E-Commerce Via Mobile Banking: Contemporary Shariah Issues and Ways to Address Them

Purpose: This study aims to address some of the contemporary issues and challenges concerning mobile banking via Islamic banks, specifically in e-commerce and m-commerce.   Theoretical Framework: Mobile banking has made it possible for consumers to buy things online right from their pockets. With the availability of this sophisticated technology, online retailers have been swift in exploiting mobile banking for m-commerce to entice consumers into buying their products without serious considerations of ethical and halal aspects. Addressing these issues is important to address Muslim consumers’ reluctance to fully utilise the functions of mobile banking.   Methodology: This study utilises a qualitative research method using virtual library and internet research. The information retrieved mainly came from academic journals, books, reports, magazines, newspapers, and websites.   Findings: This study finds that most of the transactions in e-commerce are permissible in Islamic commercial law.   Research Implications: This paper outlines issues such as gharar (uncertainty) and deception in e-commerce transactions and ways to address them. Among the ways to address these issues are content moderation, whether by a third party body or consumers themselves, and artificial intelligence. Another way is by applying the principle of khiyar in terms of khiyar al aib (option of defect) and khiyar al ru’yah (option of inspection).   Originality/Value: By addressing these issues, it is believed that consumers will be more aware of their rights in the eyes of Islamic law, which some argue accords more justice to consumers

Are boards of directors in Malaysia ethnically diversified?

This paper examines the ethnic profile of board members in 235 newly listed Malaysian companies at the time of public offerings during the period 1999 to 2006. Using Blau’s (1977) index of heterogeneity, we find evidence of the existence of ethnic diversity among board members of these companies. Further analysis reveals that the boardrooms of our sample are dominated by the Chinese ethnic group, followed by Malays, Indians and others. Our results indirectly suggest that harmonious relations between board members from different racial and ethnic backgrounds exist in Malaysia

Credit card's possession and usage among staff in Universiti Utara Malaysia

The smooth and efficient operation of the payment system is a critical factor in a country’s economic growth process. Payment methods consist of cash, cheques, debit cards, credit cards, charge cards, electronic purse and credit transfer.This study focus on a credit card as the use of credit cards as a medium of exchange for commercial, business and social purchases is ubiquitous.Credit card market in Malaysia also shows an increasing trend in term of its volume of usage and number of card possessed.Credit card is a card whose holder has been granted a revolving credit line.In this study, our respondents come from staffs in Universiti Utara Malaysia.A survey method has been adopted in finding information on the respondents via questionnaires.A three-section questionnaire was developed to find the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of the respondents, the possession of credit card and the usage of credit card among them.All the information from 117 respondents then analyzed using the descriptive method to reflect respondent’s demographic and socioeconomic data together with their possession and usage of credit card

Factors influencing young adults’ debt in Malaysia

This study explores factors affecting debt level among young adults in Malaysia. Previous studies have linked material values, money management skills, and economic factors to credit card debt and student debt, but this study extends the previous research by investigating various forms of consumers’ debt in an emerging market where vulnerable youths are frequently bombarded with materialistic media messages that trigger their spending behaviour. In particular, variables such as pursuits of materialistic attitudes, money management attributes, and income level are examined in this study to see whether they are predictors of youth debt in Malaysia. A self-administered survey on 629 respondents centered around northern part of Malaysia was conducted based on convenience and judgmental sampling techniques. The findings suggest that money management skills and income level significantly influence the debt level of Malaysian young adults. Interestingly, materialism variable is insignificant, implying that young Malaysians represented in this sample do not possess materialistic attitude that lead to indebtness. The findings provide insights to the policy maker and the government to inculcate awareness of basic money management skills to ensure that the younger generation does not fall into the state of excessive debt which could lead to financial insolvency

NUWT: Jawi-specific Buckwalter corpus for Malays word tokenization

This paper describes the design and creation of a monolingual parallel corpus for the Malay language written in Jawi.This paper proposes a new corpus called the National University of Malaysia Word Tokenization (NUWT) corpora To the best of our knowledge, currently, there is no sufficiently comprehensive, well-designed standard corpus that is annotated and made available for the public for the Jawi script corpora.This corpus contains the Jawi-specific Buckwalter character code and can be used to evaluate the performance of word tokenization tasks, as well as further language processing.The objective of this work is to conform and standardize the corpora between similar characters in Jawi.It consists of three subcorporas with documents from different genres. The gathering and processing steps, as well as the definition of several evaluation tasks regarding the use of these corpora, are included in this paper.One of the important roles and fundamental tasks of the corpus, which is the tokenization, is also presented in this paper.The development of the Malay language tokenizer is based on the syntactic data compatibility of Malay words written in Jawi.A series of experiments were performed to validate the corpus and to fulfill the requirement of the Jawi script tokenizer with an average error rate of 0.020255.Based on this promising result, the token will be used for the disambiguation and unknown word resolution, such as out-of vocabulary (OOV) problem in the tagging process

Factors associated with demand for tobacco across Malaysia regions: participation and level of consumption

Tobacco consumption is a serious public health concern. To design a better tobacco regulation, it is important for policy makers to understand which group of population consumes or does not consume tobacco. The objective of thisstudy is to examine sociodemographic factors associated with consumption of tobacco among households in Malaysia. Data are obtained from the Malaysian Household Expenditure Survey (HES) 2014 (n = 10665). A double-hurdle model is utilised to analyse participation (extensive margin) and level (intensive margin) of consumption of tobacco. Age is negatively associated with the likelihood of consuming tobacco but positively associated with the amount consumed. Household size and households headed by males are positively correlated with participation and level decisions of tobacco consumption. Being married is associated with a reduced likelihood of tobacco consumption and the amount consumed. Households with less-educated heads are more likely to consume tobacco but consume less than households with well-educated heads. Being employed and alcohol consumption are positively associated with consumption likelihood and the amount consumed. In conclusion, sociodemographic factors play an important role in explaining participation and level decisions of tobacco. Intervention measures directed toward reducing tobacco consumption among households that have a high tendency to consume tobacco or consume more may hold promise

Maxenttagger for Malays Jawi POS-tags

Purpose - Malay is a major language of the Austronesian family spoken in many countries. Malay Jawi is lacking in annotated resources and tools. In addition, Part-of-speech (POS) ambiguity in Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a vague important phenomenon that needs to be solved immediately. Since POS is an important feature of the word, and is the link between the words and syntax, POS tagging (POST) needs to provide intermediate results showing superior performance to the next NLP tasks. POS ambiguity is a main problem in increasing POST performance. POST performance is often measured with accuracy and precision of a tag and it was considered critical to NLP application. Some of the standard package POS tagging provided in Natural Language ToolKit (NLTK) are Brill tagger, HMM tagger, and CRF Tagger. In this paper, POST Malay Jawi implemented NLP tools, NLTK for the state-of-the-art methods tagger; maximum entropy models. NLTK is used as the implementation tool for Jawi tagging, as syntax and semantics of the language is transparent, and it has the good functionality of NLP-operator. The tool also uses Python as the implementation language

Fusion noise-removal technique with modified dark-contrast algorithm for robust segmentation of acute leukemia cell images

Segmentation is the major area of interest in the field of image processing stage. In an automatic diagnosis of acute leukemia disease, the crucial process is to achieve the accurate segmentation of acute leukemia blood image. Generally, there are three requirements of image segmentation for medical purposes, namely; accuracy, robustness and effectiveness which have received considerable critical attention. As such, we propose a new (modified) dark contrast enhancement technique to enhance and automatically segment the acute leukemic cells. Subsequently, we used a fusion 7 × 7 median filter as well as the seeded region growing area extraction (SRGAE) algorithm to minimise the salt-and-pepper noise, apart from preserving the post-segmentation edge. As per the outcomes, the accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of this method were 91.02%, 83.68%, and 91.57% respectively

Sociodemographic And Lifestyle Determinants of Household Consumption of Sugar-Sweetened Food in Malaysia: A Short Communication

Diabetes has become a serious public health concern. The objective of the present study is to examine the sociodemographic and lifestyle factors associated with consumption of sugar-sweetened food among different age groups of households in Malaysia. A nationally representative data (n = 14838) is used for secondary analysis. Multiple regressions are used to examine the independent effects of sociodemographic and lifestyle factors on household expenditure on sugar-sweetened food. Analyse are stratified by age group. Households headed by older individuals tend to spend more on sugar-sweetened food than households headed by younger individuals. Household size is positively associated with household consumption of sugar-sweetened food. Bumiputera households spend more on sugar-sweetened food than non-Bumiputera households. Sociodemographic and lifestyle factors play an important role in determining consumption of sugar-sweetened food. Policy makers should pay special attention to the types of households that consume a lot of sugar-sweetened food

SMVS: A Web-based application for graphical visualization of malay text corpus

Information visualization is an interesting field nowadays. A good information visualization ensures distraction of misleading information is not included in the visualization. Many studies have been conducted on the Quranic corpus. The advancement technology coupled with modern approach of the computer technology can support the learners to understand Qur'an easily. Smart Malay Visualization System (SMVS) is a Python Flask framework web application which help users efficiently to produce the most basic data visualization from a big data. This web application displayed information from the state-of-the-art corpus which is identified through text. Agile development has been adapted to prepare this web application. Six phases of the methodology have been implemented in this study which are requirements, analysis, planning, design, implementation, testing, and deployment. Natural Language Processing approach has been used to visualize the data. Twenty most informative word from each verse has been visualized using Frequency Distribution and has been embedded to the web application. This work focuses on the Malay translation of the Qur'an corpus