Swiftlet
s
are small insectivorous birds which breed throughout Southeast Asia and
the South Pacific.
Among many swiftle
t species, only a few are notable to produce edible bird’s
nest
s
(EBN) from the secreted saliva during breeding seasons.
The taxonomy of swiftlet
s
remains one of the most controversial in the avian species due to the high similarity in
morphological charac
teristics among the species. Over the last few decades, researchers have
studied the taxonomy of swiftlet
s
based on the morphological
trade
, behavior, and genetic
traits
.
However, despite all the efforts,
the
swiftlet taxonomy remains unsolved.
The
EBN is one of
the
most expensive animal products
and frequently being referred
to
as the “
Caviar of the East
”.
The
EBN market value varies from
US
$1000.00 to
US
$10,000.00 per kilogram depend
ing
on
its grade, shape, type and origin.
Hence, bird’s nest harve
sting is considered a lucrative industry
in many countries in Southeast Asia.
However,
the
industry faced several challenges over the
decades such as the authenticity of the EBN, the quality assurance and the depletion of swiftlet
population. Furthermore,
there is limited scientific evidence regarding EBN’s medical benefits
as
claimed by manufacturers. This paper reviews the taxonomy of swiftlet
s
, its morphological
characteristics, the challenges currently encountered by the industry, and finally the
compos
ition and medical benefits of EBN.
Rapid progress of Information Communication Technology (ICT) will accelerate the distribution of
information from government to the people; however the monopoly of technology ICT services will
lead to inequality of information distribution in between of normal people and disabled people.
Embrace with the inequality of ICT distribution directly make the group of disabled people left behind
at the information age, or the situation also known as digital divide. Hence, this article attempts to
identify and examine the issues facing by disabled people in order to catch up the fast diffusion of ICT.
One of the most important lifetime distributions that is used for modelling and analysing data in clinical, life sciences and engineering is the Weibull distribution. The main objective of this paper was to determine the best estimator for the two-parameter Weibull distribution. The methods under consideration are the frequentist maximum likelihood estimator, least square regression estimator and the Bayesian estimator by using two loss functions, which are squared error and linear exponential. Lindley approximation is used to obtain the Bayes estimates. Comparisons are made through simulation study to determine the performance of these methods. Based on the results obtained from this simulation study the Bayesian approach used in estimating the Weibull parameters under linear exponential loss function is found to be superior as compared to the conventional maximum likelihood and least squared methods.
Life science ontologies play an important role in Semantic Web. Given the diversity in fish species and the associated wealth of information, it is imperative to develop an ontology capable of linking and integrating this information in an automated fashion. As such, we introduce the Fish Ontology (FO), an automated classification architecture of existing fish taxa which provides taxonomic information on unknown fish based on metadata restrictions. It is designed to support knowledge discovery, provide semantic annotation of fish and fisheries resources, data integration, and information retrieval. Automated classification for unknown specimens is a unique feature that currently does not appear to exist in other known ontologies. Examples of automated classification for major groups of fish are demonstrated, showing the inferred information by introducing several restrictions at the species or specimen level. The current version of FO has 1,830 classes, includes widely used fisheries terminology, and models major aspects of fish taxonomy, grouping, and character. With more than 30,000 known fish species globally, the FO will be an indispensable tool for fish scientists and other interested users.
Technology invention and implementation have resulted in long-term educational progress. This study aimed to identify the innovative strategies in determining the factors influencing in-service teachers' technology integration in China, focusing on the information and communication technology (ICT) integration. The sample consists of 685 in-service teachers. Four factors are found to influence in-service teachers' ICT integration: attitudes, self-efficacy, digital competence, and digital tools use. The results of the study utilizing the PLS-SEM approach demonstrated that all four factors have a substantial impact on in-service teachers' ICT integration and interact with each other. Meanwhile, attitudes, digital competence, and digital tools use have a mediating effect in this research. In addition, the study discussed the effects of gender, age, and teaching experience on influencing factors and ICT integration. This research provided beneficial insights for a successful design of instruction with ICT and contributed to innovative strategies for educational technology.
Fake and unethical publishers' activities are known by most of the readers of Science and Engineering Ethics. This letter tries to draw the readers' attention to the hidden side of some of these publishers' business. Here the black market of scholarly articles, which negatively affects the validity and reliability of research in higher education, as well as science and engineering, will be introduced.
Research has tremendously contributed to the developments in both practical and fundamental aspects of limb prosthetics. These advancements are reflected in scientific articles, particularly in the most cited papers. This article aimed to identify the 100 top-cited articles in the field of limb prosthetics and to investigate their main characteristics. Articles related to the field of limb prosthetics and published in the Web of Knowledge database of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) from the period of 1980 to 2012. The 100 most cited articles in limb prosthetics were selected based on the citation index report. All types of articles except for proceedings and letters were included in the study. The study design and level of evidence were determined using Sackett's initial rules of evidence. The level of evidence was categorized either as a systematic review or meta-analysis, randomized controlled trial, cohort study, case-control study, case series, expert opinion, or design and development. The top cited articles in prosthetics were published from 1980 to 2012 with a citation range of 11 to 90 times since publication. The mean citation rate was 24.43 (SD 16.7) times. Eighty-four percent of the articles were original publications and were most commonly prospective (76%) and case series studies (67%) that used human subjects (96%) providing level 4 evidence. Among the various fields, rehabilitation (47%), orthopedics (29%), and sport sciences (28%) were the most common fields of study. The study established that studies conducted in North America and were written in English had the highest citations. Top cited articles primarily dealt with lower limb prosthetics, specifically, on transtibial and transradial prosthetic limbs. Majority of the articles were experimental studies.
The number of small and medium-sized accommodations (SMSAs) has increased in Malaysia in tandem with the growth of the tourism industry worldwide. The states involved in this study were Terengganu, Kelantan and Pahang. The SMSAs in these states are rated using Orchid rating, namely 1-Orchid, 2-Orchid and 3-Orchid, generated by the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture Malaysia (MOTAC). This study applied the Resource-based View (RBV) theory to investigate four factors (marketing management, human resourcesmanagement, innovation capability management and information technology) assumed to be competitive capabilities that may influence accommodation’s performance. The objective of the study is to examine whether the four factors influence the performance of Orchid-rated accommodations located in the East Coast of West Malaysia. The results revealed that the four factors do not have any relationship with the accommodation’s performance. The analysis also singled out one argument of the director of SMSA that competitive capabilities are not important to their business. This argument coincides with the results of the analysis that the four factors are not significant with regards to the accommodations’ performance.
Background: Medical schools have long been concerned with establishing a suitable process of
admission. The criteria used to select students have traditionally focussed on high academic achievement. Method: The International Medical University (IMU) accepts students from a wide range of pre-university entry qualifications for admission into the medical programme. The criteria for the various pre-university entry qualifications used by the IMU were agreed and accepted by the IMU Academic Council (AC), which consist of deans of the IMU’s partner medical schools (PMS). In this study, the various entry qualifications were first grouped into five categories based on the educational pedagogy. Then, this was aligned with the entry qualification data of all students who had been admitted into the IMU medical programme for the period of December 1993 to March 2000. During this period 1,281 students were enrolled into the IMU medical programme. The relationship between the five groups of pre-university entry qualifications and the students’ academic achievement in three end-ofsemester (EOS) examinations namely EOS 1, EOS 3, and EOS 5 were analysed. Results: Students with better grades in their preuniversity examinations showed better performance in their EOS examinations, regardless of the subjects that they took at the pre-university level. Cluster analysis revealed that students who came in with certain preuniversity qualifications generally performed poorly than the more conventional qualifications. However,
after their first year in medical school, there were no significant differences in the clustering of the students. Conclusion: Students with better grades in their preuniversity examinations showed better performance in their EOS examinations, regardless of the science subjects that they took at the pre-university level.
The government’s science and technology (S&T) apparatus is now in active consultation to formulate the third national S&T policy (NSTP3) and I have been involved in some of these meetings and have benefitted from them. In an earlier article (New Straits Times, 9 July 2011, p. 18) I had briefly described the two previous policies and given some thought on what the essentials of the NSTP3 should be. I am now offering some further thoughts on the subject. (Copied from article).
This paper presents the solution to a calculation of the pH of a very dilute solution of a strong acid or base, taking into account the effect of the hydronium or hydroxyl ions generated from the ionisation of the strong acid or base on the ionisation of water, as a second very weak acid. To be solved successfully, this calculation involves the concepts of conservation of charge, pH and the application of the general solution to a quadratic equation. Such an exercise involves the application of skills in basic numeracy, and can provide a core of understanding that can prepare students for
many different sorts of calculations that represent reallife problems in the medical and biological sciences.A programme is presented in C++ which enables the work of students to be individualised so that each student in a class can work through a slightly different pH calculation, in such a way that a class supervisor can quickly check each student’s result for accuracy. This exercise is presented as a potential means of enabling students to undertake and master similar types of calculations involving simple or more complex equilibria.
Evaluating scientific quality of a journal is a notoriously cumbersome problem that so far no standard consensus. Preferably, scientific journals should be examined by real experts in the field and given scores on quality according to standard guidelines. Nevertheless, information scientists (i.e. scientometricians) have developed a diverse range of tools to examine scientific merits of scientific publications that mainly depending on various indexes that counting citations. The impact factor (IF) is commonly used to examine the visibility of a journal. It is the average number of citations a paper of a journal attracts in the two years following its publication.
Sports engineering can be considered as a new engineering discipline. It bridges the gap between two distinctive fields: sport science and engineering. Sports engineers are responsible in designing and building new equipment based on athlete's demands, besides measuring the performance of the athlete, the equipment itself, as well as their interaction. It is without doubt that engineering and technology have played an important role not only in improving the performance of an athlete, but also in making sports more entertaining and safe. This article provides an insight into how engineering and technology have affected sports in many ways transforming it from just a past time to more exciting and competitive world events. Apart from the impact of engineering in sports, the history of the application of engineering and technology in sports is also elaborated. Furthermore, research conducted in related fields worldwide is highlighted. A brief overview of sports engineering research in Malaysia is also presented.
The advancement of technology has allowed a variety of tools for employees and
managers, or knowledge workers, to choose as communication tools, especially for
managing project teams. Instead of communicating and updating project progress
through emails and short messaging system, social messaging (SM) applications, such
as WhatsAppTM, are the current daily choice among them. The over-utilisation of the
SM applications has given an opportunity for a research on project knowledge
retention within project team, since it becomes an addiction to create new groups each
time a new project team is formed. It is believed that project knowledge resides within
these virtual groups, and this paper looks into how project knowledge is managed by
analysing the communication patterns against a measurement metrics based on
personal knowledge management (PKM) theory called GUSC Model. The
communication patterns found existed in the SM application are qualitatively
identified and mapped against the PKM processes within, with weighted score
assigned to each process to quantitatively measure the overall project knowledge
management participation. The differences among the organisational communication
levels, namely upper and lower level communication levels, are analysed and the final
result of participation expectation on member of SM application groups is presented.
The outcome of this research recommends the future intervention on SM application
usage and the application of knowledge management concept in current
communication tool.
A study was conducted to examine the usage of application software and its development practices in Malaysia. The study has shown that the use of application software is greatly emphasized by organizations in their respective businesses. And for most organizations, the application software is supplied by a vendor or through in house development. For the software development practices, the deployment of a current technique and technology is still inadequate. Therefore, most of the existing information technology practitioners should be given additional training on the latest techniques of software development. Other aspect of improvement on software development practices is also discussed.
Satu kajian terhadap status pemakaian dan kegiatan pembangunan perisian gunaan di Malaysia telah dijalankan. Kajian ini menunjukkan yang aspek pemakaian sangat diberi penekanan oleh organisasi. Manakala proses perolehan perisian gunaan pula terbahagi secara setara di antara buat sendiri dengan menggunakan pihak ketiga. Namun begitu yang ketara ialah kadar penggunaan teknologi dan teknik terkini dalam kegiatan pembangunan perisian masih berkurangan. Oleh itu disarankan supaya aspek latihan teknik kakitangan teknologi maklumat organisasi perlu dipertingkatkan secara berterusan. Di samping itu kajian ini memaparkan beberapa aspek amalan pembangunan perisian yang boleh diperbaiki lagi.