing cloud services. Hence, this study attempts to achieve this objective through construction. decision-making framework so-called cloud services evaluator (CSsEv). The main indicator and its sub-indicators are formed as nodes at levels(n) in tree soft sets (TSSs). Thereafter Single Value Neutrosophic Sets (SVNSs) as branch of neutrosophic sets which conjunction with the Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) technique to facilitate analysis and evaluation process for the available Cloud services providers. Hence, entropy is employed to obtain indicators and sub_indicators weights and Complex Proportional Assessment utilizes these weights to facilitate the decision process of selecting optimal ClSPs. (shrink)

The N‐end rule denotes the relationship between the identity of the amino‐terminal residue of a protein and its in vivo half‐life. Since its discovery in 1986, the N‐end rule has generally been described by a defined set of rules for determining whether an amino‐terminal residue is stabilizing or not. However, recent studies are revealing that this N‐end rule (or N‐degron concept) is less straightforward than previously appreciated. For instance, it is unveiled that N‐terminal acetylation of N‐terminal residues may create a (...) degradation signal (Ac‐degron) that promotes the degradation of target proteins. A recent high‐throughput dissection of degrons in yeast proteins amino termini intriguingly suggested that the hydrophobicity of amino‐terminal residues—but not the N‐terminal acetylation status—may be the indispensable feature of amino‐terminal degrons. Herein, these recent advances in N‐terminal acetylation and the complexity of N‐terminal degradation signals in the context of the N‐degron pathway are analyzed. (shrink)

RésuméDans le présent article, on expose la théorie aristotélicienne des comètes, bien diffusée en Occident musulman par le biais des commentaires d'Ibn Rušd et d'Ibn Bāǧǧa, et abordée trois siècles plus tard dans un manuscrit inédit attribué au fameux mathématicien Ibn Ġāzī al-Miknāsī. Dans ce traité qui ne figure pas dans la liste connue de ses écrits, Ibn Ġāzī traite de l'astrologie des comètes suivant Ptolémée, et insére une critique attribuée à Iḫwān al-Ṣafā’, caractérisée par le rejet de l'idée des (...) comètes sidérales. On s'intéresse également aux classifications des comètes données par Ibn Ġāzī et un autre auteur peu connu ‘Alī al-Antākī. Ainsi, nous avons constaté que le contenu du De cometis du pseudo-Ptolémée est analogue au le texte d'Ibn Ġāzī, et pratiquement identique au texte d'al-Antākī. Par la suite, on analyse les observations de comètes réalisées du ixe jusqu’à la fin du xixe s. en Afrique du Nord et en Espagne musulmane, et consignées dans certains manuscrits d'astronomie et chroniques en langue arabe, mais qui n'ont jamais fait l'objet d’études approfondies. Les observations étudiées sont : les deux comètes X/975 P1 et X/998 D1 signalées par un auteur anonyme du xve s., l'observation de la comète X/1381 V1 rapportée par Ibn al- Qāḍī, le passage de la comète de Halley en 1456 rapporté par Muḥammad al-Zarkašī, la comète en C/1743 X1 observée par ‘Abd al-Razzāq ibn Ḥamadūš, et qui confirme sa structure en éventail, les deux observations de Ibn ‘Alī al-Šrīf al-Šalāṭī de la D/1770 L1, et surtout son témoignage concernant la C/1769 P1 où il a inséré une représentation graphique inédite en Occident musulman. (shrink)

Résumé Juste avant sa mort précoce il y a près de vingt ans, Edward Saïd nous a légué en signe de testament l’un de ses derniers ouvrages Humanisme et démocratie dans lequel il a étalé sa vision du monde futur et montré l’impact que doit avoir l’humanisme sur la conception démocratique de la praxis politique. Son projet consiste en effet à réhabiliter l’humanisme pris déjà pour cible par le courant structuraliste antihumaniste au milieu du vingtième siècle et à le réintégrer (...) dans le processus démocratique de l’action politique et sociale. Il s’agit en effet, comme il l’exprime, « d’une méditation approfondie sur les possibilités concrètes de l’humanisme comme pratique durable et non comme propriété, sur ce qu’une activité humaniste implique, plutôt qu’une énumération des qualités souhaitables chez un humaniste ». Tout en se référant aux événements politiques des dernières décennies et à ses expériences propres dans ce domaine, particulièrement son engagement pour la cause palestinienne, Edward Saïd considère que l’humanisme présente une base solide pour bâtir une société et une culture séculaires ouvertes au monde dominé actuellement par l’impérialisme et la mondialisation. Ce qui lui importe au fond le plus, « c’est l’humanisme en tant que praxis utile aux intellectuels qui veulent comprendre ce qu’ils font, à quoi rime leur engagement en tant que chercheurs, et qui veulent également relier ces principes au monde dans lequel ils vivent comme citoyens ». Ce n’est pas en vérité une recette toute prête à résoudre les crises ou les problèmes politiques actuels mais, à la lueur de la synthèse théorique et pratique qu’il opère dans cette œuvre, Saïd nous permet aujourd’hui de relire et comprendre les événements des révolutions arabes et d’en tirer les conséquences critiques, car son projet offre la possibilité de se pencher de manière critique sur le rôle public que doit jouer l’intellectuel dans la consolidation du processus démocratique. Il indique également comment on peut participer à l’élaboration d’une culture humaniste de coexistence et de partage à la place d’une culture d’exclusion, de terreur et de guerre telle qu’on est en train de vivre actuellement dans plusieurs pays du monde. Notre feuille de travail tend à rappeler le trajet qu’a suivi Edward Saïd dans son cursus théorique et pratique depuis la parution de son écrit l’Orientalisme tout en passant par Culture et impérialisme jusqu’à Humanisme et Démocratie, et de mettre en exergue les idées fortes de cette œuvre et leurs répercussions sur les études post-orientalistes et postcoloniales. (shrink)

Quarante ans après la mort de Jean-Paul Sartre et à un moment où les bouleversements liés à la mondialisation déchirent l'humanité, cet ouvrage rappelle son engagement de philosophe et d'intellectuel après la Seconde guerre mondiale. Sartre n'a eu de cesse de transformer le mode contemporain de penser notre existence individuelle et collective en plaçant la liberté au centre de l'agir humain. Son oeuvre littéraire et ses prises de position politiques contre le racisme et le colonialisme ont rappelé vigoureusement qu'il fallait (...) prendre parti pour la liberté, l'égalité et la fraternité. La relecture critique de son oeuvre permet aujourd'hui de découvrir tant l'ampleur de son engagement que son ambiguïté pour une culture fière d'être humaniste. (shrink)