Framing the diplomatic ties between Kazakhstan and Malaysia

This study aims at investigating the prevalence news frames in the reporting of Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s official visit to Malaysia in April 2012. Both quantitative and qualitative content analysis are employed to explore the way Kazakhstani and Malaysian newspapers cover the event. In terms of quantitative analysis, the focus is on the five generic frames, namely, attribution of responsibility, human interest, conflict, morality and economic consequences. While the qualitative analysis is conducted to examine how’s the issue being defined, what are the possible causes of the problem identified, moral judgement made and the supply of remedies to the problem. A total of 134 units of analysis from two major Malaysian English newspapers and two major Kazakhstani newspapers, surrounding the period of the President’s two-day visit, were collected and content analysed. The results reveal that, although the occasion was mainly about boosting economic ties between Kazakhstan and Malaysia, responsibility frame was most highlighted, while economic consequences frame was placed in the last spot. Among the four newspapers, both The Star and New Strait Times were found to be significantly more interested than Sovereign Kazakhstan and Kazakhstani Truth in using the economic consequences frame. However, results of qualitative content analysis indicate that these four newspapers were sharing the same mind to portray their respective government as capable and determined in nation development

Investigating news framing: a comparative study of media coverage on contemporary education issues in Malaysia

This study examines how the Malay and Chinese language newspapers in Malaysia portray the issue of Teaching and Learning Science and Mathematics in English. Comparison was made between the two different language newspapers particularly in terms of framing by analyzing their coverage on two major incidents related to the issue – rally against the policy of Teaching and Learning Science and Mathematics in English (PPSMI), and the announcement of the Upholding the Malay Language, Strengthening Command of English policy (MBMMBI). This study uses the five generic frames developed by Semetko & Valkenburg (2000) as the basis of comparison. The five frames are responsibility, conflict, moral, economic consequences and human interest frame. The results suggest a congruency in the two different language newspapers reporting, which mainly emphasize the ‘conflict’ nature of the issue. However, a major difference in frame choice observed between the Malay and Chinese language newspapers in their reports of MBMMBI. While the prior significantly reduced the intensity of conflict frame in its reports on MBMMBI as compared to PPSMI, the latter maintain the same level of intensity for both the events

Application of Deep Neural Network in Estimation of the Weld Bead Parameters

We present a deep learning approach to estimation of the bead parameters in welding tasks. Our model is based on a four-hidden-layer neural network architecture. More specifically, the first three hidden layers of this architecture utilize Sigmoid function to produce their respective intermediate outputs. On the other hand, the last hidden layer uses a linear transformation to generate the final output of this architecture. This transforms our deep network architecture from a classifier to a non-linear regression model. We compare the performance of our deep network with a selected number of results in the literature to show a considerable improvement in reducing the errors in estimation of these values. Furthermore, we show its scalability on estimating the weld bead parameters with same level of accuracy on combination of datasets that pertain to different welding techniques. This is a nontrivial result that is counter-intuitive to the general belief in this field of research.Comment: Disapproval of funding organizatio

Pembingkaian isu pendidikan di Malaysia oleh sumber berita dan akhbar Cina

Perkembangan sistem pendidikan merupakan penanda kepada pembangunan negara dan pada masa yang sama, ia juga bergerak seiring dengan isu perpaduan negara ini. Cabaran utama yang dihadapi oleh Malaysia dalam perjalanannya menjadi sebuah negara maju, merupakan penentuan bahasa yang wajar digunakan di dalam sistem pendidikan negara ini. Imbangan di antara memartabatkan bahasa kebangsaan, kepada pengukuhan bahasa global dan juga pengekalan bahasa ibunda unik setiap kaum di negara ini bukanlah mudah. Polisi pendidikan dalam pengajaran dan pembelajaran subjek sains dan matematik dalam bahasa Inggeris pada semua peringkat sekolah rendah pada 2003, mendapat bantahan yang kuat daripada masyarakat Cina. Kerajaan Malaysia akhirnya menerima cadangan untuk mengajar kedua-dua subjek ini dalam dua bahasa di sekolah jenis kebangsaan Cina. Kajian ini melakukan refleksi kepada laporan empat akhbar Cina pada ketika itu untuk memahami pembingkaian yang digunakan oleh akhbar-akhbar tersebut dalam melaporkan isu pendidikan negara. Kedua-dua media dan juga sumber berita juga memainkan peranan di dalam pembingkaian isu pendidikan. Berpaksikan lima bingkai generik Semetko & Valkenburg (2000) iaitu bingkai tanggungjawab, bingkai konflik, bingkai moral, bingkai akibat ekonomi dan bingkai kemanusiaan, kajian ini melakukan analisis kandungan kuantiatif terhadap empat akhbar utama tempatan Cina di Malaysia. Sebanyak 157 berita diperolehi dengan 1,218 unit analisis. Kajian mendapati bahawa parti kerajaan cuba mempromosikan bingkai tanggungjawab, sementara editorial mementingkan bingkai minat manusia dan pihak pembangkang melihat bingkai moral