Legal Issues in the rehabilitation of abandoned housing projects of the liquidated housing-developer-companies in Peninsular Malaysia

Abandoned housing projects is one of the biggest problems in the housing industry in Peninsular Malaysia. Even though since the Independence days in 1957, the Malaysian Government have provided laws and policies to govern housing industry, yet abandoned housing projects problem is still an unsettled issue until today.The real victims are the purchasers themselves.Usually when a housing developer company is wound up, the affair and business of the company are taken over either by the private liquidator or provisional liquidator or the official Receiver (OR) under the Department of Insolvency.The liquidator may rehabilitate the abandoned projects left by the wound up housing developer companies, if the projects are viable for rehabilitation with the approval of the creditors, contributories, the committee of inspection and the court and that there is adequate fund to finance the rehabilitation. Otherwise, if the project is not viable, particularly because there are insufficient funds to run the rehabilitation, the projects may be stalled forever without any prospects for rehabilitation, to the detriment of the purchasers. This article discusses the law and practice in the rehabilitation of abandoned housing projects in Peninsular Malaysia of the wound-up-housing-developer-companies.At the ending part of this article the author proposes certain suggestions for facing the problems of abandoned housing projects of the wound up housing developer companies and their rehabilitation in Peninsular Malaysia

The importance of better models in stochastic optimization

Standard stochastic optimization methods are brittle, sensitive to stepsize choices and other algorithmic parameters, and they exhibit instability outside of well-behaved families of objectives. To address these challenges, we investigate models for stochastic minimization and learning problems that exhibit better robustness to problem families and algorithmic parameters. With appropriately accurate models---which we call the aProx family---stochastic methods can be made stable, provably convergent and asymptotically optimal; even modeling that the objective is nonnegative is sufficient for this stability. We extend these results beyond convexity to weakly convex objectives, which include compositions of convex losses with smooth functions common in modern machine learning applications. We highlight the importance of robustness and accurate modeling with a careful experimental evaluation of convergence time and algorithm sensitivity

Differential genetic advantages in youth and in aging, or how to die healthy

Human society ages at a steady rate, that is, the proportion of adult and elderly individuals increases constantly because of improved living conditions and the advances in medical care. This means that very soon the tradeoff between the advantages in old age conferred by alleles disadvantageous or neutral in young age would begin to show, providing the fascinating opportunity of studying the interplay between genetic factors and environment outside the framework of reproductive capacity and in the unique milieu of the aging cell. Being healthy and/or health-conscious in youth does not guarantee for successful aging or even that the person would live up to the average life expectancy of the population. Therefore, successful aging and longevity are related to a healthy-conscious attitude to a degree only. The present paper reviews the basic genetic and evolutionary mechanisms which have operated during human history so as to ensure survival of humankind and the possible factors preventing or contributing to successful aging

ATM in focus:a damage sensor and cancer target

The ability of a cell to conserve and maintain its native DNA sequence is fundamental for the survival and normal functioning of the whole organism and protection from cancer development. Here we review recently obtained results and current topics concerning the role of the ataxia-telangiectasia mutated (ATM) protein kinase as a damage sensor and its potential as therapeutic target for treating cancer. This monograph discusses DNA repair mechanisms activated after DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs), i.e. non-homologous end joining, homologous recombination and single strand annealing and the role of ATM in the above types of repair. In addition to DNA repair, ATM participates in a diverse set of physiological processes involving metabolic regulation, oxidative stress, transcriptional modulation, protein degradation and cell proliferation. Full understanding of the complexity of ATM functions and the design of therapeutics that modulate its activity to combat diseases such as cancer necessitates parallel theoretical and experimental efforts. This could be best addressed by employing a systems biology approach, involving mathematical modelling of cell signalling pathways

A Multi-User, Single-Authentication Protocol for Smart Grid Architectures

open access articleIn a smart grid system, the utility server collects data from various smart grid devices. These data play an important role in the energy distribution and balancing between the energy providers and energy consumers. However, these data are prone to tampering attacks by an attacker, while traversing from the smart grid devices to the utility servers, which may result in energy disruption or imbalance. Thus, an authentication is mandatory to efficiently authenticate the devices and the utility servers and avoid tampering attacks. To this end, a group authentication algorithm is proposed for preserving demand–response security in a smart grid. The proposed mechanism also provides a fine-grained access control feature where the utility server can only access a limited number of smart grid devices. The initial authentication between the utility server and smart grid device in a group involves a single public key operation, while the subsequent authentications with the same device or other devices in the same group do not need a public key operation. This reduces the overall computation and communication overheads and takes less time to successfully establish a secret session key, which is used to exchange sensitive information over an unsecured wireless channel. The resilience of the proposed algorithm is tested against various attacks using formal and informal security analysis

The Generalized Distance Spectrum of the Join of Graphs

Let G be a simple connected graph. In this paper, we study the spectral properties of the generalized distance matrix of graphs, the convex combination of the symmetric distance matrix D(G) and diagonal matrix of the vertex transmissions Tr(G) . We determine the spectrum of the join of two graphs and of the join of a regular graph with another graph, which is the union of two different regular graphs. Moreover, thanks to the symmetry of the matrices involved, we study the generalized distance spectrum of the graphs obtained by generalization of the join graph operation through their eigenvalues of adjacency matrices and some auxiliary matrices

Energy, Laplacian energy of double graphs and new families of equienergetic graphs

For a graph $G$ with vertex set $V(G)=\{v_1, v_2, \cdots, v_n\}$, the extended double cover $G^*$ is a bipartite graph with bipartition (X, Y), $X=\{x_1, x_2, \cdots, x_n\}$ and $Y=\{y_1, y_2, \cdots, y_n\}$, where two vertices $x_i$ and $y_j$ are adjacent if and only if $i=j$ or $v_i$ adjacent to $v_j$ in $G$. The double graph $D[G]$ of $G$ is a graph obtained by taking two copies of $G$ and joining each vertex in one copy with the neighbours of corresponding vertex in another copy. In this paper we study energy and Laplacian energy of the graphs $G^*$ and $D[G]$, $L$-spectra of $G^{k*}$ the $k$-th iterated extended double cover of $G$. We obtain a formula for the number of spanning trees of $G^*$. We also obtain some new families of equienergetic and $L$-equienergetic graphs.Comment: 23 pages, 1 figur