Sentiment analysis is a field of research that has a significant impact on today’s nations, politics and businesses. It is an algorithmic process to comprehend the opinions of a given subject based on the Natural Language Processing (NLP) methodologies. It has received much attention in recent years and is proven vital in various fields, e.g., online product reviews and social media analysis (Twitter, Facebook, etc.). This paper reports the outcome of sentiment analysis to investigate people’s acceptance of Pakatan Harapan, as the new Malaysian government, spearheaded by Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad and Dr. Wan Azizah, with an influence of Dato Seri Anwar Ibrahim. The objective is to classify tweets into three types of sentiments; positive, neutral and negative using Naïve Bayes method which is readily available in Python. The first step is tweets extraction for a month (March to April 2019) using search queries: {Pakatan Harapan, Mahathir, Anwar Ibrahim, Wan Azizah}. It is followed by tweets wrangling using NLP library and lastly output visualization in the form of a word cloud. A word cloud is a visual representation of text data with various font sizes depending on its probabilities. Final results showed that the tweets related to new government consist of neutral sentiment (41%) followed by positive sentiment (30%) and negative sentiment (29%). Malaysians do prefer the new government. However careful mitigation steps must be crafted to overcome controversial issues such as the ‘Rome Statute’ to avoid negative digital footprint, hence winning the Malaysians’ heart.
This paper proposes recommendations for probiotics in pediatric gastrointestinal diseases in the Asia-Pacific region. Evidence-based recommendations and randomized controlled trials in the region are included. Cultural aspects, health management issues and economic factors were also considered. Final recommendations were approved by utilizing a modified Delphi process and applying the Likert scale in an electronic voting process. Bacillus clausii was recommended as an adjunct treatment with oral rehydration solution for acute viral diarrhea. B. clausii may also be considered for prevention of antibiotic-associated diarrhea, Clostridium difficile-induced diarrhea, and as adjunct treatment of Helicobacter pylori. There is insufficient evidence for recommendations in other conditions. Despite a diversity of epidemiological, socioeconomical and health system conditions, similar recommendations currently apply to most Asia-Pacific countries. Ideally, these need to be validated with local randomized-controlled trials.
With globalization education has become a tradable service governed by the rules and regulations of GATS and worth trillions of dollars. International standards are rapidly being developed to facilitate cross border supply of services. In medical education, the WFME has produced International Guidelines on Quality in Medical Education which has a regional equivalent in the WHO Western Pacific Region, and the IIME has defined the minimum essential requirements of standards in medical education in seven core competences. Malaysia, having an explicit policy of making education a sector for revenue generation, has put in place regulatory frameworks and incentives to make the country a centre of educational excellence. Within the ambit of this national aspiration, medical education has grown phenomenally in the last decade. Standards and procedures for accreditation of medical schools in line with the world standards have been developed and implemented and policies are enforced to facilitate compliance to the standards. The ultimate goal is for medical schools to be self-accredited. In striving towards self-accreditation medical schools should be innovative in making changes in the three requirements of medical education. These are the intellectual and social imperatives and strategies for effective implementation.
The first case of COVID-19 was reported in Malaysia on the 25 January 2020. By the 20 January 2021, the cumulative numbers reported confirmed cases of COVID-19 had reached 169,379 including 630 deaths. Malaysia has been hit by three waves of COVID-19. This article reports on the three waves, the current situation and some of the possible factors associated. It outlines the need to reassess the overall situation, re-strategize the approach in order to contain the spread. The first COVID-19 wave lasted from 25 January to 16 February 2020, the second wave occurred between the 27 February 2020 and the 30 June 2020. The current third wave began on 8th September 2020.The sudden surge of cases in the third wave was mainly due to the two largest contributors, namely the Benteng Lahad Datu cluster in Sabah state and Kedah's Tembok cluster. The current situation is critical. The daily confirmed cases of COVID-19 continue to soar. The challengers faced by healthcare workers and other front liners is tremendous. Non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and cancer are the leading cause of death in Malaysia. A paradigm shift in the approach is required to ensure the sustainability of the normal healthcare services provided by the government especially for the lower income groups. There is also a need to expedite the tabling of Tobacco Control Bill in coming parliament session which is long overdue. H.E. the King of Malaysia has called on all Malaysians to put aside political, racial and religious differences and show the spirit of loyalty, humanitarianism and steadfastness in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.
The works of Malaysian poet, Wong Phui Nam's Against the Wilderness (vii) China bride and Variations on a Birthday Theme (iv) Kali, illustrate a bride and a mother in terrifying images. Wong's stylistic form of representing the female body through startling images of inversion and degradation evoke feelings of unease. The suspension between the known and the unknown causes a bewildering reality verging on madness. Interpreted through the lens of the carnivalesque, specifically, the grotesque body, festive language and parody, I attempt to reconstruct the psyche of the Chinese migrant which underpins these poems. The migrant who arrived in Malaya during the colonial era in the early nineteenth century faced political and social struggles in adapting to a new land. In the poems, the migrant juxtaposes his position to a female and uses the female body as a site of contention to intensify the torment of the psyche and to reflect the despair of the Chinese in Malaysia.
OBJECTIVE: A group of established aesthetic physicians sought to develop treatment guidelines for assessing Asian face morphologies that reflect accurate and current beauty standards across Asia. DESIGN: Physicians completed surveys, debated, and voted on their clinical strategies and developed an alternative simplified visual tool of assessment (SVAT) that discerns between country variations in genetic and ideal morphotypes. SETTING: Electronic and paper surveys were followed by consensus debates and voting. PARTICIPANTS: Established aesthetic physicians practicing regularly on Asian patients. MEAUSUREMENTS: A clinically applicable SVAT was developed, which considered facial index, mid-face projection, upper and lower face shape, submalar contour, nose length and dorsal height, eye shape and brow shape, proportion of lips-to-lower face and ratio of upper-to-lower lip, and chin shape. RESULTS: For facial shape change, physicians always assessed the horizontal thirds, facial symmetry, and lip-chin complex profile, and also analyzed overall face shapes and Ogee curves. Criteria for creating oval-shaped faces was also defined and included treating indications, such as loss of angularity and bilateral masseter muscle hypertrophy, narrow jawlines, and longer and wider foreheads. Critical differences and similarities in country-specific aesthetic preferences, treatment requests, and considerations or strategies were uncovered, including the inadequacy of assessing overall peripheral facial shapes. CONCLUSION: This consensus establishes the assessment and treatment criteria for achieving ideal shapes for Asian patients. Specific descriptors are affected by variations; therefore, we present the visual criteria for Asian facial morphotypes. We hope that physicians new to treating Asian patients can use this clinical information to improve their practice.
"This article examines some of the links between the phenomena of urban migration and squatter settlements in the Third World city. This will be done by demonstrating that both are outcomes of fundamental social and political forces that have operated on these societies. Migration and squatting are placed in a context of the historical processes that led to the uneven development of Malaysia. The article offers some explanation for the origin of the inequalities observed in spatial structures--in this case urban housing--by focusing on one of the contributory factors, namely migration."
Globally, more patients are intentionally travelling abroad as consumers for medical care. However, while scholars have begun to examine international medical travel's (IMT) impacts on the people and places that receive medical travellers, study of its impacts on medical travellers' home contexts has been negligible and largely speculative. While proponents praise IMT's potential to make home health systems more responsive to the needs of market-savvy healthcare consumers, critics identify it as a way to further de-politicise the satisfaction of healthcare needs. This article draws from work on political consumerism, health advocacy and social movements to argue for a reframing of IMT not as a 'one-off' statement about or an event external to struggles over access, rights and recognition within medical travellers' home health systems but rather as one of a range of critical forms of on-going engagement embedded within these struggles. To do this, the limited extant empirical work addressing domestic impacts of IMT is reviewed and a case study of Indonesian medical travel to Malaysia is presented. The case study material draws from 85 interviews undertaken in 2007-08 and 2012 with Indonesian and Malaysian respondents involved in IMT as care recipients, formal and informal care-providers, intermediaries, promoters and policy-makers. Evidence from the review and case study suggests that IMT may effect political and social change within medical travellers' home contexts at micro and macro levels by altering the perspectives, habits, expectations and accountability of, and complicity among, medical travellers, their families, communities, formal and informal intermediaries, and medical providers both within and beyond the container of the nation-state. Impacts are conditioned by the ideological foundations underpinning home political and social systems, the status of a medical traveller's ailment or therapy, and the existence of organised support for recognition and management of these in the home context.
Despite increasing calls to integrate and prioritise sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services in universal health coverage (UHC) processes, several SRH services have remained a low priority in countries' UHC plans. This study aims to understand the priority-setting process of SRH interventions in the context of UHC, drawing on the Malaysian experience. A realist evaluation framework was adopted to examine the priority-setting process for three SRH tracer interventions: pregnancy, safe delivery and post-natal care; gender-based violence (GBV) services; and abortion-related services. The study used a qualitative multi-method design, including a literature and document review, and 20 in-depth key informant interviews, to explore the context-mechanism-outcome configurations that influenced and explained the priority-setting process. Four key advocacy strategies were identified for the effective prioritisation of SRH services, namely: (1) generating public demand and social support, (2) linking SRH issues with public agendas or international commitments, (3) engaging champions that are internal and external to the public health sector, and (4) reframing SRH issues as public health issues. While these strategies successfully triggered mechanisms, such as mutual understanding and increased buy-in of policymakers to prioritise SRH services, the level and extent of prioritisation was affected by both inner and outer contextual factors, in particular the socio-cultural and political context. Priority-setting is a political decision-making process that reflects societal values and norms. Efforts to integrate SRH services in UHC processes need both to make technical arguments and to find strategies to overcome barriers related to societal values (including certain socio-cultural and religious norms). This is particularly important for sensitive SRH services, like GBV and safe abortion, and for certain populations.
Online voting is a trend that is gaining momentum in modern society. It has great potential to decrease organizational costs and increase voter turnout. It eliminates the need to print ballot papers or open polling stations-voters can vote from wherever there is an Internet connection. Despite these benefits, online voting solutions are viewed with a great deal of caution because they introduce new threats. A single vulnerability can lead to large-scale manipulations of votes. Electronic voting systems must be legitimate, accurate, safe, and convenient when used for elections. Nonetheless, adoption may be limited by potential problems associated with electronic voting systems. Blockchain technology came into the ground to overcome these issues and offers decentralized nodes for electronic voting and is used to produce electronic voting systems mainly because of their end-to-end verification advantages. This technology is a beautiful replacement for traditional electronic voting solutions with distributed, non-repudiation, and security protection characteristics. The following article gives an overview of electronic voting systems based on blockchain technology. The main goal of this analysis was to examine the current status of blockchain-based voting research and online voting systems and any related difficulties to predict future developments. This study provides a conceptual description of the intended blockchain-based electronic voting application and an introduction to the fundamental structure and characteristics of the blockchain in connection to electronic voting. As a consequence of this study, it was discovered that blockchain systems may help solve some of the issues that now plague election systems. On the other hand, the most often mentioned issues in blockchain applications are privacy protection and transaction speed. For a sustainable blockchain-based electronic voting system, the security of remote participation must be viable, and for scalability, transaction speed must be addressed. Due to these concerns, it was determined that the existing frameworks need to be improved to be utilized in voting systems.
New plantations can either cause deforestation by replacing natural forests or avoid this by using previously cleared areas. The extent of these two situations is contested in tropical biodiversity hotspots where objective data are limited. Here, we explore delays between deforestation and the establishment of industrial tree plantations on Borneo using satellite imagery. Between 1973 and 2015 an estimated 18.7 Mha of Borneo's old-growth forest were cleared (14.4 Mha and 4.2 Mha in Indonesian and Malaysian Borneo). Industrial plantations expanded by 9.1 Mha (7.8 Mha oil-palm; 1.3 Mha pulpwood). Approximately 7.0 Mha of the total plantation area in 2015 (9.2 Mha) were old-growth forest in 1973, of which 4.5-4.8 Mha (24-26% of Borneo-wide deforestation) were planted within five years of forest clearance (3.7-3.9 Mha oil-palm; 0.8-0.9 Mha pulpwood). This rapid within-five-year conversion has been greater in Malaysia than in Indonesia (57-60% versus 15-16%). In Indonesia, a higher proportion of oil-palm plantations was developed on already cleared degraded lands (a legacy of recurrent forest fires). However, rapid conversion of Indonesian forests to industrial plantations has increased steeply since 2005. We conclude that plantation industries have been the principle driver of deforestation in Malaysian Borneo over the last four decades. In contrast, their role in deforestation in Indonesian Borneo was less marked, but has been growing recently. We note caveats in interpreting these results and highlight the need for greater accountability in plantation development.
Ujian Alexander-Govern merupakan ujian kesamaan sukatan memusat yang teguh pada keadaan varians heterogen. Malangnya ujian ini tidak teguh pada keadaan data tidak normal. Adaptasi penganggar teguh seperti penganggar M satu langkah terubah suai (MOM) sebagai sukatan memusat menggantikan min didapati berupaya meningkatkan keteguhan ujian ini apabila dijalankan pada data terpencong. Penganggar ini mempunyai kelebihan berbanding min kerana tidak dipengaruhi oleh data yang tidak normal. Kajian ini mendapati bahawa ujian Alexander-Govern yang telah diubah suai ini berupaya mengawal Ralat Jenis I dengan baik pada data terpencong untuk semua keadaan. Kadar Ralat Jenis I yang dihasilkan kebanyakannya berada di dalam selang kriteria teguh ketat (0.045 hingga 0.055) pada aras keertian 0.05. Berbeza dengan kaedah pengujian asal yang mana pada kebanyakan keadaan, ujian teguh tetapi hanya dengan kriteria liberal (0.025 hingga 0.075), malahan ada kedaan yang mana ujian tidak teguh. Prestasi kaedah yang diubah suai ini juga setanding dengan keadah asal pada keadaan data normal. Kajian ini juga membandingkan kaedah Alexander Govern yang diubah suai dengan kaedah pengujian klasik seperti ujian-t dan ANO VA dan menyaksikan bahawa kaedah klasik tidak teguh pada keadaan varians heterogen.