Factors influencing online banking adoption: the case of academicians in Malaysian technical University network (MTUN)

Advancement of technology saw the evolution of how banking activities being conducted. Online banking for example, has created new approach of banking activities around the globe. This study was conducted to investigate and determine factors influencing online banking adoption among academicians in Malaysia. The selection of factors was developed based on extended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). TAM is the most widely applied model in the field of technology adoption. TAM investigates the adoption of technology based on its Perceived Usefulness and Perceived Ease of Use. Government support was included as an extension of the original model mainly because of its direct influence on the existence of the online banking itself. These factors were categorized as the independent variables in this study while online banking adoption as the dependent variable. Data for this research were collected from survey questionnaires, distributed to the target population of academicians at four higher education institutions listed under Malaysian Technical University Network (MTUN) in Malaysia. Data collected were analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) software. Correlation and regression technique was employed to study factors influencing online banking adoption among respondents, Results of the analysis shows that Perceived Usefulness and Perceived Ease of Use found to be significant factors while Government Support is found to be not a significant factor in influencing the adoption of online banking among the respondents. This study has shed new knowledge for the research in the area of technology adoption particularly in Malaysia

Online banking adoption among academicians at MTUN Universities in Malaysia

The advancement of technology especially the invention of the internet has changed the way organizations conduct their businesses today including banks especially in offering online banking services. Online banking services had been introduced in Malaysia in the year 2000. However, bank customers including academicians in Malaysia are influenced by issues of trust of online banking which also affects their level of adoption. In addition, there were only few studies which have combined Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Perceived Risk Theory (PRT) in understanding the adoption of online banking services in Malaysia. Therefore, this study intended to determine the factors influencing the adoption of online banking based on TAM (Perceived Usefulness, PU; Perceived Ease of Use, PEOU) as the base model, with Government Support (GS) being included as the additional variable. Furthermore, based on PRT, Trust is also included in this study. Variables influencing Trust (Perceived Security, PS; Perceived Risk, PR; Perceived Privacy, PP) are also assessed as well as the moderating influence of Trust on the relationship between PU, PEOU and GS, with the adoption of online banking in Malaysia. Respondents of this study were selected among academicians at Malaysian Technical Universities Network (MTUN) based on simple random sampling approach. Data was collected through the use of survey questionnaires. A total of 600 questionnaires were distributed while 253 of them were retrieved and usable for data analysis. Data analysis was carried out with the aid of the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). The main results of this study revealed that PU and PEOU have significant influence on the adoption of online banking while GS was found not to be significant. Besides, PS and PR were also found to be significant in influencing Trust, while PP was found to be non-significant. Finally, Trust is also found to have a moderating influence on the relationship between PU and GS with the adoption of online banking and not significant in moderating the relationship between PEOU with the adoption of online banking. These findings sheds some valuable information to be considered by banks in offering online banking services to their customers as well as additional new practical and informational understanding to current literature on the adoption of online banking services

Classification of cross site scripting web pages using machine learning techniques

There are many web application threats such as SQL injection and Cross Site Scripting. According to OWASP 2013 security report, Cross Site Scripting came in third place. Cross Site Scripting is an attack that targets web applications which lack security countermeasures against untrusted data that is provided by the user, and this attack take advantage of these web applications because they do not apply any input validation or output sanitization methods. Few previous works which used machine learning to detect cross site scripting attacks via classification of the web pages into two classes; malicious or benign. The previous works used too many features which considered as irrelevant and noise data because they do not have significant value on accuracy ratio which would cause complexity and decrease the performance of the classification process. They also used URL features which considered unnecessary since URL is considered as the entry point of the attack but cannot activate it since all the different kinds of cross site scripting get activated and run inside the HTML source code. In this study, we focus on how to implement feature selection through Information Gain (IG) to select the most significant features that lead to better performance and less execution time. The selected features used to classify the datasets with three different classifiers to test the performance of these features. The features used in this study were used by previous works, however with IG feature selection, we selected 14 features as the most significant features and the accuracy obtained by using these features was 95.78% compared to when using all features which was 93.11%. The recall was also improved from 88% when all features used to 92.33% when only using the 14 selected features

The Role of UNICEF's Intervention Programs in Improving Polio Coverage During the Humanitarian Crisis in Yemen

Even before the current crisis, the humanitarian situation in Yemen was suffering from many problems affecting the life’s standards of the population. The poor humanitarian situation in the country resulted from many factors such as political instability, multiple localized conflicts and chronic underdevelopment. All those factors led Yemen to become one of the poorest countries in the Middle East as the majority of its population lives below the poverty threshold. Moreover, when the armed conflict started in March 2015 the civilian infrastructures in the country impacted heavily including hospitals, schools, roads, bridges, public services such as water and sanitation services. In addition, the whole country started experiencing a great shortage of supplies such as food and medications which unfortunately caused mass risks to millions of people. Polio is one of the highest infectious viral diseases affecting young children, although it is considered a vaccine-preventable disease the children in Yemen still exposing to it. Therefore, fighting against polio was one of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) battles as children in Yemen were always exposed to the danger of being affected by that disease. This research aims to provide an assessment regarding the major interventions that UNICEF uses to deliver the immunization service including polio vaccines to children during the current humanitarian crisis in the country. The data collection was conducted by using a mixed-method to collect the data from 108 sampled households in addition to the structured interviews with the key informant personnel such as the health facilities management, immunization supervisors and UNICEF’s key personnel. The analysis of the results showed that UNICEF’s support has a positive impact on the immunization programme in Yemen. However, a point to be highlighted is that the coverage rate improves slowly due to several challenges faced by the population during the humanitarian crisis. The massive displaced movement due to the conflict caused more iv pressure on the health facilities which became unable to provide some areas with immunization services. The conflict also causes a decrease in the number of mobile immunization teams and national vaccination campaigns. In addition, it was found that many immunization interventions are carried out without developing a monitoring plan or training the health workers on the reporting system including data collection, analysis and calculating coverage rate or drop-out rate. This study proposed recommendations to resolve these challenges, the aid agencies such as UNICEF need to put some pressure on the conflict parties to facilitate the INGOs' work without delaying their humanitarian aids. Also, UNICEF needs to prioritize its financial and technical support to increase the number of health personnel in the expanded programme on immunization staff and mobile immunization members to be able to deliver the immunization services and handle the extra workload caused by the current humanitarian crisis. The study also recommends strengthening the immunization information system at all levels; monitoring, evaluation, on-site supervision and disease surveillance. The immunization programme should develop a detailed monitoring and evaluation plan to ensure acceptable standards of quality and effectiveness in the implemented immunization interventions

Effects of probiotics in patients with diabetes mellitus type 2 : study protocol for a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial

Background: Low grade chronic inflammation is observed in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). Endotoxin derived from gut bacteria may act as a potent inflammatory stimulant. Probiotics, which are believed to contain health promoting live microorganisms, may influence circulating endotoxin levels. Ingestion of live probiotic cultures may alter gut microbiota in a beneficial manner to reduce inflammation; no information is available whether or not they do so in patients with T2DM. Therefore, the aim of this study is to characterize the beneficial effects of probiotics on circulating endotoxin levels and other biomarkers related to systemic low-grade inflammation in patients with T2DM. Methods: One hundred and twenty consenting adult Saudi T2DM patients (naïve or newly diagnosed and without co-morbidities) will be enrolled in this clinical trial and randomized to receive daily placebo or probiotics (Ecologic®Barrier) for 26 weeks in a double-blind manner. Inflammatory and metabolic markers will be measured and fecal samples analyzed. Measurements/samples will be obtained at baseline and after 4, 8, 12/13 and 26 weeks of treatment. Discussion: It is expected that the probiotic product will induce beneficial changes in gut microbiota, reduce the systemic inflammatory state through altering systemic endotoxin levels and, as such, reduce the systemic inflammatory response observed in T2DM subjects. Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT0176551