Using a sample of adolescents from schools in Otago, New Zealand, associations between food outlets around schools and dietary quality were investigated. Food outlet environment data were derived using GIS data. Multivariate regression analysis results showed that outlet density, in an 800m buffer around schools, of cafes and restaurants, supermarkets and takeaways was associated with higher Diet Quality Index scores in boys, and distance to nearest outlet for convenience stores, cafes and restaurants and supermarkets with lower scores for girls. Effect sizes were small, suggesting that the food environment around schools plays a minor role in adolescent diet quality.
This study evaluates the impact of public export promotion programs (EPPs) among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Malaysia. Three indicators, level of awareness, frequency of use, and perception of usefulness, were examined according to a firm's export status. The global evaluation suggests that exporters are more frequent users of EPPs and perceive them to be more useful than non-exporters. Nonetheless, both groups demonstrate higher levels of awareness, are frequent users, and perceive the programs relating to export info/knowledge are more usefulness than programs relating to financial assistance. Further analysis also reveals that the frequency of use and the perception of usefulness for most programs are positively related to export experience, but not to export turnover. This study offers insights into the effectiveness of export programs for encouraging export initiation and expansion in an emerging economy.
Among the issues of medical exchanges, medicaments are more often encountered than medical issues, based on ancient Chinese literatures, early in the Han-Jin Dynasties, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei had exchanges with China, also in Sui-Tang Dynasties. In the Song-Yuan Dynasties, ancient Singapore and the Philippines also incorporated in exchanges of medicament and goods. In the Ming-Qing dynasties, these 6 Asian countries had even more close contact with China, especially in trades and medical exchanges among the masses, carried out in a large scale thus, promoting the advent and development of TCM in Asiana Regions.
Stock market, is one of the most important financial market which has a close relationship with a country's economy, due to which it is often called the barometer of the economy. Over the past 25 years, the stock markets have been affected by different global economic shocks. Various researchers have analyzed different aspects of these effects one by one, however, this study is an assessment of stock market interrelationship of emeriging Asian economies which include most of the East Asian, and Southeast Asian emerging economies with special focus on China for past decades during which different crisis occurred. We used Morgan Stanley capital international (MSCI) daily indices data for each stock market and compared Chinese stock market with the stock markets of India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. We analyzed the data through the individual wavelet power spectrum, cross-wavelet transform and wavelet coherence, to determine the correlation and volatility among the selected stock markets. These model have the power to analyze co-movements among these countries with respect to both frequency and time spaces. Our findings show that there are co-movement patterns of higher frequencies during the crises periods of 1997, 2008 and 2015. The dependency strength among the considered economies is noted to increase in the crisis periods, which implies increased short- and long-term benefits for the investors. From a financial point of view, it has been determined that the co-movement strength among the emerging economies of Asia may have an effect on the VaR (Value at Risk) levels of a multi-country portfolio. Furthermore, the stock market of China shows a high correlation with the other six Asian stock emerging markets in both high and low-frequency spectrums. The association of the south and east Asian stock market with Chinese stock markets show the interconnection of these economies with the economy of China since past two decades. These findings are useful for investors, portfolio managers and the policymaker around the globe.
Four formal rounds of Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) negotiations took place in 2010. They involved over 200 officials from Australia, the United States, New Zealand, Chile, Singapore, Brunei, Peru, Vietnam and Malaysia. Future negotiations officially are set to include three issues with public health and medicines policy implications for Australia and our region: ways to approach regulatory coherence and transparency; how to benefit multinational and small-medium enterprises; and multilateral investor-state dispute settlement. US-based multinational pharmaceutical companies are lobbying for TPPA provisions like those in the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement, which reduce government cost-effectiveness regulatory control of pharmaceuticals, threatening equitable access to medicines. They also advocate increased TPPA intellectual monopoly privilege protection, which will further limit the development of Australian generic medicine enterprises and restrict patient access to cheap, bioequivalent prescription drugs. Of particular concern is that proposed TPPA multilateral investor-state dispute settlement procedures would allow US corporations (as well as those of other TPPA nations) to obtain damages against Australian governments through international arbitral proceedings if their investments are impeded by Australian public health and environment protection legislation.
Recently. recommender systems have become a very crucial application in the online market and e-commerce as users are often astounded by choices and preferences and they need help finding what the best they are looking for. Recommender systems have proven to overcome information overload issues in the retrieval of information, but still suffer from persistent problems related to cold-start and data sparsity. On the flip side, sentiment analysis technique has been known in translating text and expressing user preferences. It is often used to help online businesses to observe customers' feedbacks on their products as well as try to understand customer needs and preferences. However, the current solution for embedding traditional sentiment analysis in recommender solutions seems to have limitations when involving multiple domains. Therefore, an issue called domain sensitivity should be addressed. In this paper, a sentiment-based model with contextual information for recommender system was proposed. A novel solution for domain sensitivity was proposed by applying a contextual information sentiment-based model for recommender systems. In evaluating the contributions of contextual information in sentiment-based recommendations, experiments were divided into standard rating model, standard sentiment model and contextual information model. Results showed that the proposed contextual information sentiment-based model illustrates better performance as compared to the traditional collaborative filtering approach.
The World Trade Organization's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) set global minimum standards for the protection of intellectual property, substantially increasing and expanding intellectual-property rights, and generated clear gains for the pharmaceutical industry and the developed world. The question of whether TRIPS generates gains for developing countries, in the form of increased exports, is addressed in this paper through consideration of the importance of pharmaceuticals in health-care trade, outlining the essential requirements, implications, and issues related to TRIPS, and TRIPS-plus, in which increased restrictions are imposed as part of bilateral free-trade agreements. TRIPS has not generated substantial gains for developing countries, but has further increased pharmaceutical trade in developed countries. The unequal trade between developed and developing countries (ie, exporting and importing high-value patented drugs, respectively) raises the issue of access to medicines, which is exacerbated by TRIPS-plus provisions, although many countries have not even enacted provision for TRIPS flexibilities. Therefore this paper focuses on options that are available to the health community for negotiation to their advantage under TRIPS, and within the presence of TRIPS-plus.
This paper describes the Malaysian car owners’ preference to purchase their car through car lease swap arrangement. Since owning a car nowadays is a necessity for most individuals, people will try to find the easiest and fastest way to own a car. Hence, the aim of this paper is to describe the issues of car lease swap businesses conducted in Malaysia, in particular to understand the reasons, business mechanism, and benefits of buying a car via this method. Due to limited empirical studies on car lease swap arrangement in Malaysia, the research adopted a qualitative approach, which utilises the snowball method to identify its participants. Interviews were conducted with relevant parties, who were directly involved in car lease swap business, which include the car lease dealers, the car owners and third parties (buyers). The findings indicate that the car lease dealers were the most to gain out of this business, meanwhile the car owners were worse off. Compared to the third parties, the car owners benefited from the convenient arrangement of the business. Nevertheless, due to its vague legality, it is possible to have negative implications on all parties involved. As such, future research should look at all parties involved in investigating the issues of this car lease swap business, such as relevant government agencies and all other stakeholders.
This study investigated restaurant customers' perceived importance of key factors in accordance with dining occasions and restaurant segments. Our investigation into restaurant selection and situational factors present two types of empirical evidence regarding customers' choice of restaurant. First, menu price was customers' top priority in restaurant selections for full-service, quick-casual, and quick-service restaurants. Second, restaurant customers rated the importance level of restaurant selection criteria differently according to eating-out occasions. The importance of menu price was greatest for both quick meal/convenience and social occasion, brand reputation was the most important factor for business necessity, and word-of-mouth recommendation was greatest for celebration.
The polymer solar cells also known as organic solar cells (OSCs) have drawn attention due to their cynosure in industrial manufacturing because of their promising properties such as low weight, highly flexible, and low-cost production. However, low η restricts the utilization of OSCs for potential applications such as low-cost energy harvesting devices. In this paper, OSCs structure based on a triple-junction tandem scheme is reported with three different absorber materials to enhance the absorption of photons which in turn improves the η, as well as its correlating performance parameters. The investigated structure gives the higher value of η = 14.33% with Jsc = 16.87 (mA/m2), Voc = 1.0 (V), and FF = 84.97% by utilizing a stack of three different absorber layers with different band energies. The proposed structure was tested under 1.5 (AM) with 1 sun (W/m2). The impact of the top, middle, and bottom subcells' thickness on η was analyzed with a terse to find the optimum thickness for three subcells to extract high η. The optimized structure was then tested with different electrode combinations, and the highest η was recorded with FTO/Ag. Moreover, the effect of upsurge temperature was also demonstrated on the investigated schematic, and it was observed that the upsurge temperature affects the photovoltaic (PV) parameters of the optimized cell and η decreases from 14.33% to 11.40% when the temperature of the device rises from 300 to 400 K.
The exposure of food to ionizing radiation is being progressively used in many countries to
inactivate food pathogens, to eradicate pests and to extend shelf-life of food. To ensure free
consumer choice, irradiated food will be labeled. The availability of a reliable method to detect
irradiated food is important to enforce legal controls on labeling requirements, ensure proper
distribution and increase consumer confidence. This paper reports on the preliminary application
of photostimulated luminescence technique (PSL) as a potential method to detect irradiated food
and perhaps be used for monitoring irradiated food on sale locally in the near future. Thus this
study will be beneficial and relevant for application of food irradiation towards improving food
safety and security in Malaysia.
Even though EDXRF analysis has major advantages in the analysis of stainless steel samples such as simultaneous determination of the minor elements, analysis can be done without sample preparation and non-destructive analysis, the matrix issue arised from the inter element interaction can make the the final quantitative result to be in accurate. The paper relates a comparative quantitative analysis using standard and standardless methods in the determination of these elements. Standard method was done by plotting regression calibration graphs of the interested elements using BCS certified stainless steel standards. Different calibration plots were developed based on the available certified standards and these stainless steel grades include low alloy steel, austentic, ferritic and high speed. The standardless method on the other hand uses a mathematical modelling with matrix effect correction derived from Lucas-Tooth and Price model. Further
improvement on the accuracy of the standardless method was done by inclusion of pure elements into the development of the model. Discrepancy tests were then carried out for these quantitative methods on different certified samples and the results show that the high speed method is most reliable for determining of Ni and the standardless method for Mn.
The own price, income and price of a substitute are the determinants of demand in the classical theory of consumer behavior. We used the theory to analyze the demand for local rice in Malaysia by using time series variables. We examined whether there is a long run relationship among the variables by using the unit root and cointegration tests. We then conducted the Granger causality, variance decomposition and impulse response function tests to examine their directions of causality as well as short term dynamics. The results show that there is a long run relationship among the variables and a unidirectional causality from price and income to demand. There are also lagged and short term dynamics among the variables.
The practice of development planning does not empower the local authority to prepare a development
plan, as planning and development control is under the jurisdiction of the State Planning Authority
(SPA). Rapid growth in the housing sector shows a positive indicator towards urbanization in Sarawak.
This study showed that the current centralised process is fair to all parties, for it ensures equilibrium in
all areas. Beside that, the study also found that there is some confusion in the roles played by the
involved parties. The study also identified few problems that often occur, among them complicated
procedures, slow approval process, bureaucracy, and risks in planning and marketing. However, the
practice of development planning is concerned with aspects quality and quantity so as not to burden the
purchaser. The state government, through the SPA, controls the price of housing to ensure equilibrium
and to avoid the occurrence of abandoned housing projects.
Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is one of the most attractive tools employed nowadays by environmental policy-makers as well as business decision-makers to ensure environmentally sustainable production/consumption of various goods/services. LCA is a systematic, rigorous, and standardized approach aimed at quantifying resources consumed/depleted, pollutants released, and the related environmental and health impacts through the course of consumption and production of goods/service. Algal fuels are no exception and their environmental sustainability could be well scrutinized using the LCA methodology. In line with that, this chapter is devoted to present guidelines on the technical aspects of LCA application in algal fuels while elaborating on major standards used, i.e., ISO 14040 and 14044 standards. Overall, LCA practitioners as well as technical experts dealing with algal fuels in both the public and private sectors could be the main target audience for these guidelines.
Investment funds are growing in Malaysia since people are more knowledgeable about
investments and aware of investment opportunities in order to secure good savings for the
future. These investments include unit trusts, gold, fixed deposits, stock prices and property
investments. It is essential for individuals or organisations to know the value of future share
prices of their investment portfolio in order to predict the profit or loss in the future. The
purpose of study is to identify the best duration of historical data and forecast days in order
to accurately forecast share prices. The study uses Geometric Brownian Motion model in
forecasting share prices of companies in Bursa Malaysia. This study focused on 40 listed
companies in Bursa Malaysia from the top gainers list. It was found that 65 historical days
could forecast the share prices for 21 days accurately.