Understanding the relationship between construction costs and selling prices with specific reference to housing projects in the Klang Valley

Debates on the continuous and upward increase in the selling price of houses continue unabated. However, very little has been said about construction costs of houses, such as, is the trend in construction costs of houses moving in similar patterns too? One way to understand it is through comparing and contrasting the construction costs index against the selling price index of housing projects. This paper reports on a study into historic cost and price movements of newly built housing in the Klang Valley. The study endeavors to seek answers to the following key questions: (i) is the construction costs of houses moves in similar pattern with the movement of house prices; and (ii) is construction costs of houses moves in similar pattern with the movement in the economy? The methodology for the study starts with the identification of appropriate indices for both construction costs and selling prices of houses in the Klang Valley. While there is house price index published by NAPIC but there is no published data on construction costs price index of houses. In addition, the NAPIC house price index does not differentiate between the selling prices of new or second-hand houses. Consequently, the study constructed its own construction costs and house price indices for new houses. Data on construction costs of houses (all types), was acquired via a questionnaire survey among quantity surveyors and contractors. In the case of selling prices of houses, data was acquired from newspaper archives and websites with records on advertisements for new houses. The period covered in the study is for the duration from 2005 to 2013. The constructed indices were validated via discussions with experts representing the Malaysian housing sector and academics. The outcome of the study, in terms of the relationship between construction costs and selling prices of houses, the indices suggested that construction costs moves upwards along similar pattern with that of the selling prices but the upward movement in costs is relatively much higher than that of prices. In addition, in terms of the relationship between construction costs of houses and the economy (GDP) the indices suggested that construction costs moves upwards along similar pattern with that of the economy but the upward movement in costs is relatively higher than that of the economy. Furthermore, the indices suggested that selling prices of houses moves in tandem with the economy. The paper concludes that there is positive relationship in terms of upward movements between construction costs, selling prices and the economy during periods of economic growth

Security versus Reliability Analysis of Opportunistic Relaying

Physical-layer security is emerging as a promising paradigm of securing wireless communications against eavesdropping between legitimate users, when the main link spanning from source to destination has better propagation conditions than the wiretap link from source to eavesdropper. In this paper, we identify and analyze the tradeoffs between the security and reliability of wireless communications in the presence of eavesdropping attacks. Typically, the reliability of the main link can be improved by increasing the source's transmit power (or decreasing its date rate) to reduce the outage probability, which unfortunately increases the risk that an eavesdropper succeeds in intercepting the source message through the wiretap link, since the outage probability of the wiretap link also decreases when a higher transmit power (or lower date rate) is used. We characterize the security-reliability tradeoffs (SRT) of conventional direct transmission from source to destination in the presence of an eavesdropper, where the security and reliability are quantified in terms of the intercept probability by an eavesdropper and the outage probability experienced at the destination, respectively. In order to improve the SRT, we then propose opportunistic relay selection (ORS) and quantify the attainable SRT improvement upon increasing the number of relays. It is shown that given the maximum tolerable intercept probability, the outage probability of our ORS scheme approaches zero for $N \to \infty$, where $N$ is the number of relays. Conversely, given the maximum tolerable outage probability, the intercept probability of our ORS scheme tends to zero for $N \to \infty$.Comment: 9 pages. IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 201

Unveiling the practices and challenges of professional learning community in a Malaysia Chinese School

Professional learning community (PLC) studies in the Asian Chinese nations remain scarce despite the emerging interest in the practice of PLC beyond the Western context. This study attempts to provide an understanding of the practices of PLC and challenges in implementing PLC in a Malaysian Chinese culture–dominated secondary school. This qualitative study used a phenomenological constructivist approach as a strategy of inquiry. Semi-structured interview data were collected from six middle leaders and ordinary teachers in a national-type Chinese secondary school in the northern region. Findings informed three existing PLC practices at the school level, namely, (a) peer coaching, (b) sharing of personal practices, and (c) professional development courses. However, the practice of PLC encounters various challenges, including excessive workload, teachers’ passive attitudes, unsupportive conditions in the school, poor execution of PLC by the school community, and a vague understanding of PLC. Interestingly, this study identified two uncovered challenges hindering the development of PLC: misconception about PLC and lack of supervision from the authority. Implications and future studies are presented

Unveiling the practices and challenges of professional learning community in a Malaysian Chinese Secondary School

Professional learning community (PLC) studies in the Asian Chinese nations remain scarce despite the emerging interest in the practice of PLC beyond the Western context. This study attempts to provide an understanding of the practices of PLC and challenges in implementing PLC in a Malaysian Chinese culture–dominated secondary school. This qualitative study used a phenomenological constructivist approach as a strategy of inquiry. Semi-structured interview data were collected from six middle leaders and ordinary teachers in a national-type Chinese secondary school in the northern region. Findings informed three existing PLC practices at the school level, namely, (a) peer coaching, (b) sharing of personal practices, and (c) professional development courses. However, the practice of PLC encounters various challenges, including excessive workload, teachers’ passive attitudes, unsupportive conditions in the school, poor execution of PLC by the school community, and a vague understanding of PLC. Interestingly, this study identified two uncovered challenges hindering the development of PLC: misconception about PLC and lack of supervision from the authority. Implications and future studies are presented

Pengumpulan B-Karotin Dan A-Tokoferol Oleh Ikan Keli Afrika (Clarias Gariepinus) Dari Produk Sampingan Industri Minyak Kelapa Sawit

Keupayaan ikan keli Afrika (Clarias gariepinus) untuk mengumpul f3-karotin dan a-tokoferol dari makanan ikan keli terumus yang mengandungi dua produk sampingan hasil penyaringan minyak kelapa sawit, iaitu Tanah Peluntur Terpakai (TPT) dan Asid Lemak Sawit Tersuling (ALST) ke dalam ototnya dikaji. Empat jenis makanan ikan dirumuskan, dinamakan AF (mengandungi ALST dan serb uk ikan), SF (mengandungi TPT dan serbuk ikan), ASF (mengandungi ALTS, TPT dan serbuk ikan) dan CF (mengandungi minyak hati ikan kod dan serbuk ikan). Keempat-empat makanan dirumuskan supaya meneapai 13% lipid dan 30% protein. Serat akhir ikan keli bagi kajian pemakanan AF, SF, ASF dan CF adalah 180.44 ± 2.64, 174.84 ± 3.04, 193.49 ± 2.49 dan 173.90 ± 2.38 9 seek~r, manakala ukuran badan akhir bagi ikan-ikan tersebut pula adalah 29'.77 ± 0.15, 29.66 ± 0.17, 30.45 ± 0.13 dan 29.67 ± 0.13 em seek~r, masing-masing. Nisbah penukaran makanan bagi AF, SF, ASF dan CF adalah 2.4:1, 2.3:1, 2.1: 1 dan 2.4: 1, masing-masing. ,The ability of the African catfish (C/arias gariepinus) to accumulate p-carotene and a-tocopherol from formulated catfish feed that contained palm oil mill by-products n~mely, Spent Sleaching Earth (SSE) and Palm Fatty Acid Distillate (PFAD) into their muscle was studied. Four types of feed were formulated, namely AF (contained PFAD and fish meal), SF (contained SSE and fish meal), ASF (contained PFAD, SSE and fish meal) and CF (contained cod liver oil and fish meal). All feed were formulated to achieve 13% lipid and 30% protein levels. The final weights of individual catfish fed with AF, SF, ASF and CF feed were 180.44 ± 2.64, 174.84 ± 3.04, 193.49 ± 2.49 and 173.90 ± 2.39 g, whereas the final total lengths of individual catfish were 29.77 ± 0.15,29.66 ± 0.17,30.45 ± 0.13 and 29.67 ± 0.13 cm, respectively

Non-uniform deployment of power beacons in wireless powered communication networks

© 2002-2012 IEEE. In wireless powered communication networks (WPCNs), base station (BS) and power beacons (PBs) can offer supplement power for uplink transmission of user equipments (UEs). However, the aggregate power consumption of massively deployed PBs may exceed that of a BS. We propose a non-uniform deployment scheme for PBs in WPCNs, where a cell is divided into inner and outer areas, such that BS and PBs can cooperate to power UEs. To be more specific, a BS located in the center of a cell provides downlink power supply for the inner area UEs and uplink information decoding for all the UEs in the cell; while the PBs power UEs in the outer area. With multiple antennas, maximum ratio transmission and maximum ratio combining are adopted for downlink energy beamforming and uplink information reception. Considering a finite area of the network, we derive the distribution of the distance from a non-center-located UE to its nearest PB in the outer area. An optimization problem is formulated to minimize total average power consumption while satisfying BS average transmission power constraint and coverage probability threshold. Moreover, coverage probability is derived for performance evaluation. The numerical results show that the power consumption of the proposed scheme is reduced significantly compared to PB-only WPCNs

Relieving Triplet Ambiguity: Consensus Network for Language-Guided Image Retrieval

Language-guided image retrieval enables users to search for images and interact with the retrieval system more naturally and expressively by using a reference image and a relative caption as a query. Most existing studies mainly focus on designing image-text composition architecture to extract discriminative visual-linguistic relations. Despite great success, we identify an inherent problem that obstructs the extraction of discriminative features and considerably compromises model training: \textbf{triplet ambiguity}. This problem stems from the annotation process wherein annotators view only one triplet at a time. As a result, they often describe simple attributes, such as color, while neglecting fine-grained details like location and style. This leads to multiple false-negative candidates matching the same modification text. We propose a novel Consensus Network (Css-Net) that self-adaptively learns from noisy triplets to minimize the negative effects of triplet ambiguity. Inspired by the psychological finding that groups perform better than individuals, Css-Net comprises 1) a consensus module featuring four distinct compositors that generate diverse fused image-text embeddings and 2) a Kullback-Leibler divergence loss, which fosters learning among the compositors, enabling them to reduce biases learned from noisy triplets and reach a consensus. The decisions from four compositors are weighted during evaluation to further achieve consensus. Comprehensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that Css-Net can alleviate triplet ambiguity, achieving competitive performance on benchmarks, such as $+2.77\%$ R@10 and $+6.67\%$ R@50 on FashionIQ.Comment: 11 page

Openness and Commitment: A conversation between a theological debate and the practice of intentional interreligious encounter in Malaysia

Interculturele Theologi

Locate and Verify: A Two-Stream Network for Improved Deepfake Detection

Deepfake has taken the world by storm, triggering a trust crisis. Current deepfake detection methods are typically inadequate in generalizability, with a tendency to overfit to image contents such as the background, which are frequently occurring but relatively unimportant in the training dataset. Furthermore, current methods heavily rely on a few dominant forgery regions and may ignore other equally important regions, leading to inadequate uncovering of forgery cues. In this paper, we strive to address these shortcomings from three aspects: (1) We propose an innovative two-stream network that effectively enlarges the potential regions from which the model extracts forgery evidence. (2) We devise three functional modules to handle the multi-stream and multi-scale features in a collaborative learning scheme. (3) Confronted with the challenge of obtaining forgery annotations, we propose a Semi-supervised Patch Similarity Learning strategy to estimate patch-level forged location annotations. Empirically, our method demonstrates significantly improved robustness and generalizability, outperforming previous methods on six benchmarks, and improving the frame-level AUC on Deepfake Detection Challenge preview dataset from 0.797 to 0.835 and video-level AUC on CelebDF$\_$v1 dataset from 0.811 to 0.847. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/sccsok/Locate-and-Verify.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, 60 references. This paper has been accepted for ACM MM 202