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This study aims to investigate the organizational and individual factors that influence the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in Kuwait's public accounting sector.

The methodology of this study is a cross-sectional survey of 393 experienced accounting professionals, using partial least square structural equation modeling to analyze the data.

The findings show that organizational culture, regulatory support, perceived usefulness and ease of use have a direct positive effect on AI adoption, while perceived usefulness and ease of use also have an indirect positive effect through accounting profit and behavioral intention. However, the availability of resources, effective communication channels and competition pressure have an insignificant impact on AI adoption.

This study pioneers a structural framework to elucidate the perceived enhancement of accounting quality through AI system integration. Further, this research adds to the literature on AI adoption in accounting. This study also offers empirical evidence regarding how organizations in Kuwait's public accounting sector view AI systems in accounting.

Food safety is among the most important topics in the world. According to WHO guidelines, aflatoxins are one of the most hazardous food toxins. Therefore, their detection in food products seems crucial due to health problems. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the different types of biosensors in aflatoxin determination.

Traditional detection methods are time consuming and expensive. As fast and accurate detection is important in monitoring food contaminants, alternative analytical methods would be essential. Biosensors are the intelligent design of sensitive sensors for precise detection of toxins in a short time. Various biosensors are being applied for aflatoxins detection in food products with many advantages over the traditional methods.

Biosensors are cost-effective, stable and have possessed high selectivity, specificity and accuracy in aflatoxins detection. Applying biosensors has been increased recently, so biosensing methods (optical, electrochemical, piezoelectrical, immunosensors, surface plasmon resonance and calorimetric) are discussed along with their advantages in this article.

More efforts should be occurred to detect and decrease the aflatoxins by biosensors, and some traits like accuracy and selectivity would be the purpose of future projects. The combination of various techniques would also help in toxin detection issue in food products, so high efforts in this regard are also required for the upcoming years.

This article also reviews different types of biosensors simultaneously and explains their specificity for aflatoxin determination in different food products and also the future trends and requirements.

Limited research exists on the role of information access as a key success factor for rural entrepreneurs. The purpose of this study is to examine the importance of information access, among other inequality forms, in shaping entrepreneurial outcomes.

The authors used a qualitative, inductive research methodology. They conducted interviews with rural entrepreneurs and gained insights into the role of information access and basic tangible resources in shaping their ventures.

The authors identified two critical factors that impact rural entrepreneurs: inequalities in access to information and basic tangible resources. They found that inequalities in rural entrepreneurship are often interrelated, rather than isolated. The authors demonstrated that the relationship between entrepreneurship and inequality is not solely characterized by a positive or negative correlation but is a dynamic interplay where certain inequality forms may create barriers to opportunities for some individuals while creating opportunities for others.

The authors uncovered key barriers in rural entrepreneurship and constructed a roadmap to effectively address these challenges, providing valuable insights to policymakers and support initiatives and enabling the target of high-impact resources. This research supports efforts to provide rural entrepreneurs with equal opportunities to grow and succeed.

This research significantly contributes to the field by examining the complexities of entrepreneurship in emerging economies, with a particular focus on rural areas. The authors introduced a comprehensive conceptual model linking inequality and entrepreneurship, explored the challenges faced by rural entrepreneurs and offered strategic policy recommendations for development initiatives.

This study aims to descriptively identify and refine the role of emotional intelligence (EI) in the retail banking employee–customer contact context, and prescriptively use this knowledge to develop a framework for improving true customer service without excess organizational cost, in Lebanon.

The research adopts the classical interpretive/constructivist ontology and the interpretivism/constructivism epistemology, and it rests on a tripod of methodological foundations. The first leg is the theoretical work that sets the extant scientific ground for the empirical work to develop. The second incorporates the main (qualitative) empirical tools, i.e. 40 interviews with customers and HR managers (NVivo-analyzed), plus a critical incident technique study. The third includes the supportive tools of secondary data and an expert panel composed of industry and scholarly specialists.

EI was empirically shown to modulate the levels of customer satisfaction and to hold a critical role in the company–customer interface, albeit one that is currently and unjustly both undervalued and ineffectively controlled. The findings identify the key factors and exhibited behavioral attributes of EI within the customer service process, and they integrate all into a comprehensive framework of both scholarly and executive worth.

This study provides distinct theoretical elucidations and conceptualization that have identified and interrelated the relevant works on the subject; empirically refines the variables involved in the EI context of retail banking customer service; and culminates in the form of the proposed framework that incorporates and interrelates the findings into an empirical-data-based composition of both scholarly and executive orientation and worth.

This paper aims to introduce a new numerical approach based on the local weak form and the Petrov–Galerkin idea to numerically simulation of a predator–prey system with two-species, two chemicals and an additional chemotactic influence.

In the first proceeding, the space derivatives are discretized by using the direct meshless local Petrov–Galerkin method. This generates a nonlinear algebraic system of equations. The mentioned system is solved by using the Broyden’s method which this technique is not related to compute the Jacobian matrix.

This current work tries to bring forward a trustworthy and flexible numerical algorithm to simulate the system of predator–prey on the nonrectangular geometries.

The proposed numerical results confirm that the numerical procedure has acceptable results for the system of partial differential equations.

The purpose of this study was to determine the incidence and concentrations of aflatoxin M1 (AFM1) in raw buffalo milk samples obtained from four different seasons: winter, spring, summer and autumn in Sohag City, upper Egypt, and compared the determined findings against the several regulations regarding AFM1 that have been legislated by the European Union, US Food and Drug Administration and Egyptian Regulations.

Simultaneous determination of aflatoxins in raw buffalo milk samples trailed in different seasons, in Sohag City, Egypt. The aflatoxin that has been included in this survey is AFM1. Milk samples were obtained from February to October 2021. The enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay was used as a methodology technique.

The results of AFM1 presented the highest frequency of occurrence, with a detected incidence of 85.5% in winter samples, 64.2% in spring samples, 78.5% in summer samples and 78.5% in autumn samples. The positive samples showed concentration range levels of AFM1 between 0.0 and 0.9 µg/kg (12 samples) in winter samples, 0.03 and 1.2 µg/kg in spring milk samples (9 samples), 0.06 and 0.8 µg/kg in summer milk samples (11 samples) and lasted with 0.028 and 0.9 µg/kg in autumn milk samples (11 samples). The percentage of AFM1samples exceeded the maximum residues limit of Egyptian Standard Regulation 2010/7136 last updated, 78%, 57%, 100% and 64% in the four examined seasons, respectively.

The residue levels of AFM1 obtained in the investigated samples represented a serious concern about the health risk of consumers. Milk is introduced to the diet plan all over the people units especially the offspring ones as it is a complete food that contains a lot of important nutrients. So it is worth to set a regular schedule for monitoring and inspection of dairy products for aflatoxin residues.

This study models the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the performance of the private health-care sector in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries. This paper aims to address the economic, societal and sustainability of the health-care sector.

Data were collected from Bloomberg and the sample consists of 534 firm-year observations from 55 firms listed over 2010–2020. The authors apply panel data and control for the country and governance effects.

The authors found heterogeneous results regarding the three sub-sectors. The pandemic has a negative effect on the accounting and market performances of the “Pharmaceutical companies” and an insignificant impact on “Healthcare Management and Facilities Services.” Moreover, the impact of COVID-19 on health-care firms’ performance depends on the country’s economic classification and the degree of regulatory and governance frameworks.

Further studies may consider a larger sample and other regions. It is recommended to address the health-care sector's challenges to invest in new technologies such as “digital twin” and predictive and personalized medicine. It is worth testing model development theory and its effects on speeding up and designing models to ensure the proper functioning and developing mathematics to determine uncertainties in patient data and model predictions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is novel as it is unique in modeling the impact of COVID-19 on the health-care public companies in the MENA region. The findings pinpoint firms’ and countries’ heterogeneous impacts on financial and market performances.

Lebanon has faced one of the most severe financial and economic crises since the end of 2019. The practices of the Lebanese banks are blamed for dangerously exposing economic agents and precipitating the current financial collapse. This paper examines the patterns of manipulation of the 10 biggest banks before and after implementing the financial engineering mechanism.

The authors apply Benford law for the first and second positions of the reports of condition and income and four out of the six aspects of the CAMELS rating system (Capital Adequacy, Assets Quality, Management expertise, Earnings Strength, Liquidity and Sensitivity to the market) by excluding Management and Sensitivity. The deviations from BL frequencies are tested using Z-statistic and Chi-square tests.

Banks seem to have manipulated their Capital Adequacy, Liquidity and Assets Quality in the pre-financial engineering and considerably in the post-financial engineering periods. Fraudulent manipulations in the banking sector can distort depositors, shareholders and regulating authorities.

This study has many implications for governmental authorities, commercial banks, depositors, businesses, accounting and auditing firms, and policymakers. The Lebanese government needs to implement corrective fiscal and monetary policies and apply amendments to the bank secrecy and capital control law. The central bank should revamp its organizational structure, improve its disclosure practices and significantly reduce its ties to the government and the political elite.

The study findings suggest that the central bank should revamp its organizational structure, improve its disclosure practices and significantly reduce its ties to the government and the political elite.

The study is the first to examine the patterns of fraudulent manipulation in the Lebanese banking industry using Benford Law (BL).

The calculation and design of the structures are carried out with the aim of obtaining a sufficiently ductile behavior to allow the structure to undergo displacements, without risk of sudden breaks or loss of stability. The purpose of this study is to develop and validate a computer program (Thin beam2), allowing the modeling and simulation of the nonlinear behavior of reinforced concrete elements, on the other part, it is estimating the local and global ductility of the sections or elements constituting these structures.

The authors present two nonlinear analysis methods to carry out a parametric study of the factors influencing the local and global ductility of reinforced concrete structures. The first consists in evaluating the nonlinear behavior at the level of the cross-section of the reinforced concrete elements used in the elaborate Sectenol 1 program, it allows us to have the local ductility. The second, allows us to evaluate the nonlinear behavior of the element used in the modified thin beam 2 program, it allows us to estimate the overall ductility of the element.

The validation results of the Thin beam2 program are very satisfactory, by conferring the analytic and experimental results obtained by various researchers and the parametric study shows that each factor such as the compressive strength of the concrete has a favorable effect on ductility. Conversely, the normal compression force and the high resistance of tensioned reinforcements adversely affect ductility.

The reliability of the two programs lies in obtaining the local and global ductility of reinforced concrete structures because the calculation and design of the structures are carried out with the aim of obtaining ductile behavior without risk of breakage and instability.

This study aims to explore how the attitudes, motivations and practices of informal entrepreneurs, who choose service exclusion, prevent them from recognizing and taking advantage of transformative opportunities and embracing change.

The authors conducted a two-year study to explore five types of informal entrepreneurs (musicians, street vendors, artists, owners of informal smoke shops and street food vendors). The authors used semi-structured interviews and applied thematic analysis (ATA) of popular music and narratives to shed light on their attitudes, motivations and practices.

The study shows how potential service participants freely exclude themselves from services and transformative service initiatives, preventing them from realizing opportunities and embracing change that can improve their well-being. The study also demonstrates that to serve human needs fairly, service designers need to recognize that some actors require more attention and resources than others to achieve their potential.

The study challenges the notion that any population experiencing vulnerability wants help and chooses to participate in transformative service initiatives. Service participants can, in fact, exclude themselves from services and transformative service initiatives by free will, demonstrating that service exclusion is a multidirectional phenomenon, not unidirectional. Additionally, the paper analyzes narratives gathered from aesthetic expressions, using principles of ATA, introducing music thematic analysis as a research approach.