Analysis of Drought Index in Sub-Urban Area Using Standard Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI)

The climate change interference and increase of surface temperature have contributed to the changes at the atmosphere that give a significant effect to the availability of water. Malaysia is one of the countries which effected with this event and had been suffered series of drought events in 1997, 1998, and 2014. These problems contribute to the disruption of country’s economic development and quality of life. The using of drought indices for analytical is important and it can estimate the drought affect hat are being experienced accurately. The Standard Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) is one of the methods in determination of drought indices. Thus, the objective of this paper is to determine the drought index using the Standard Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) for sub-urban river basin which is Pahang River basin. The rainfall and potential evapotranspiration (PET) data were obtained from Malaysian Meteorological Department (Met Malaysia) starting from 1988 until 2018 in determining the SPEI value for sub-urban river basin. RStudio software are being used to determine the value of SPEI for different timescale, which is 3, and 12-month. The significant value of SPEI for the river basin are influence by the population, topography, rainfall, and land use. Findings from this study are believed to the mitigation can be proposed to the related organization to take an action in designing, planning, and managing the water supply and to prevent the serious impact on the agricultural and country economic development as well

Analysis of Drought Index in Sub-Urban Area Using Standard Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI)

The climate change interference and increase of surface temperature have contributed to the changes at the atmosphere that give a significant effect to the availability of water. Malaysia is one of the countries which effected with this event and had been suffered series of drought events in 1997, 1998, and 2014. These problems contribute to the disruption of country’s economic development and quality of life. The using of drought indices for analytical is important and it can estimate the drought affect hat are being experienced accurately. The Standard Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) is one of the methods in determination of drought indices. Thus, the objective of this paper is to determine the drought index using the Standard Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) for sub-urban river basin which is Pahang River basin. The rainfall and potential evapotranspiration (PET) data were obtained from Malaysian Meteorological Department (Met Malaysia) starting from 1988 until 2018 in determining the SPEI value for sub-urban river basin. RStudio software are being used to determine the value of SPEI for different timescale, which is 3, and 12-month. The significant value of SPEI for the river basin are influence by the population, topography, rainfall, and land use. Findings from this study are believed to the mitigation can be proposed to the related organization to take an action in designing, planning, and managing the water supply and to prevent the serious impact on the agricultural and country economic development as well

Relationship Between Service Quality and Behavioral Intentions: the Mediating Effect of Customer Satisfaction

This study was undertaken to measure the relationship between service quality, customer satisfaction and behavioral intentions. A survey method was employed to collect data from customers who received treatments at army medical organizations in Malaysia. The outcomes of Smart-PLS path model analysis confirmed that relationship between service qualities features (tangible, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy) with customer satisfaction were positively and significantly correlated with behavioral intentions. This result demonstrates that effect of tangible, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy on behavioral intentions was mediated by customer satisfaction.DOI: 10.15408/etk.v16i2.553

Effect of Psychological Empowerment and Transformational Leadership on Organizational Commitment

According to recent literature that relates to organizational leadership, transformational leadership consists of three important elements: idealized influence, individual consideration and intellectual stimulation. Extant studies in this area highlighted that the ability of the leaders in implementing these transformational processes (to execute organizational functions) may have a significant impact on individual outcome especially organizational commitment. Although this relationship has been studied, the mediating role of transformational leadership has taken a less prominent role in organizational leadership model. Recent studies on organizational leadership have emphasized that transformational leadership has three important characteristics: idealized influence, individual consideration and intellectual stimulation. The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of empowerment in the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational commitment; by using 77 USAble questionnaires gathered from employees who worked at a foreign manufacturing company in Free Trade Zone, Malaysia. Results of SmartPLS path model analysis confirm that empowerment does act as an important mediating variable in the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational commitment in the organizational sample. In the succeeding sections, discussion, implications and conclusion are elaborated

Electromagnetic shielding effectiveness of epoxy/lanthanum iron garnet (LIG) nanocomposites at Ku-band frequency

The effect of shielding materials on electromagnetic (EM) waves has been studied. This research was carried out to investigate the shielding effectiveness of Epoxy/ Lanthanum Iron Garnet (LIG) nanocomposite. Lanthanum (III) Oxide (La2O3) and Iron (III) Oxide (Fe2O3) was used to form Lanthanum Iron Garnet (LIG) as a shielding material. The Lanthanum Iron Garnet nanoparticle as a filler was prepared using solid-state reaction methods and was sintered at 900 °C. The X-ray diffraction (XRD) pattern of Lanthanum Iron Garnet was observed using an X-ray diffractometer (Rigaku Miniflex) at a diffraction angle of 20° to 80°. The functional group was obtained by using Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR). Different compositions of Lanthanum Iron Garnet fillers (5 wt% and 10 wt%) were prepared and dispersed in epoxy resin to form Epoxy/ Lanthanum Iron Garnet nanocomposites. The morphology of the composites was determined using Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy (FESEM) and the samples were found inhomogeneous and homogeneous with filler particle size are about 15.95 nm and 15.45 nm for 5 wt% and 10 wt%, respectively. The Vector Network Analyzer (VNA) was utilized to measure a transmission coefficient and reflection at Ku-band frequency (12 to 18 GHz) to determine the shielding effectiveness of composites. From the result, the total shielding effectiveness of Epoxy/Lanthanum Iron Garnet (epoxy/LIG) nanocomposite was increased as the percentage of filler increases

Analysis on background subtraction for street surveillance

Background subtraction is a well-known technique used in computer vision applications. However, in public surveillance system, the utilization of background subtraction still new and far from being solved. Insufficient analysis of the background subtraction algorithms made the situation getting worse. The analysis of the commonly-used algorithms is presented in this paper. Experiments are conducted to quantitatively evaluate the performance of the algorithms by using three video sequences. The more suitable algorithm for various conditions is expected to be presented as the results in this paper

Review on the treatment method to improve the strengthening of recycled aggregate concrete

In order to explore the effective method of strengthening recycled concrete coarse aggregate，improve the effective utilization rate of recycled concrete, respond to the development requirements of green buildings and green building materials. By reading a large number of existing research methods and documents, the advantages and disadvantages of various strengthening methods for recycled concrete coarse aggregate in recent years are analyzed and summarized. The main strengthening methods of reclaimed coarse aggregate are physical strengthening, chemical strengthening and gradation strengthening through comparative analysis, more effective strengthening methods are not single, but a combination of two or more methods. Effectively combine gradation strengthening and chemical strengthening, can better improve the mechanical properties of recycled concrete coarse aggregate and durability. There is little research on the failure mechanism of transition zone and strengthening the interface transition zone of recycled concrete, and there are few literatures about harmless treatment of chemically strengthened slurry. These two aspects can be explored and analyzed in the future research

Moving object detection and classification using neuro-fuzzy approach

Public surveillance monitoring is rapidly finding its way into Intelligent Surveillance System. Street crime is increasing in recent years, which has demanded more reliable and intelligent public surveillance system. In this paper, the ability and the accuracy of an Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) was investigated for the classification of moving objects for street scene applications. The goal of this paper is to classify the moving objects prior to its communal attributes that emphasize on three major processes which are object detection, discriminative feature extraction, and classification of the target. The intended surveillance application would focus on street scene, therefore the target classes of interest are pedestrian, motorcyclist, and car. The adaptive network based on Neuro-fuzzy was independently developed for three output parameters, each of which constitute of three inputs and 27 Sugeno-rules. Extensive experimentation on significant features has been performed and the evaluation performance analysis has been quantitatively conducted on three street scene dataset, which differ in terms of background complexity. Experimental results over a public dataset and our own dataset demonstrate that the proposed technique achieves the performance of 93.1% correct classification for street scene with moving objects, with compared to the solely approaches of neural network or fuzzy

The effect of temperature on low temperature vacuum drying with induced nucleate boiling for stingless bees honey

Low Temperature Vacuum Drying (LTVD) with induced nucleate boiling is a new method that has been invented to reduce the water content of honey at a lower temperature without damaging the nutrient content of honey. The objective of this study is to investigate the effect of temperature on the dewatering rate by this LTVD method. The honey sample was placed in a pressure vessel and the air from the vessel was removed to create a vacuum condition. This experiment was conducted by using three different temperature which was 40 °C, 45 °C and 50 °C. The honey sample was dewatered for 5 minutes and each condition was repeated three times. The water content before and after the experiment was measured by a digital refractometer. Final water content decrease from 26.5 % to 25.1 % from temperature 40 °C to 50 °C. The dewatering rate increase from 0.14 %/min to 0.28 %/min when the temperature increase from 40 °C to 50 °C. The highest dewatering rate was obtained at 50 °C. However, considering the quality conservation of honey, it is suggested to apply a temperature of 45 °C to get a high dewatering rate while considering the quality of honey. It could be concluded that the temperature effect the final water content and dewatering rate of honey