Book review: Lee Kuan Yew: the grand master’s insights onChina, the United States, and the world

Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of modern Singapore and its prime minister from 1959 to 1990, has seem more than fifty years on the world stage. This book gathers key insights from interviews, speeches, and Lee’s voluminous published writings, and covers Lee’s assessment of China’s future, the impact of technology of our economy, and how Singapore successfully opened itself to the world. Of interest for those studying power, life, and culture in any part of the world, finds Stephen Minas

Guest Workers in the Underground Economy

Guest-worker programs have been providing rapidly growing economies with millions of temporary foreign workers over the last couple of decades. With the duration of stay strictly limited by program rules in most of the host countries and wages paid to guest workers often set at sub-market levels, many of the migrants choose to overstay and seek employment in the underground economy. This paper develops a general-equilibrium model that relates the flow of guest workers transiting to the underground economy to the rules of the program, enforcement measures of the host country and market conditions facing migrants at home and abroad

Confronting the challenge : Innovation in the regulation of broadcasting in Malta

This discussion paper attempts to provide an overview of certain aspects of the broadcasting sector in Malta. In particular, it focuses on clauses 118 and 119 of the Constitution of Malta as well as the Broadcasting Act, exploring possibilities for innovation in the sector while also taking into account the implications of rapid changes brought about by new technologies.N/

India poll 2013

This paper presents the results of a comprehensive survey on the attitudes of Indian citizens towards their future in the world. Key issues covered in the poll include: Indian perceptions of India\u27s economic future, India\u27s role in the world, domestic policy priorities, the challenge of corruption, and relations with other countries including China, the United States and Pakistan.The India Poll 2013 is a collaboration between the Lowy Institute for International Policy and the Australia India Institute. Key findings: 74% of Indians are optimistic about the prospects for India\u27s economy 80-85% of Indians see shortages of energy, food and water as big threats to their country\u27s security, while 94% consider Pakistan a threat, and 83% consider China a threat 95% of Indians support the democratic rights of fair trial, free expression and the right to vote 96% of Indians think corruption is holding India bac

Mapping Digital Media: Singapore

The Mapping Digital Media project examines the global opportunities and risks created by the transition from traditional to digital media. Covering 60 countries, the project examines how these changes affect the core democratic service that any media system should provide: news about political, economic, and social affairs.The city-state of Singapore, with its five million people, has fully embraced the technology and opportunities presented by digitization. Nearly nine out of ten households have broadband access. Mobile phone penetration is 150 percent (most are smartphones), and there are 340 TV and 46 local and foreign radio channels.However, the government—and the Singaporean people—are still highly sensitive to the belief that the stability of their multi-ethnic population (Chinese, Malays, Indians, and Eurasians) is fragile, stoked by the memory of two bloody race and religious clashes in the 1950s and 1960s. This has long shaped the role of the media as non-adversarial.So individuals, groups, and media professionals operate within a state-sanctioned sphere and observe what are called "OB markers" ("out of bounds" lines used in sports to denote an area beyond which play is not allowed). These are the boundaries of acceptable and permissible political public discussion, which opposition politicians view as a form of self-censorship. The government has recently acknowledged openly that those markers are shifting.Despite the advances that have been made in recent years, there is a need for further steps to encourage diversity in content across all media. In addition, though Singapore has escaped the decline in professional standards that has accompanied media liberalization in many other countries, more needs to be done to retain talent and to raise the standards and skills of the city-state's 70,000 media professionals, particularly as demand increases for new forms of content creation and distribution

Chlorophyll-a transformations associated with sinking diatoms during termination of a North Atlantic spring bloom

A research cruise in the North Atlantic during the annual diatom bloom provided an ideal platform to study chlorophyll-a (chl-a) transformations associated with a large scale diatom bloom and export below the photic zone. On one deployment, Lagrangian sediment traps captured a significant flux of aggregated diatom cells produced during the termination of the main bloom. We examined the distribution of chl-a transformation products in sinking particles from the sediment traps and in suspended particles from the water column using high-resolution HPLC with multistage mass spectrometry (LC-MSn). There was a dramatic change in the distribution of chl-a and its transformation products between the pre-sinking period, when the average chl-a concentration integrated over the upper 50 m was 68 ± 36 mg m-2, and the post-sinking period, when it was 30 ± 11 mg m-2. Before the diatom bloom left the euphotic zone (pre-sinking), suspended particles contained a considerably higher percentage of pheophorbide-a and other chl-a transformation products (27%) than during the post-sinking period (10%). Despite high levels of spatial variability in the chl-a concentration, and despite sampling from both within and outside a main bloom patch, the chl-a transformation products in suspended particles did not exhibit spatial variability. Sinking particles associated with the diatom bloom export had low POC: chl-a ratios (52 - 97), suggesting undegraded phytoplankton cells. However, the samples with especially low POC: chl-a ratios exhibited similar distributions of chl-a transformation products to those with a higher ratio. The proportions of demetalated and de-esterified transformation products increased with depth of suspended particles, although significant levels of these products were also found in the uppermost 20 m during the bloom. This suggests processes in both surface waters and through the water column led to the formation of these products

Multichannel equalisation for high-order spherical microphone arrays using beamformed channels

High-order spherical microphone arrays offer many practical benefits including relatively fine spatial resolution in all directions and rotation invariant processing using eigenbeams. Spatial filtering can reduce interference from noise and reverberation but in even moderately reverberant environments the beam pattern fails to suppress reverberation to a level adequate for typical applications. In this paper we investigate the feasibility of applying dereverberation by considering multiple beamformer outputs as channels to be dereverberated. In one realisation we process directly in the spherical harmonic domain where the beampatterns are mutually orthogonal. In a second realisation, which is not limited to spherical microphone arrays, beams are pointed in the direction of dominant reflections. Simulations demonstrate that in both cases reverberation is significantly reduced and, in the best case, clarity index is improved by 15 dB

Decision support continuum paradigm for cardiovascular disease: Towards personalized predictive models

Clinical decision making is a ubiquitous and frequent task physicians make in their daily clinical practice. Conventionally, physicians adopt a cognitive predictive modelling process (i.e. knowledge and experience learnt from past lecture, research, literature, patients, etc.) for anticipating or ascertaining clinical problems based on clinical risk factors that they deemed to be most salient. However, with the inundation of health data and the confounding characteristics of diseases, more effective clinical prediction approaches are required to address these challenges. Approximately a few century ago, the first major transformation of medical practice took place as science-based approaches emerged with compelling results. Now, in the 21st century, new advances in science will once again transform healthcare. Data science has been postulated as an important component in this healthcare reform and has received escalating interests for its potential for ‘personalizing’ medicine. The key advantages of having personalized medicine include, but not limited to, (1) more effective methods for disease prevention, management and treatment, (2) improved accuracy for clinical diagnosis and prognosis, (3) provide patient-oriented personal health plan, and (4) cost containment. In view of the paramount importance of personalized predictive models, this thesis proposes 2 novel learning algorithms (i.e. an immune-inspired algorithm called the Evolutionary Data-Conscious Artificial Immune Recognition System, and a neural-inspired algorithm called the Artificial Neural Cell System for classification) and 3 continuum-based paradigms (i.e. biological, time and age continuum) for enhancing clinical prediction. Cardiovascular disease has been selected as the disease under investigation as it is an epidemic and major health concern in today’s world. We believe that our work has a meaningful and significant impact to the development of future healthcare system and we look forward to the wide adoption of advanced medical technologies by all care centres in the near future.Open Acces

<Special Feature 1 "Islam as a Source of Contemporary Thought: New Advances and Outlooks">Halal Certifi cation as a Modern Application of Shariah Morality: An Analysis of Malaysian Halal Standard

Halal certification and its standards are said to be based on Islamic law. In Malaysia, however, the Halal certification system was formally introduced as a section in the governmental administration of industries in the year of 2000. The author has found that halal standards are based on Islamic law and federal laws as well as modern administrative rules. The author also analyses the Halal Showcase or Halal Expo. These observations indicate that halal standards form an important part of the industrial policies of the Malaysian government. Furthermore, this paper argues that halal issues are related to the Shariah morality awareness of the Muslim population. The emergence of this Shariah morality after the Islamic revival from the 1970's onward should be considered as the background for the appearance of Halal industrial policies and the Halal standards in Malaysia. As seen in the actual regulations, Islamic law itself is not a monolithic body of rules, but a complex mass of different levels of legal interpretations. Through these analyses, this paper provides a new insight for our understanding of Halal certification

The Malaysian Plot: Marcos, Sabah, and the Origins of Moro Secessionism

The Lahad Datu incident makes a re-examination of Philippine claim to Sabah compelling. During the twenty-year Marcosian rule, the Sabah claim somewhat defined Philippine foreign policy in its relation to Malaysia and to ASEAN. It was made complicated by the formation of a Moro rebellion. What is the role of Malaysia in the secessionist movement in the south? This article examines this in light of “old” and “new” sources, as it tries to explore a possible conspiracy between Malaysian leaders, the Liberal Party, and some Moro leaders behind the rebellion in Mindanao and Sulu, and its connection to Sabah.