Oral Cancer Awareness and its Determinants among a Selected Malaysian Population

Objective: To assess oral cancer awareness, its associated factors and related sources of information among a selected group of Malaysians. Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted on all Malaysian ethnic groups aged >= 15 years old at eight strategically chosen shopping malls within a two week time period. Data were analysed using chi-square tests and multiple logistic regression. Significance level was set at alpha<0.05. Results: Most (84.2%) respondents had heard of oral cancer. Smoking was the most (92.4%) recognized high risk habit. Similar levels of awareness were seen for unhealed ulcers (57.3%) and red/white patches (58.0%) as signs of oral cancer. Age, gender, ethnicity, marital status, education, occupation and income were significantly associated with oral cancer awareness (p<0.05). Conclusions: There was a general lack of awareness regarding the risk habits, early signs and symptoms, and the benefits of detecting this disease at an early stage. Mass media and health campaigns were the main sources of information about oral cancer. In our Malaysian population, gender and age were significantly associated with the awareness of early signs and symptoms and prevention of oral cancer, respectively.Article Link: http://koreascience.or.kr/article/ArticleFullRecord.jsp?cn=POCPA9_2013_v14n3_195

Generic Fibrational Induction

This paper provides an induction rule that can be used to prove properties of data structures whose types are inductive, i.e., are carriers of initial algebras of functors. Our results are semantic in nature and are inspired by Hermida and Jacobs' elegant algebraic formulation of induction for polynomial data types. Our contribution is to derive, under slightly different assumptions, a sound induction rule that is generic over all inductive types, polynomial or not. Our induction rule is generic over the kinds of properties to be proved as well: like Hermida and Jacobs, we work in a general fibrational setting and so can accommodate very general notions of properties on inductive types rather than just those of a particular syntactic form. We establish the soundness of our generic induction rule by reducing induction to iteration. We then show how our generic induction rule can be instantiated to give induction rules for the data types of rose trees, finite hereditary sets, and hyperfunctions. The first of these lies outside the scope of Hermida and Jacobs' work because it is not polynomial, and as far as we are aware, no induction rules have been known to exist for the second and third in a general fibrational framework. Our instantiation for hyperfunctions underscores the value of working in the general fibrational setting since this data type cannot be interpreted as a set.Comment: For Special Issue from CSL 201

Trade Liberalization and Foreign Direct Investment in Malaysia

A decision to establish foreign direct investment (FDI) involves a lot of critical thinking, especially in deciding a place to locate the investment. Evaluation and consideration comprise of costs and benefits of launching the FDI. This study focuses on time series data for the sample period of 1970 to 2009. The main objective of this study is to identify the major determinant of the inward flows of FDI for Malaysia by employing the bounds testing (ARDL) approach to cointegration. Of all the variables being tested, trade openness is found to be the most influential variable in attracting the inflows of FDI as it shows consistent results in the short run as well as in the long run in all models being tested. Since the trade openness which represents the liberalization of the Malaysian economy could induce the inflows of FDI, some policy actions can be taken up to enhance the trade openness

Low Incidence of Contrast Induced Nephropathy after Coronary Angiography in Patients with Advanced Chronic Kidney Disease Treated with Prophylactic Continuous Veno-venous Hemofiltration

Introduction: Contrast-induced nephropathy (CIN) is associated with increased risk of in-hospital morbidity and mortality. The purpose of this study was to find out whether continuous venovenous hemofiltration (CVVH) after coronary angiography in chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients is associated with a lower incidence of CIN than that reported in the literature. Methods: All patients with CKD who underwent coronary angiography in the Chest Disease Hospital, Kuwait, between January 2004 and December 2005 were treated by CVVH after the procedure. Renal function was assessed before and after the procedure. Results: A total of 98 patients were enrolled in the study, 52 (53.1%) of whom were males. Their mean age was 60.7 years. Before the procedure, the mean serum creatinine level was 4.65 mg/dl and the mean creatinine clearance (Cr Cl) was 18.04 ml/min. Patients underwent CVVH for a mean duration of 21.3 hours, after a mean time-interval of 44.3 min. Their mean serum creatinine was 4.57 mg/dl at discharge (within the first week after the procedure) and 4.78 mg/dl at 15 days after the procedure. Mean Cr Cl was 18.52 ml/min at discharge and 17.62 ml/min at 15 days after the procedure. There was no statistically significant difference between the mean serum creatinine and Cr Cl values before and after the procedure. However, one patient (1.02%) developed CIN and ended on regular hemodialysis. The in-hospital mortality was 0%. Conclusion: Patients with advanced CKD who undergo coronary angiography may be protected from further deterioration in their renal function after exposure to radiological contrast material if the procedure is immediately followed by CVVH. A randomized controlled clinical trial is needed to verify our encouraging results. Keywords: contrast induced nephropathy, chronic kidney disease, continuous venovenous hemofiltratio

Segmentation Of Retinal Vasculature Using Contourlet Enhancement For Early Detection Of Diabetic Retinapthy

In this project we use contourlet transform rather than wavelet transform because the contourlet transform was proven to require less number of coefficient compared to wavelet and contourlet also have the ability to detect directional signal. The enhanced blood vessel will be extract by BottomHat. This transformation works by isolating dark object on light surrounding

Fibrational induction meets effects

This paper provides several induction rules that can be used to prove properties of effectful data types. Our results are semantic in nature and build upon Hermida and Jacobs’ fibrational formulation of induction for polynomial data types and its extension to all inductive data types by Ghani, Johann, and Fumex. An effectful data type μ(TF) is built from a functor F that describes data, and a monad T that computes effects. Our main contribution is to derive induction rules that are generic over all functors F and monads T such that μ(TF) exists. Along the way, we also derive a principle of definition by structural recursion for effectful data types that is similarly generic. Our induction rule is also generic over the kinds of properties to be proved: like the work on which we build, we work in a general fibrational setting and so can accommodate very general notions of properties, rather than just those of particular syntactic forms. We give examples exploiting the generality of our results, and show how our results specialize to those in the literature, particularly those of Filinski and Støvring

Etika Kerja Islam sebagai Penyederhana dalam Hubungan antara Kecerdasan Emosi dan Kepemimpinan Administrator Universitas Negeri

The main challenges for the HEIs are to provide a market driven academic programmes and able to respond to the changing needs of economic sectors. Apparently, the recent challenges require the staff to equip themselves with leadership quality in order to achieve organizational goals. Previous studies have shown several factors such as EI influenced effective leadership. Another significant issue in leadership is ethical behaviors. Therefore, this study intends to examine the relationship between EI and leadership practices when Islamic work ethic is practiced in Malaysian public universities. The respondents will consist of middle administrators in Malaysian public universities. Using qualitative and cross sectional approaches, surveys will be distributed to the stratified randomly selected respondents. Most of the past results suggested there were significant relationships between the variables. The findings are expected to have some contributions both to the practical and theoretical aspects and enable PHIs to improve their leadership training programmes

Prevalensi Diabetes Melitus Pada Tuberkulosis Dan Masalah Terapi

The incidence and prevalence of diabetes mellitus (DM) is rapidly increasing across the world. DM has been known as one of the risk factors for tuberculosis (TB). DM was seen to have a negative effect on the outcome of TB treatment. This paper is a literature review based on articles about DM and TB taken from PubMed, Google, and Mendeley published ten years behind. Screening for DM in persons with TB demonstrated that DM prevalence in TB population is high. DM prevalence in TB was about 5,4 % – 44,0 %. Diabetes mellitus is a risk factor to develop active tuberculosis (OR: 1,5 – 8,9). DM impairs the immunity of the patients and therefore DM is an independent risk factor for infections such as TB. Lack control of diabetes predisposes the patient to tuberculosis. People with diabetes are more likely to fail TB treatment compared to those without diabetes. Effective management of both diseases require the same elements including early detection, providing guided standard treatment, and proper drug intak

A demand-driven approach for a multi-agent system in Supply Chain Management

This paper presents the architecture of a multi-agent decision support system for Supply Chain Management (SCM) which has been designed to compete in the TAC SCM game. The behaviour of the system is demand-driven and the agents plan, predict, and react dynamically to changes in the market. The main strength of the system lies in the ability of the Demand agent to predict customer winning bid prices - the highest prices the agent can offer customers and still obtain their orders. This paper investigates the effect of the ability to predict customer order prices on the overall performance of the system. Four strategies are proposed and compared for predicting such prices. The experimental results reveal which strategies are better and show that there is a correlation between the accuracy of the models' predictions and the overall system performance: the more accurate the prediction of customer order prices, the higher the profit. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg