Mesra Hotel: The challenges in making a dream into a reality

On March 14, 2016, Salina Johan, the owner, cum the general manager of Mesra Hotel, looked out of her office window in disbelief as the rain continued to pour.Thunder and lightning did not seem to bother her.It was already 7 pm and her mind continued to wander.She was thinking about her delayed hotel project. The contractor just called to inform that the project could not be continued unless she paid the progressive payment before the end of the month.Everything seemed perfect before this.Good economic conditions and terrific businesses made her confident that the hotel construction would be completed as planned.Unfortunately, now her life turned upside down.The hotel project had been beyond schedule.The contractor in charge kept asking for more money."I only have two weeks to prepare the money" sighed Salina Johan. The initial cost of building the hotel was RM950,000.Payments were made based on the progress of the work done.Until now, she had paid more than 60 percent of the costs involved. She was very confident that the project would run smoothly.In addition to the amount allocated for the building, she had also put aside RM50,000 for contingency expenses.Additionally, another RM500,000 for the hotel room furniture, lighting and other hotel necessaries.She had invested all her savings to the project.In fact, she had also used cash from her other businesses, a grocery store and a 15-room motel, for the project."Why things do not happen as what I've planned?" sighed Salina Johan in frustration. Everything had become expensive.The supplier charged her higher price for grocery products and hotel's necessaries; using the implementation of goods and services tax (GST), inflation and depreciation of Ringgit Malaysia as excuses; while the motel guests had decreased for about 40 percent.“What should I do? The income from the grocery store and motel has decreased, the price of products has increased and now I am running out of cash to pay the contractor for the hotel project" she said, feeling depressed as the rain was

Optimization sizing and economic analysis for stand alone photovoltaic system with hydrogen storage

Photovoltaic system has a high potential in the future, since it is clean, environmental friendly and has secure energy sources. However, the intermittence behavior in photovoltaic resource due to their strong dependency on climatic and meteorological conditions made the essential of having energy storage as a backup power supply. This paper proposes a design steps in obtaining the optimal sizing of standalone photovoltaic system, which able to meet a pre-determined power load requirement close to its point of utilization. The keys of system design were, primarily, to satisfy a specific load demand that depends on the power generated from installed PV system and also to maintain hydrogen storage state of charge. A case study was conducted using Kuala Lumpur's meteorological data and typical rural area daily load profile of 2.215kWh. An economic analysis on the system was performed in order to determine system feasibility. The finding shows that the levelized cost of energy for proposed system is RM 1.98/kWh. However, the results of the study showed that if the same configuration is using AGM battery as back-up supply, the system cost is lower and more economically viable, unless the cost of hydrogen storage technologies significantly reduced in the future

Carboxymethyl sago starch based hydrogel for drug delivery application

Chemically modified sago starch into carboxymethyl sago starch (CMSS) was done by using carboxymethylation reaction. The reaction times are varied to determine the optimum degree of substitution (DS) and reaction efficiency (RE). CMSS prepared via carboxymethylation for 3 hours show the highest DS and RE. The CMSS hydrogel was prepared using citric acid as cross-linker. The effects of the preparation condition of CMSS hydrogel such as the percentage of citric acid (w/w), cross-linking periods and cross-linking temperature on the gel fraction were investigated. The swelling study was carried out in distilled water, acidic, neutral and alkaline medium. The release behaviour of methylene blue (MB) as the drug model demonstrates that CMSS hydrogel has potential to be use in drug delivery applications

Socio-cultural influences in the composition of traditional Malay house compounds in rural Melaka

The traditional Malay living environment is planned carefully through harmonious interactions between man, nature and culture, which are translated into the home design and the surroundings. However, rapid urbanization and industrialization in Malaysia have transformed many traditional villages due to the insufficient numbers of studies done in the local context. This paper explores the existence of the local essences of the Malay landscape characteristics within rural traditional residential gardens through the study on preferences and influencing factors. Eighteen case studies were involved in the quantitative and qualitative inventory processes in understanding the local context. Ian McHarg’s Overlay analysis was adopted in this study to correlate the data by using the macro and micro analyses in order to understand the preferences and influences within the social and cultural contexts. Significant characteristics emerged as the essences of Malay socio-cultural identity, which have been identified as desperately in need of immediate acts of conservatio

Catatan media elektronik di Malaysia : suatu catatan sejarah ringkas / Mohd Nordin Abdul Rahman

Catatan ini secara ringkasnya meninjau perkembangan media elektronik di tanah air yang telah bermula dengan perkembangan radio dan penggunanya pada zaman Jepun. Setelah merdeka, media ini telah berkembang ke Sabah dan Sarawak sehingga bermulanya pula televisyen di Tanah Melayu. Kini, media elektronik televisyen telah berkembang ke arah penubuhan beberapa buah stesen televisyen yang baru. Media elektronik (radio dan televisyen) di Nusantara, rata-rata dimiliki oleh pemerintah. Walaupun kini terdapat milik swasta tetapi tetap tertakluk kepada kod atau garis panduan yang ditentukan oleh pemerintah. Meskipun milik pemerintah, rakyat berhak serta berpeluang memberikan kerjasama, melalui petugas yang menyelenggarakan isi kandungan persembahan, sama ada memberikan secara fizikal atau moral. Baik secara langsung atau tidak langsung. Menyebut milik pemerintah tentulah kedua alat elektronik ini amat penting, terkawal dan segala anggota kerjayanya tertakluk di bawah Perintah Am Kerajaan

Measurement of Nitrogen Fixed by Pueraria Phaseloides by N-15 Dilution Technique

A field experiment was carried out to determine the amount of nitrogen fixed by Pueraria phaseloides which was grown as a cover in the interrow of two-year old oil palms (Elaeis guineensis) in Seafield Estate, Batu Tiga, Selangor. The grasses that were found growing together with the legume cover were Paspalum congugatum and Ottochloa nodosa. Plots of 1 m by 1 m were randomly selected within the inter rows of the palms to give various mixtures of grass and legume. These plots were cut at 5 cm above the ground, and applied with 2 g Nlm 2 as ammonium sulphate enriched with 10% atom excess N-15. The regrowth of the legume and grass were harvested after three months, and analysed for total N and N-15 enrichment of the tissues. The. results show that there were significant differences in total N fixed by Peurana mixed with different percentages of grass. At 0 - 40% legume composition, the total N fixed by Peurana was 9.20 kg lha/3 months and increased to 22.34 and 37.80 kgIhal3 months at 41 - 60% and 61 - 80% respectively. Total N fixed at 81 - 100% legume composition was 22. 73 kg lha/3 months. The maximum amount of N fixed by Peuraria was when the mixture contained about 80% legume standing

A review of documentary film as authentic input in enhancing writing skills in ASL setting

The objectives of this paper are three folds: firstly, to highlight the studies which have used documentary film as authentic input in teaching second language skills, secondly to review the studies which have used documentary film in enhancing the second language writing skill, and lastly to offer ways to deal with documentary film in improving Arabic as a Second Language (ASL) writing skill. For this purpose, the paper analyses related literature review and previous studies in the field. The literature review shows the concern of second language practitioners as well as scholars in the field in using documentary film in the learning process. However, studies related to ASL are very scarce. There are four steps to be adopted for the purpose of linking documentary film input with enhancing writing skills output. The paper also highlights the strengths of documentary film as authentic input in language teaching as well as putting forth some technical advice and suggestions to improve the selection of teaching materials

A REVIEW OF DOCUMENTARY FILM AS AUTHENTIC INPUT IN ENHANCING WRITING SKILLS IN ASL SETTING

The objectives of this paper are three folds: firstly, to highlight the studies which have used documentary film as authentic input in teaching second language skills, secondly to review the studies which have used documentary film in enhancing the second language writing skill, and lastly to offer ways to deal with documentary film in improving Arabic as a Second Language (ASL) writing skill. For this purpose, the paper analyses related literature review and previous studies in the field. The literature review shows the concern of second language practitioners as well as scholars in the field in using documentary film in the learning process. However, studies related to ASL are very scarce. There are four steps to be adopted for the purpose of linking documentary film input with enhancing writing skills output. The paper also highlights the strengths of documentary film as authentic input in language teaching as well as putting forth some technical advice and suggestions to improve the selection of teaching materials. Keywords: TASL, teaching material, Arabic for specific purposes, Arabic writing skill, authentic inputCite as: Tg Abdul Rahman, T.A.F, Chik, A.R., Sahrir, M.S., & Nordin, M.S. (2017). A review of documentary film as authentic input in enhancing writing skills in ASL setting. Journal of Nusantara Studies, 2(1), 99-110.  http://dx.doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol2iss1pp99-11

Improving Accuracy and Performance of Customer Churn Prediction Using Feature Reduction Algorithms

Prediction of customer churn is one of the most essential activities in Customer Relationship Management (CRM). However, the state-of-the-art of the customer churn prediction approach only focuses on the classifier selection in improving the accuracy and performance of churn prediction, but rarely contemplate the feature reduction algorithms. Furthermore, there are numerous attributes that contribute to customer churn and it is crucial to determine the most substantial features in order to acquire the highest prediction accuracy and to improve the prediction performance. Feature reduction decreases the dimensionality of the information and may allow learning algorithms to function faster and more effectively and able to produce predictive models that deliver the highest rate of accuracy. In this research, we investigated and proposed two (2) different feature reduction algorithms which are Correlation based Feature Selection (CFS) and Information Gain (IG) and built classification models based on three 3) different classifiers, namely Bayes Net, Simple Logistic and Decision Table. Experimental results demonstrate that the performance of classifiers improves with the application of features reduction of the customer churn data set. A CFS feature reduction algorithm with the Decision Table classifier yields the highest accuracy of 92.08% and has the lowest RMSE of 0.2554. This study recommends the use of feature reduction algorithms in the context of CRM for churn prediction to improve accuracy and performance of customer churn prediction

Towards web-based management for rural farmer products in Ketengah (WeRules)

Advances in Internet technologies and related software applications increasingly drive a large number of businesses.The infrastructures provided by these information and communication technologies (ICT) reduce much of the cost of business implementations such as marketing strategies, advertising, transactions processing and collaborative information sharing. Based on these benefits, to achieve a better performance of marketing strategies this paper introduces a new approach to manage rural farmer products in Ketengah Terengganu by using a practical model of web-based portal (WeRules).Currently, the farmers encounter major problems to market their products to outside boundaries of their locations.As they lack of the necessary knowledge on marketing strategies, farmers either have to sell their products in a limited market boundary or capacity. The propose model composed a set of on-line functions such as farmer-products registration, buyers registration, web portal administration, brochure services, catalogue services and link and transactional services.Furthermore, the architecture of the web portal will also be demonstrated.The models identified may improve the quality, speed and realization of digital marketing as well as management for farmer community agriculture products in Ketengah Jaya. Finally, the future works and conclusion will be discussed