Personal data “Up in the Air”: a tale of two Malaysian airlines in dealing with consumers online privacy

Uncertainties and concerns surrounding the privacy of personal information in Malaysia in the wake of many data abuse incidents had led to the passing of Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) 2010. In a market where personal data has long been widely traded and unjustifiably exploited, the coming of this law could resemble the arrival of a long-awaited messiah expected to correct the evils and rectify people’s problem in a very immediate manner. Once the law is in force, a wide range of industries that process personal data of individuals would have to reformulate their entire business processes to comply with the new legal requirements. In order to do that, they will need to perform critical self-assessment to ensure their business practice does not contravene the law and not trigger criminal liabilities. Against this background, this paper seeks to analyze how the Malaysian airlines industries – represented by the two biggest players Malaysian Airlines (MAS) and AirAsia – treats consumers’ personal data based on their existing online policies. The reason behind choosing this industry is of two folds; firstly, because airlines industry is relatively massive personal data users (especially on their passengers’ data). Secondly, the two companies have now aggressively embarked into online environment which sees them collecting and processing more personal data through their websites and online processing mechanism. The ultimate goal of this assessment is to see to what extent their existing online privacy policies and practices are in line with the personal data protection principles provided in the PDP Act 2010. Using critical methods of discussion, this paper aims at producing gap analysis and recommendations as to how the industry should improve their privacy policy and make it closer to the legal requirements in protecting consumers’ personal data

Personal data “Up in the air”: A tale of two Malaysian airlines in dealing with consumers online privacy

Uncertainties and concerns surrounding the privacy of personal information in Malaysia in the wake of many data abuse incidents had led to the passing of Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) 2010. In a market where personal data has long been widely traded and unjustifiably exploited, the coming of this law could resemble the arrival of a long-awaited messiah expected to correct the evils and rectify people’s problem in a very immediate manner. Once the law is in force, a wide range of industries that process personal data of individuals would have to reformulate their entire business processes to comply with the new legal requirements. In order to do that, they will need to perform critical self-assessment to ensure their business practice does not contravene the law and not trigger criminal liabilities. Against this background, this paper seeks to analyze how the Malaysian airlines industries – represented by the two biggest players Malaysian Airlines (MAS) and AirAsia – treats consumers’ personal data based on their existing online policies. The reason behind choosing this industry is of two folds; firstly, because airlines industry is relatively massive personal data users (especially on their passengers’ data). Secondly, the two companies have now aggressively embarked into online environment which sees them collecting and processing more personal data through their websites and online processing mechanism. The ultimate goal of this assessment is to see to what extent their existing online privacy policies and practices are in line with the personal data protection principles provided in the PDP Act 2010. Using critical methods of discussion, this paper aims at producing gap analysis and recommendations as to how the industry should improve their privacy policy and make it closer to the legal requirements in protecting consumers’ personal data

Health related quality of life in the female-headed households

Introduction: According to psychological research female-headed households have a lot of physical and mental problems because they experience more stress and anxiety than other women in general population. Aims of this study determine of quality of life and associated factors in Female-headed households under cover Welfare Organization of Ilam Province. Materials & Methods: In this descriptive analytical study, 787 Female-headed households under cover Welfare Organization of Ilam in urban and rural Ilam province participated. Systematic random sampling used to as a sampling method. A validated questionnaire (SF - 36) completed in a Six-month interval and the data were collected for analysis. Findings: From 787 Female-headed households contributing to the project, the numbers of subjects missing were 79 and 708 of subjects completed questionnaires (response rate 89.9). Mean ± SD age of participants was 53.3± 19.18. We found that having the chronic disease and life in rural area was associated with a worse health related quality of life (p

Extending Topic Models With Syntax and Semantics Relationships

Probabilistic topic modeling is a powerful tool to uncover hidden thematic structure of documents. These hidden structures are useful for extracting concepts of documents and other data mining tasks, such as information retrieval. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), is a generative probabilistic topic model for collections of discrete data such as text corpora. LDA represents documents as a bag-of-words, where the important structure of documents is neglected. In this work, we proposed three extended LDA models that incorporates syntactic and semantic structures of text documents into probabilistic topic models. Our first proposed topic model enriches text documents with collapsed typed dependency relations to effectively acquire syntactic and semantic dependencies between consecutive and nonconsecutive words of text documents. This representation has several benefits. It captures relations between consecutive and nonconsecutive words of text documents. In addition, the labels of the collapsed typed dependency relations help to eliminate less important relations, i.e., relations involving prepositions. Moreover, in this thesis, we introduced a method to enforce topic similarity to conceptually similar words. As a result, this algorithm leads to more coherent topic distribution over words. Our second and third proposed generative topic models incorporate term importance into latent topic variables by boosting the probability of important terms and consequently decreasing the probability of less important terms to better reflect the themes of documents. In essence, we assign weights to terms by employing corpus-level and document-level approaches. We incorporate term importance using a nonuniform base measure for an asymmetric prior over topic term distributions in the LDA framework. This leads to better estimates for important terms that occur less frequently in documents. Experimental studies have been conducted to show the effectiveness of our work across a variety of text mining applications. Furthermore, we employ our topic models to build a personalized content-based news recommender system. Our proposed recommender system eases reading and navigation through online newspapers. In essence, the recommender system acts as filters, delivering only news articles that can be considered relevant to a user. This recommender system has been used by The Globe and Mail, a company that offers most authoritative news in Canada, featuring national and international news

Angiogenic factors and the risk of preeclampsia: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Background: The etiological nature of preeclampsia is heterogeneous. The use of biomarkers indices in early pregnancy helps to have appropriate stratification of pregnancies into high- and low risk for the purpose of choosing timely interventions. Objective: The aim of this systematic review was to determine the pathogenic role of soluble soluble fms-like tyrosine kinase-1 (sFlt-1) and placental growth factor (PlGF) inthe prediction of preeclampsia in women. Materials and Methods: We performed a systematic search of the international databases including PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science until August 2017. The quality of included studies was assessed using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale. The primary outcome in this review was preeclampsia. The statistical heterogeneity was assessed using the X2 test and quantified by I2. Pooled effects size was obtained by random effects model. Subgroup  analyses were also carried out. Results: Totally, 284 records were identified in the initial search and 15 records were finally included in the meta-analysis. The pooled odds ratios (ORs) for the association between the high level of sFlt-1 and low level of PlGF and subsequent development of preeclampsia among women were 5.20 (95% CI: 1.24–9.16) and 2.53 (95% CI: 1.33–3.75), respectively. The mean difference for sFlt-1 and PlGF in women with preeclampsia compared to controls was 1.15 (95% CI: 0.43–1.86) and –0.94 (95% CI: –1.37–0.52),respectively. Conclusion: According to the results from this meta-analysis, increased levels of sFlt-1 and reduced levels of PlGF predict the subsequent development of preeclampsia. Key words: Angiogenic factors, Preeclampsia, sFLT-1, PlGF

Review of next generation hydrogen production from offshore wind using water electrolysis

\ua9 2023 The Author(s)Hydrogen produced using renewable energy from offshore wind provides a versatile method of energy storage and power-to-gas concepts. However, few dedicated floating offshore electrolyser facilities currently exist and therefore conditions of the offshore environment on hydrogen production cost and efficiency remain uncertain. Therefore, this review focuses on the conversion of electrical energy to hydrogen, using water electrolysis located in offshore areas. The challenges associated with the remote locations, fluctuating power and harsh conditions are highlighted and recommendations for future electrolysis system designs are suggested. The latest research in polymer electrolyte membrane, alkaline and membraneless electrolysis are evaluated in order to understand their capital costs, efficiency and current research status for achieving scaled manufacturing to the GW scale required in the next three decades. Operating fundamentals that govern the performance of each device are investigated and future recommendations of research specifically for the integration of water electrolysers with offshore wind turbines is presented

The global trend of infertility: an original review and meta-analysis

Background and aims: Infertility is one of the most important conditions in reproductive system and there is no reliable estimates for global prevalence of infertility. Therefore, knowing the prevalence of infertility is important and can be effective in decision making. Methods: We systematically reviewed all published papers in Medline database and Scopus (1988–2010). Univariate and multivariate approaches were applied to assess the causes of heterogeneity among the selected studies. Meta-regression was used to examine the relationship between the prevalence of infertility and the year of study. Data manipulation and statistical analyses were performed using Stata 11.1. Results: The study population was not similar in all papers. Studies evaluated the prevalence of infertility in the general population, the total female population, women and couples. Some studies defined infertility as failure to conceive within 12 months of regular sexual life without contraception methods while other studies defined it as failure to conceive within 24 months of regular sexual life without contraception methods. Overall, 52 studies met our inclusion criteria and the pooled worldwide of infertility was obtained about 10. The correlation between prevalence of secondary infertility and year of study was significant (P=0.039). Conclusions: Approximately 10 of the world's population suffers from infertility. Due to the negative impact of infertility on couples in various aspects of life, and the need for treatment and support programs, accurate estimate of infertility is essential worldwide

ATTRIBUTION OF MENTAL DISORDERS IN SUICIDE OCCURRENCE

The present study aimed to determine attribution of mental disorders in suicide occurrence. By a cross-sectional study, all suicide records (n = 5188), between 1993 and 2009 in Ilam province, were investigated. Multiple logistic regression analysis was adopted. Totally, 27.5 of the suicides occurred due to mental disorders. This was significantly higher in males (29.3), individuals born in 1996(44) and 1990s (30.3), those aged 30 years and above (33.2) and suicide attempters (28.3), respectively and separately. The risk of suicide due to mental disorders was observed for females (OR = 0.85, CI = 0.74-0.97), those born in 1994 (OR = 2.82, CI = 1.27-6.24), completed suicides (OR = 0.81, CI = 0.68-0.97) and the age group 25 to 29 years old (OR = 0.82, CI = 0.66-1.01). Suicide due to mental disorders was higher among males compared to females, the rate of which was directly proportional to attempted suicide and age. It is therefore recommended that health educations be seriously carried on targeted groups

Comparison of Artificial Neural Network and Logistic Regression Models for Prediction of Psychological Symptom Six Months after Mild Traumatic Brain Injury

Background: Nowadays, outcome prediction models using logistic regression (LR) and artificial neural network (ANN) analysis have been developed in many areas of healthcare research. Objectives: In this study, we have compared the performance of multivariable LR and ANN models, in prediction of psychological symptoms six months after mild traumatic brain injury. Methods: In a prospective cohort study, information of 100 mild traumatic brain injury patients, during a six months period between 2014 and 2016 were included. Data were divided into two training (n = 50) and testing (n = 50) groups, randomly. 300 ANNs and LRs were studied in the first group and then the predicted values were compared in the second group using the two final models. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and accuracy rate were used to compare these models. Results: The results showed that accuracy rate for the neural network model was 90.65, while it was 75.96 for the LR model. Conclusions: The ANN models appeared to be more powerful in predicting psychological symptoms versus the LR models

Procalcitonin and white blood cell count (WBC), erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) and serum C-reactive protein (CRP) alterations in children with systemic inflammatory response syndrome before and after treatment

Systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) due to infection is an important cause of morbidity and  mortality in children. The present prospective observational study aimed to determine the correlation  between  procalcitonin (PCT) and white blood cell count (WBC), erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) and  C-reactive protein (CRP) in toddlers before and after treatment. Moreover, 50 patients aged 1 to 36 months who were hospitalized at the Pediatrics Ward in Besat Hospital, Sanansaj city, Kurdistan province Western  Iran through a census sampling method were recruited. The complete blood count (CBC) was measured via  cell counter; ESR by the Westergren method, CRP via semi quantitative method and PCT via semi quantitative  immune-chromatography method. Pearson correlation coefficient was used to estimate correlation between  WBC, ESR, CRP and PCT before and after treatment of SIRS. The results obtained show correlation coefficients between PCT and CRP as well as between PCT and ESR in the first day of trial before treatment were  determined as ‘good’ and ‘moderate’, respectively. However, there was no significant correlation between PCT and WBC. No significant correlation was found between PCT and WBC count, ESR and CRP at the third day of  treatment. It was concluded that procalcitonin and CRP is the most favorable values for confirming SIRS  diagnosis in the onset of treatment. PCT can be considered as the marker of choice for following up purposes.Key words: Systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS), procalcitonin, toddlers, treatment