Combating Corruption in the Asia-Pacific Countries: What do We Know and What

Corruption is a serious problem in the Asia-Pacific, judging from the rankings and scores of the 32 Asia-Pacific countries included in the Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index of 2008. The governments in these countries have initiated various anti-corruption measures since the 1950s but, with few exceptions, have not been effective in curbing corruption. In 1968, the Swedish economist, Gunnar Myrdal, had attributed the lack of research on corruption in South Asian countries to the existing research taboo on corruption.Fortunately, this research taboo on corruption in the Asia-Pacific countries no longer exists and this is manifested in the tremendous increase in the number of country studies on corruption since the 1990s. Indeed, in contrast to the dearth of research on corruption in the 1960s, research on corruption in these countries has mushroomed into a growth industry during the past two decades.Given the vast literature on corruption in the Asia-Pacific countries, the purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it reviews the literature to identify the major strategies adopted by the Asia-Pacific countries to combat corruption. Second, the paper provides an evaluation of these anti-corruption strategies to identify their strengths and weaknesses and to enhance their effectiveness by suggesting how their weaknesses can be rectified

In Singapore's National values

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Real-time credit card fraud detection using computational intelligence

Online banking and e-commerce have been experiencing rapid growth over the past few years and show tremendous promise of growth even in the future. This has made it easier for fraudsters to indulge in new and abstruse ways of committing credit card fraud over the Internet. This paper focuses on real-time fraud detection and presents a new and innovative approach in understanding spending patterns to decipher potential fraud cases. It makes use of self-organization map to decipher, filter and analyze customer behavior for detection of fraud

V.L.H.: Adaptive WAP Portals

Abstract Mobile Internet browsing using wireless application protocol (WAP) phones has created unique problems of its kind. One of the challenges that consumers faced is that they are only equipped with a small screen for browsing WAP contents. This makes navigating to WAP sites of interest on WAP portals a hassle. WAP portals served as consumers' gateway to the WAP sites offered by third party content providers. These portals usually organize the list of WAP sites into a multi-level tree hierarchy structure. Often, consumers are required to navigate deep down the tree to access their favorite sites. This paper presents a prototype for making WAP portals adaptive. Such portals reduce time spend by consumers in navigation henceforth more time for content browsing. The system does not require explicit consumers' input for adaptation but rather, they implicitly track consumers' navigation activities among WAP sites and use these input to form the basis of consumers' preferences for adaptation. The methods implemented are adaptive link sorting and navigation shortcuts. The system also takes into account possible drift of consumers' interests over time and weighted computation is used to achieve adaptation that will be of relevance to consumers at any point of time. Experiments with mobile users have yield promising results