Factors influencing intention to use Islamic credit cards in Selangor

Islamic credit card (ICC) has been widely used for personal consumption. The use of ICC is gaining prominence as an alternative to conventional credit card as the concept and operations are permissible by the shariah. The paper aims to determine factors influencing intention to use ICC based on three variables namely benefits, fair charges and religious motivation. A quantitative methodology was conducted via a survey of 102 respondents in the state of Selangor. The results indicated that benefits and religious motivations have significant influence on the intention to use Islamic credit cards. Hence, practitioners should incorporate the two factors in their marketing efforts to promote ICC. The academician can benefit by conducting further research on this eminence body of knowledge

Concept discovery innovations in law enforcement: a perspective.

In the past decades, the amount of information available to law enforcement agencies has increased significantly. Most of this information is in textual form, however analyses have mainly focused on the structured data. In this paper, we give an overview of the concept discovery projects at the Amsterdam-Amstelland police where Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is being used as text mining instrument. FCA is combined with statistical techniques such as Hidden Markov Models (HMM) and Emergent Self Organizing Maps (ESOM). The combination of this concept discovery and refinement technique with statistical techniques for analyzing high-dimensional data not only resulted in new insights but often in actual improvements of the investigation procedures.Formal concept analysis; Intelligence led policing; Knowledge discovery;

Formally analysing the concepts of domestic violence.

The types of police inquiries performed these days are incredibly diverse. Often data processing architectures are not suited to cope with this diversity since most of the case data is still stored as unstructured text. In this paper Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is showcased for its exploratory data analysis capabilities in discovering domestic violence intelligence from a dataset of unstructured police reports filed with the regional police Amsterdam-Amstelland in the Netherlands. From this data analysis it is shown that FCA can be a powerful instrument to operationally improve policing practice. For one, it is shown that the definition of domestic violence employed by the police is not always as clear as it should be, making it hard to use it effectively for classification purposes. In addition, this paper presents newly discovered knowledge for automatically classifying certain cases as either domestic or non-domestic violence is. Moreover, it provides practical advice for detecting incorrect classifications performed by police officers. A final aspect to be discussed is the problems encountered because of the sometimes unstructured way of working of police officers. The added value of this paper resides in both using FCA for exploratory data analysis, as well as with the application of FCA for the detection of domestic violence.Formal concept analysis (FCA); Domestic violence; Knowledge discovery in databases; Text mining; Exploratory data analysis; Knowledge enrichment; Concept discovery;

Reconocimiento de los derechos de pueblos indígenas en el sudeste asiático

[ES] Esta investigación ha tratado de explicar por qué en algunos lugares se reconocen los derechos de los PI y en otros lugares no. El reconocimiento de estos derechos se ha extendido sobre todo a partir de los años ochenta, fruto de un cambio de paradigma a nivel internacional por el cual se pasó de un enfoque asimilacionista y paternalista a un enfoque multicultural de reconocimiento de la diversidad. Sin embargo la extensión del reconocimiento se ha producido de forma desigual. Los países de América Latina y de la esfera anglosajona han sido los pioneros en esta materia, y también por ese motivo existe una literatura mucho más abundante sobre estos casos. El problema es que se ha producido un sesgo geográfico y/o cultural a la hora de teorizar sobre Pueblos Indígenas, puesto que estos dos conjuntos de países comparten una serie de condiciones que por sí mismas podrían explicar cierto nivel de reconocimiento de derechos. No obstante, existen otras realidades contextuales, distintas a los patrones históricos de estas dos áreas, para las cuales apenas existe teoría sobre el reconocimiento de derechos de los Pueblos Indígenas. Ante este vacío teórico, la presente tesis ha querido poner a prueba teorías ya existentes, pero ésta vez aplicadas al área el Sudeste Asiático. Esta región dada su gran variabilidad interna permite testar las condiciones que en América Latina y los países anglosajones se comportan como constantes. Para ello se ha construido el índice IRELDI que partiendo también de un esquema multicultural, busca recoger información relevante sobre el reconocimiento de estos derechos en diferentes realidades contextuales. Éste índice ha permitido discriminar entre Estados que reconocen los derechos de los PI (Camboya, Filipinas, Indonesia, Sabah y Sarawak) y Estados que no los reconocen (Laos, Malasia Peninsular, Myanmar, Tailandia, Timor Oriental y Vietnam), así como establecer gradaciones más finas dentro de los dos conjuntos, que permiten distinguir entre Estados que reconocen más y Estados que reconocen menos. También se han analizado a través de un análisis en dos fases y de la lógica de conjuntos difusos dentro del Análisis Cualitativo Comparado ciertas condiciones que pueden estar detrás del reconocimiento. Estas condiciones son de dos tipos: estructurales o remotas y coyunturales o próximas. Las primeras son poco susceptibles de variar en el tiempo, y hacen referencia a la tradición colonial de pluralismo legal, la forma de ciudadanía, el peso de la población indígena y la extensión del cristianismo. Las segundas varían a lo largo del tiempo, y hacen referencia a la Estructura de Oportunidades Políticas (contexto internacional, apertura del Estado al régimen de derechos de los PI y democracia) y a la resonancia de los movimientos indígenas

Indigenous Peoples’ Access to Justice, Including Truth and Reconciliation Processes

Access to justice is a demand that increasingly underlies the major debates of our time, whether in the area of economic, political and social development, peace, human rights or culture. The issue is a bridge between the past, the present and the future as it refers to the entrenched marginalization of and systemic discrimination against members or groups of society. Access to justice is the stepping stone to address or remedy injustice. No area of human endeavor has given more meaning and normative content to the concept of access to justice than the human rights area, including the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The solid international human rights framework developed in the past seventy years and the ways it is being given depth through the interpretation of international human rights bodies is providing access to justice with the normative contours and specificity needed for practical implementation. Thus, access to justice is at once a substantive and a procedural right. Major elements such as the rule of law, the right to truth and other fundamental normative frameworks have added new weight to access to justice. It is within this rich human rights context that the effort to breathe new life to the struggle of Indigenous Peoples’ access to justice should be viewed. The mobilization around access to justice is shedding light on the concrete steps that can be followed for Indigenous Peoples’ access to justice to materialize. The articles contributed to this book are written by Indigenous Peoples, researchers, policy-makers, practitioners and academics, capturing a variety of international and national perspectives, based both on theory and on the analysis of specific cases and examples. Most of the articles have been contributed by participants to the International Expert Seminar on Indigenous Peoples’ Access to Justice, including Truth and Reconciliation Processes held from February 27th to March 1st, 2013 at Columbia University in New York, co-hosted by the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and held to inform the UN Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’ Study on Access to Justice in the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In addition, the co-editors found it useful to invite some authors who were not present at the Seminar to make their contributions. Thus, this volume captures a variety of subjects that fall under the broad topic of “Indigenous Peoples’ Access to Justice.

Exploring the resource recovery potentials of municipal solid waste: a review of solid wastes composting in developing countries

Population explosion, high urbanization and improved living standards have induced rapid changes in quantities and materiacompositions of solid waste generation globally. Until recently solid waste disposal in landfills and open dump sites waconsidered more economical and it is the most widely used methods in developing countries. Hence the potentials in the othealternative methods such as the resource recovery and recycling and their integration into waste management have been scarcelassessed. However, the ever growing challenges posed by the rapidly increasing quantities and compositions of solid wastes ideveloping countries led to the searching for alternative waste disposal methods. In this regard the paper presented an assessmenof the resource potentials of municipal solid waste materials arising from cities in developing countries as a strategy fosustainable solid waste management. Using published data on solid waste composition the paper has identified that there is higpotentials of composting in the solid waste stream from cities in developing countries. In conclusion, it recommended the recoverof organic waste material and papers for composting and the recycling of plastic, metals, textiles and others to explore their resource recovery potentials. This will largely reduce the ultimate quantities of solid waste for disposal and lower the operatincosts. This strategy will achieve sustainable waste management in developing countries. It is hoped that the paper has provided useful guide for wastes management policy decisions in developing countries

Evaluating question answering over linked data

Lopez V, Unger C, Cimiano P, Motta E. Evaluating question answering over linked data. Web Semantics Science Services And Agents On The World Wide Web. 2013;21:3-13.The availability of large amounts of open, distributed, and structured semantic data on the web has no precedent in the history of computer science. In recent years, there have been important advances in semantic search and question answering over RDF data. In particular, natural language interfaces to online semantic data have the advantage that they can exploit the expressive power of Semantic Web data models and query languages, while at the same time hiding their complexity from the user. However, despite the increasing interest in this area, there are no evaluations so far that systematically evaluate this kind of systems, in contrast to traditional question answering and search interfaces to document spaces. To address this gap, we have set up a series of evaluation challenges for question answering over linked data. The main goal of the challenge was to get insight into the strengths, capabilities, and current shortcomings of question answering systems as interfaces to query linked data sources, as well as benchmarking how these interaction paradigms can deal with the fact that the amount of RDF data available on the web is very large and heterogeneous with respect to the vocabularies and schemas used. Here, we report on the results from the first and second of such evaluation campaigns. We also discuss how the second evaluation addressed some of the issues and limitations which arose from the first one, as well as the open issues to be addressed in future competitions. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

A Review of Norms and Normative Multiagent Systems

Norms and normative multiagent systems have become the subjects of interest for many researchers. Such interest is caused by the need for agents to exploit the norms in enhancing their performance in a community. The term norm is used to characterize the behaviours of community members. The concept of normative multiagent systems is used to facilitate collaboration and coordination among social groups of agents. Many researches have been conducted on norms that investigate the fundamental concepts, definitions, classification, and types of norms and normative multiagent systems including normative architectures and normative processes. However, very few researches have been found to comprehensively study and analyze the literature in advancing the current state of norms and normative multiagent systems. Consequently, this paper attempts to present the current state of research on norms and normative multiagent systems and propose a norm’s life cycle model based on the review of the literature. Subsequently, this paper highlights the significant areas for future work