To ascertain the level of knowledge among primary school teachers towards the management of traumatic dental injuries (TDIs) in school and to determine the preference among teachers regarding the education tools that can be used to increase awareness and knowledge among them. A total of 150 teachers from primary schools in three different districts were included in the study and they were given self-administered questionnaires to be filled. The validated questionnaire was distributed randomly in the selected schools. The questionnaire included two scenarios comprising of tooth fracture and avulsion. Questions regarding awareness and management of these scenarios were asked. All 150 participants answered the questionnaire; of these 74% were females 26% were males. 64% of the participants had received tertiary education. Although 70% of teachers had obtained first aid training, only 9.3% of them had received training regrading dental injuries. About 53% of participants knew the correct answer for the appropriate response to fractured tooth and only 35.3% managed to correctly answer the question related to appropriate response to an avulsed tooth. Only 38.7% knew about appropriate rinsing solution and a mere 4.7% were familiar with proper storage media. Even though the teachers have poor knowledge regarding management of dental injuries, it is reassuring to know that 93% of them are keen on further training and awareness. More educational programmes need to be introduced to empower the teachers with the relevant knowledge required to deal with dental emergencies.
Regression models are developed in various field of applications to help researchers to predict certain variables based on other predictor variables. The dependent variables in the regression model are estimated by a number of independent variables. Model utility test is a hypothesis testing procedure in regression to verify if there is a useful relationship between the dependent variable and the independent variable. The hypothesis testing procedure that involves p-value is commonly used in model utility test. A new technique that involves coefficient of determination R2 in model utility test is developed in this paper. The effectiveness of the model utility test in testing the significance of regression model is evaluated using simple linear regression model with the significance level α = 0.01, 0.025 and 0.05. The study in this paper shows that a regression model that is declared to be a significant model by using model utility test, however it fails to guarantee a strong linear relationship between the independent variable and dependent variable. Based on the evaluation presented in this paper, it is shown that the p-value approach in model utility test is not a good technique in evaluating the significance of a regression model. The results of this study could serve as a reference for other researchers applying regression analysis in their studies.
A series of Schiff base ligand, SALMPD, and its mono- and trinuclear Zn(II) metal complexes were synthesised from m-phenylenediamine and salicylaldehyde in alcoholic solution. The synthesis of ligand and mononuclear complex were synthesised using conventional condensation method, while the trinuclear complex was done using microwave-assisted synthesis method. The structure of each compound was elucidated by elemental analysis, infrared and ¹H NMR spectroscopy. The infrared spectrum of SALMPD shows a strong azomethine (C=N) band at 1621.62c m⁻¹, indicates the formation of the ligand. Upon complexation of the mononuclear complex, the C=N infrared band shifted and the disappearing of the phenolic hydrogen signal in ¹H NMR suggesting the chelation between Zinc(II) metal ion and ligand took place when azomethine and phenolic hydrogen deprotonated. The trinuclear complex, Zn3(SALMPD) obtained was consist of two moieties of mononuclear Zn₃(SALMPD), which act as ligands that chelating to the third Zn(II) metal ion through oxygen atom due to the shifting of M-O infrared band from 575.12-540.53cm⁻¹, which serves as a coordination site for the metal ion.
This study focused on the identification of pathogenic bacteria in raw water intake and after sand filtration for drinking water treatment plant during flood event in 2014. The samples was collected from the Lubok Buntar Water Treatment Plant (WTP) and processed through bacterial isolation using chocolate agar as a media. The isolation process conducted based on serial samples dilution and streaking method prior to DNA extraction. Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) extraction kit was used to get selected bacteria DNA and further analysis using Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test and electrophoresis to get DNA sequences. The Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) analysis was employed to identify the species of the isolated bacteria. As a result, Pantoeaagglomerans and Enterobacter sp. were found in raw and filtered water sample and indicating the same family types. It was concluded that bacteria of the same species were found before and after sand filtration and need to be removed by disinfectant process. The findings also indicated that all the physicochemical parameters measured were within the values prescribed by the Interim National Water Quality Standard (INWQS).
The new complexes [CuL2
(H2
O)2
] and [FeL2
(CH3
O)2
] in which L =
β-mangostin were synthesised and characterised. The structure of the
ligand, β-mangostin was confirmed using NMR and the purity of ligand
was determined using HPLC. Both Cu(II) and Fe(II) complexes were
prepared by reaction between the ligand and the acetate of the metals in
one-step reaction. The synthesised compounds have been characterised
using UV-Visible, FTIR and CHNS analyser. Ligand and metal complexes
were tested against bacteria to assess on their antimicrobial properties using
Minimum Inhibitory Concentrations (MICs) and Minimum Bactericidal
Concentrations (MBCs) method. The elemental analysis and spectra data
suggested octahedral geometry for both Cu(II) and Fe(II) complexes. The
IR spectroscopy revealed that the chelation of Cu2+ and Fe2+ ion occurred
with hydroxyl and carbonyl group at C9
and C1 respectively of β-mangostin.
Both Cu(II) and Fe(II) complexes showed stronger inhibition against
Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Proteus vulgaris, Klebsiella pneumoniae and
Salmonella pneumonia at concentration 900 mg/mL and Escherichia coli
at 450 mg/mL compared to the ligand itself
Heavy metal ions contamination has become more serious which is caused
by the releasing of toxic waterfrom industrial area and landfill that are very
harmful to all living organism especially human and can even cause death
if contaminated in small amount of heavy metal concentration. Currently,
peoples are using classic method namely electrochemical treatment,
chemical oxidation/reduction, chemical precipitation and reverse osmosis
to eliminate the metal ions from toxic water. Unfortunately, these methods
are costly and not environmentally friendly as compared to bioadsorption
method, where agricultural waste is used as biosorbent to remove heavy
metals. Two types of agricultural waste used in this research namely oil
palm mesocarp fiber (Elaesis guineensis sp.) (OPMF) and mangrove bark
(Rhizophora apiculate sp.) (MB) biomass. Through chemical treatment,
the removal efficiency was found to improve. The removal efficiency is
examined based on four specification namely dosage, of biosorbent to
adsorb fourtypes of metalsion explicitly nickel, lead, copper, and chromium.
The research has found that the removal efficiency of MB was lower than
OPMF; whereas, the multiple metals ions removal efficiency decreased in
the order of Pb2+ > Cu2+ > Ni2+ > Cr2+.
Elaeis oleifera serves as a source of genetic foundation in oil palm improvement programme, as it possess several interesting agronomic traits such as slow growth, higher oil unsaturation and disease resistance. Malaysian Palm Oil Board (MPOB) has developed a collection of simple sequence repeats (SSRs) from Elaeis oleifera genome (E. oleifera-gSSRs). A total of 21 polymoprhic SSR markers were evaluated in the attempt to assess the population structure of E. oleifera populations. The appropriate common ancestry (K) value was determined to be seven from the likelihood scores. The profile from STRUCTURE analysis indicates considerable sharing of genetic components among E. oleifera population with an exception for Population 01 from Columbia and Population 02 from Costa Rica. The present study provides information on population structure of MPOB E. oleifera collection via model-based method for germplasm conservation and utilisation in breeding programmes.
A study on abundance and diversity of Hymenoptera was conducted in Gunung Datuk, Rembau. Samplings were conducted from November 2014 to February 2015 using six Malaise traps. Three traps were placed at Site 1 at 700m height for high elevation and the remaining traps were placed at Site 2 at 200m height for low elevation. A total number of 221 Hymenopteran were collected which consist of nine families namely Ichneumonidae, Formicidae, Braconidae, Bethylidae, Evaniidae, Tiphiidae, Vespidae, Pompilidae and Apidae. In this study, 93 individuals were obtained from Site 1, comprising nine families and 43 morphospecies while 127 individuals were obtained from Site 2 with nine families and 45 morphospecies. Formicidae was the most dominant family collected from both sites with a total of 104 individuals while the least family recorded was Apidae with only one individual. Shannon’s Weiner Diversity Index (H’) showed Site 1 had the higher diversity value with H’ = 3.17 compared to Site 2 with value H’ = 3.12. For Evenness Index, Site 1 had higher value compared to Site 2 with E’ = 0.84 and E’ =0.82 respectively. Moreover, for Margalef Richness Index, Site 1 recorded R’ = 9.24 while site two recorded R’ = 9.08 which concluded that Site 1 had higher species richness compared to Site 2. Paired t-test showed that both sites had no significant difference with p>0.05. Overall study showed that the diversity and abundance of Hymenoptera in Gunung Datuk were low since the value of H’ is less than 3.50.
This study aimed to understand the problems faced by self-planning
travellers when they plan for a trip by searching travel information from
the Internet and propose a system to facilitate the self-planning travellers
to obtain useful travel information. An online survey was conducted via
social media to understand the problems, the search criteria and types of
content of travel itinerary needed in facilitating the planning. A total of
65 responses were collected. The results showed that there were too many
unrelated information on the Web and travellers were unsure of where to
start the search. Also, the result revealed that the search criteria needed to
generate travel itinerary were travel date, travel duration, travel country
and travel budget. Finally, flight schedule, hotel accommodation, sightseeing
places, travelling route and things to do were the information required by
travellers for their travel itineraries. Based on the results, a travel itinerary
recommendation system named eTravelPlanner is proposed.
Storytelling is considered as an interactive social arts that uses word and
gestures to reveal the elements and images of a story while engaging the
listener's imagination. Multimedia based digital storytelling learning
approach provides interesting, interactive, engaging and multisensory
learning experience to children. Children explore new experience and
scenarios as new stories are being told. This study concentrates on
determining the best combination of elements for designing effective digital
storytelling applications specifically for the usage of dyslexic children.
Dyslexic children are known to have a common learning difficulty that can
cause problems with reading, writing, spelling and comprehension. These
applications are design with the objective to help in improving dyslexic
children ability in readings and comprehensions. Four elements were
derived from extensive literature studies. The elements are multimedia
components, multi-sensory instructional approach, emotional design and
games design. The relationship among all the elements were determine
and described in details as it will be used to contribute to the design and
development of the application in further works. The strength of this study
is it models the combinations of technology, psychology and instructional
approach as a support components for developing an effective digital story
telling learning application for dyslexic children.
Text localisation determines the location of the text in an image. This process
is performed prior to text recognition. Localising text on shop signage is
a challenging task since the images of the shop signage consist of complex
background, and the text occurs in various font types, sizes, and colours.
Two popular texture features that have been applied to localise text in
scene images are a histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) and speeded up
robust features (SURF). A comparative study is conducted in this paper
to determine which is better with support vector machine (SVM) classifier.
The performance of SVM is influenced by its kernel function and another
comparative study is conducted to identify the best kernel function. The
experiments have been conducted using primary data collected by the
authors. Results indicate that HOG with quadratic kernel function localises
text for shop signage better than SURF.
This paper presents the development of a Graphical User Interface (GUI)
for calculating the sum of nail-fold (NF) and distal interphalangeal joint
(DIP) ratios for all ten fingers. The sum of NF:DIP ratios for all ten fingers
leads to the Digital Index (DI) that was used as the measure for identifying
and determining the presence of finger clubbing symptom. This GUI system
was developed to serve as a simple and user-friendly interface for clinicians
to calculate DI value of patients in a busy clinic practice. It is also equipped
with the capability to keep the patient’s past diagnosis medical check-up
data for future monitoring purposes. The result shows that the developed
system helps the clinicians to perform calculation of DI value and identify
the presence of finger clubbing in a very short time. The average time taken
to measure both NF and DIP circumferences using Finger Clubbing Meter,
and to compute DI values using Digital Index Evaluation System (DIES)
interface is 6:36 ± 1:24 minutes (Mean ± SD) .This system is expected to
contribute in detecting the finger clubbing problem at early stage of so the
treatment can be performed immediately.
In recent years, the utility grid system is more essential for the power
transmission and distribution system because it cannot produce harmful
gases or no discharge waste in the environment. PWM based phase
synchronous invert systems are generally utilised in the high efficiency
energy supply, long distance and higher power quality. The inverter output
voltage depends on the coupling transformer, input sources and invert
controllers. An inverter using a three leg IGBT has been designed for utility
grid and simulated by using MATLAB2014a. In this paper, both sides of
the LCL filters are used for removing the DC ripple current, reducing the
noise and synchronous the output phase between inverter and the utility
grid. The PWM controller has created pulse signal to control the inverter,
electronic switches and precisely synchronise with grid line frequency. In
this system, the input DC voltage 500V, switching frequency 1.65 kHz, grid
frequency 50Hz, 20 km feeder (resistance, inductance and capacitance per
unit length, which are 0.1153, 1.05e-3 and 11.33e-09 ohms/km) with 30MW
three phase load (active and inductive reactive power which are 30e6 W
and 2e6 var) and also a balanced utility grid load of star configuration (00,
1200, and 2400 degree) are considered in the design. On the other hand,
three phase transformer consists of three signal phase transformers, normal
power 100e3, magnetization resistance and inductance which are 500 pu and
416.67pu are considered in this design. The system conversion efficiency
is 99.94% and 99.96%, while the total THD are 0.06% on inverter side
and 0.04% on grid side.
'Doa' is derived from Arabic word which means that one asks for the
fulfillment or a need or the cure of sickness from him/her. Having to search
and retrieve the relevant ‘doa’ for one needs at any particular time is
beneficial. There are some search and retrieval applications that require
using the exact match of the keyword search with the words stored in the
database. This approach leads to the retrieval of insignificant results as
users need to know the exact word to be searched. Therefore, this project
allows for partial keyword search that utilises N-gram method for the
search and retrieval process. Moreover, various words may have similar
meaning thus to increase the accuracy of the retrieved result, this project
compares the dice and overlap coefficient algorithms to find the synonyms
of the searched word. The result produced indicates that overlap coefficient
perform better than dice coefficient.
Palm Oil Mill Effluent (POME) is the largest contributor of biomass from
the palm oil milling industry. Conventional method of POME treatment
using ponding system should be improved because of huge land resource
requirement. In this study, microbubbles technology was applied to
understand the recovery rate of residual oil from POME at different
operating temperatures. Temperature for POME was set at 27 oC, 30 oC and
50 oC to determine the microbubble size distributions and characteristics at
different POME temperature. At each temperature, the size of microbubbles
was measured based on six size range; 50 μm. The results showed that at different
temperatures, the microbubbles size distribution varies and the smallest
group of microbubbles (
This paper examines the temperature profile of a building material and also a
built space. The study directly examines the influence of solar radiation on
building material and the heat it generated and diffuses into the built space.
Two experiments are presented. The first look at a simple technique for
evaluating heat performance of a building material, and the second evaluates
the performance of a cross-ventilated built space with respect to solar radiation.
The construction industry should move from conventional construction method and adopt the
industrialisation concept, to increase productivity and deliver quality construction end products.
Industrialisation is the combination of a large market to divide into fractions the investment in
strategies and innovation, in return, of simplifying the production and, therefore, reducing the costs.
The introduction of Degree of Industrialisation by Roger-Bruno Richard is critical to the construction
industry. The five degrees of industrialisation are prefabrication, mechanisation, automation, robotics
and reproduction. Richard’s Degree of Industrialisation is in line with the Malaysian government’s
vision to be a developed nation by 2020, to push forward the use of innovative technologies in most
industries including the construction industry. The adoption of industrialisation and innovations in
the Malaysian construction industry has the potential to solve the current problems in the
construction industry. The problems are the inferior quality of products and processes, a poor site
working conditions, low construction productivity, high construction cost, relying on foreign workers
and lack of skill labours. The adoption of industrialisation and innovations promote sustainability in
the construction environment. The objectives of the study are to investigate whether the adoption of
industrialisation in the construction environment promotes sustainability and to identify the current
level of industrialisation of the Malaysian construction industry. The methodologies of the study are
semi-structure interview and observation. The Malaysian construction industry is ready to embrace
industrialisation in construction environment in limited areas and industrialisation promotes
sustainability in the construction environment.
An investigation on the properties of Tenun Pahang fabric performances using alternative yarns was conducted. The studies were made in order to evaluate whether the Tenun Pahang fabric could be produced economically and at the same time maintain the fabric quality. Traditional Tenun Pahang fabric uses silk for both warp and weft. For this project, two alternative yarns were used which were bamboo and modal, which were a little lower in cost compared to silk. These yarns were woven with two variations, one with the yarns as weft only while maintaining the silk warp and the other with both warp and weft using the alternative yarns. Four (4) physical testing and three (3) mechanical testing conducted on the fabric samples. The fabric samples were evaluated including weight, thickness, thread density, crease recovery angle, stiffness and drapability. The results show that modal/silk and bamboo silk fabrics are comparable in terms of stiffness and drapability, hence they have the potential to replace 100% silk Tenun Pahang.
Two Schiff bases, 3-(4-hydroxyphenylimino)-1,3-dihydroindol-2-one (OPI) and 3-(4-Chlorophenylimino)-1,3-dihydroindol-2-one
(CPI) were successfully synthesized through condensation
reactions giving yields of 82% and 63%, respectively. The compounds were characterized via
physical and spectroscopic techniques, namely elemental analysis (C, H, N), 1H and 13C Nuclear
Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy and
melting point. The corrosion inhibiting property of the Schiff bases on mild steel in 1 M HCl solution
was investigated by the weight loss (WL) measurements, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy
(EIS) and linear polarization resistance (LPR). The concentrations of the Schiff bases were varied
from 1 x 10-3 M to 1 x 10-5 M. The inhibition efficiencies obtained from all the methods employed were
in good agreement where the percentage of inhibition efficiencies increased with concentration. OPI
showed better inhibition efficiency than CPI with 91 % highest inhibition efficiency at 1 x 10-3 M
additive concentration. This is likely to be caused by the resonance donating effect due to the
presence of the hydroxyl group. The adsorption behaviour obeyed Langmuir isotherm for monolayer
formation.
Leachate (liquid pollutant), which is highly contaminated with organic matter and toxic substances is a major
problem that arised from landfill. Biological methods have proven to be effective to remove organic matters that are
abundant in leachate. This study is intended to compare the used of free mycelia and immobilized mycelia of the
white-rot fungi, Ganoderma australe for the removal of landfill leachate organics. The organics fraction of landfill
leachate was measured by biological oxygen demand (BOD5), and chemical oxygen demand (COD). The experiment
revealed that free mycelia of G. australe showed capability in removing leachate BOD5 but not COD. However, the
use of immobilized G. australe displayed the best result in the removal of BOD5 and COD leachate after 4 weeks of
treatment in flasks with 93.09% and 17.84% percentage removal of BOD5 and COD, respectively. Therefore, G.
australe can be considered potentially useful in the treatment of landfill leachate as they can help in removing BOD
and COD due to their biodegradative abilities.