Exchange Rate – Relative Price Nonlinear Cointegration Relationship in Malaysia

The finding of exchange rate–relative price nonlinear cointegration relationship in Malaysia, among others, suggests that nonlinear Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) equilibrium may be regarded as reference point in judging the short run misalignment of the Ringgit currency and thereby deducing effective policy actions. Moreover, economists who wish to extend the simple PPP exchange rate model into the more complicated monetary exchange models may do so comfortably, at least in the text of Malaysia. Nonetheless, such attempt should be tailored in a nonlinear way to suit the nonlinear characteristic of exchange rate behaviour

Exchange Rate – Relative Price Relationship: Nonlinear Evidence from Malaysia

Using nonlinear unit root tests developed by Kapetanios et al. (2003), we find strong evidence that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and Wholesale Price Index (WPI) based Malaysian Ringgit – U.S. Dollar (MYR/USD) real exchange rates are nonlinear stationary, implying that MYR/USD nominal exchange rate and relative price are cointegrated regardless of price indices. The results in this study are supportive of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) and are more robust than previous study, which did not take the nonlinear exchange rate adjustment behavior into consideration. Few principle implications may be drawn from this study. First, nonlinear PPP equilibrium may be regarded as reference point in judging the short run misalignment of the Ringgit currency and thereby deducing effective policy actions. Second, the effort of Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) in managing the Ringgit in certain fluctuation bands has successfully maintained Malaysian’s macroeconomics equilibrium in the sample period of study. Third, economists who wish to extend the simple PPP exchange rate model into the more complicated monetary exchange models may do so comfortably, at least in the text of Malaysia. Nonetheless, such attempt should be tailored in a nonlinear way to suit the nonlinear characteristic of exchange rate behaviour.Exchange rate; Nonlinearity; stationarity; Purchasing Power Parity; Exponential Smooth Transition Autoregressive (ESTAR), Malaysia.

Monotone Fuzzy Rule Relabeling for the Zero-Order TSK Fuzzy Inference System

To maintain the monotonicity property of a fuzzy inference system, a monotonically-ordered and complete set of fuzzy rules is necessary. However, monotonically-ordered fuzzy rules are not always available, e.g. errors in human judgements lead to non-monotone fuzzy rules. The focus of this paper is on a new monotone fuzzy rule relabeling (MFRR) method that is able to relabel a set of non-monotone fuzzy rules to meet the monotonicity property with reduced computation. Unlike the brute-force approach, which is susceptible to the combinatorial explosion problem, the proposed MFRR method explores within a reduced search space to find the solutions; therefore decreasing the computational requirements. The usefulness of the proposed method in undertaking Failure Mode and Effect Analysis problems is demonstrated using publicly available information. The results indicate that the MFRR method can produce optimal solutions with reduced computational time

South-East Asian Stock Markets Follow A Non-Random Walk

Are the returns of the major South-East Asian stock markets forecastable? This study resorts to time series models that estimate the current value of a variable solely based on its historical records. Technical analysis that explore, for instance, patterns such as head-and-shoulders are viewed as some kinds of non-linearity in the financial time-series. As such, linear and non-linear models are considered in this study, together with the benchmark random walk model for forecastability comparison. Stock market returns of five major South-East Asian countries over the sample period ranges from January 1990 to October 2000 are examined in this study. Two linear and four non-linear models are estimated to generate 1-day, 1-week, 1month, 3-month, 9-month and 1-year forecasts. Results obtained shows that the random walk model ranked last in terns of forecast accuracy performance in all cases. Hence, it can be concluded that these stock market returns follow a non-random walk and are forecastable by time series models

Multi-expert decision-making with incomplete and noisy fuzzy rules and the monotone test

The use of Fuzzy Inference System (FIS) in decision making problems has received little attention so far. This may be due to the difficulty in gathering a complete set of fuzzy rules, which is free from noise, and the complexity in constructing an FIS model that is able to satisfy a number of important properties, including the monotonicity property. Previously, we have proposed a single-input Monotone-Interval FIS (MI-FIS) model, which can handle incomplete and non-monotone fuzzy rules. Besides that, we have proposed the idea of a monotone test (MT) for a set of fuzzy rules, which give an indication pertaining to the degree of monotonicity of a fuzzy rules set. In this paper, a multi-input MI-FIS model is firstly presented. The focus of this paper is on the use of MI-FIS and MT for undertaking multi expert decision-making (MEDM) problems. A three-phase MEDM framework consists of modelling, aggregation, and exploitation phases is proposed. In the modelling phase, an MT index for each fuzzy rule base from each expert, which is potentially non-monotone and incomplete, is obtained. The provided fuzzy rule bases are also modelled as MI-FISs. In the aggregation phase, an overall collective rating score of an alternative from a number of experts is obtained through the fuzzy weighted averaging operator. We suggest including MT as part of the aggregation phase. In exploitation phase, a rank ordering procedure among the alternatives is established using a possibility method. The developed framework is evaluated with simulated information. The results show that including the MT index in the aggregation phase is able to increase the robustness of the proposed FIS-MEDM model in the presence of noisy fuzzy rule sets

马来西亚大学华语二语教材的编写方向 （the direction of TCSL materials in Malaysian Universities）

(abstract only available in Chinese) 学习华语就要有教材，现时的趋势是很多傜来西亚儈等学府的华语课程教材䜭是自编的，很多儈等学府的华语二语讲师䜭很努力地自编和本土化他们的华语课程教材。在这电子媒体盛行，讲求认证和新冠疫情肆虐的时代，为䝽合时代的变迁和新挑战，华语课程新教材也要和汉语水平考试接轨和䝽合电子学习的时代，有些原则上调整，因此教材编写会出现了一些格式和编写上的改变。傜来西亚的华语教学课本的编写历史并不䮯，本土编写的有关课本也不多。开始时，课本模拟中国的对外汉语教学课本来编写，发展到最后才开始有自己的格调，也本地化和根据这䟼的要求来编写。 这篇文章会简单介绍大学的华语教材、和教材有关的教学法、华语文教材编写原则和华语 二语（对外汉语）教材编写原则，过后以编写玛拉工艺大学文凭课程课本生活华语（二）为例提出编写新时代教材的方向，并将过程中会䙷上的䳮仈和解决方案写出来，以为对编写教材有兴趣者提供资料和借鉴

Exchange Rate – Relative Price Nonlinear Cointegration Relationship in Malaysia

The finding of exchange rate–relative price nonlinear cointegration relationship in Malaysia, among others, suggests that nonlinear Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) equilibrium may be regarded as reference point in judging the short run misalignment of the Ringgit currency and thereby deducing effective policy actions. Moreover, economists who wish to extend the simple PPP exchange rate model into the more complicated monetary exchange models may do so comfortably, at least in the text of Malaysia. Nonetheless, such attempt should be tailored in a nonlinear way to suit the nonlinear characteristic of exchange rate behaviou

Hybrid of multi-car elevator system and double-deck elevator system

Multi-car elevator system is a new breakthrough in an elevator system in 2001. It has broken the traditional concept of developing only one elevator car in an elevator shaft. Multi-car elevator system can have more than one elevator car moving in an elevator shaft and it has improved a lot in minimizing the waiting time of passengers if compared with only one elevator car in an elevator shaft. The main advantage of multi-car elevator system is to reduce the construction cost where 30% of the core-tube area of the elevator system is made up of shaft. By developing multi-car elevator system, many of elevator shafts need not to be developed and it still can perform about the same efficiency in serving passengers. However, it is still not able to transport a large number of passengers efficiently if the passengers are calling from the same floor, especially during the up-peak traffic. For that reason, the feature of double-deck elevator system is integrated into multi-car elevator system to develop a new hybridized elevator system called “Hybrid of multi-car elevator system and double-deck elevator system” to solve the limited car capacity problem. The performance of both systems, the hybridized elevator system and the multi-car elevator system is simulated. The result shows that the average journey time of the hybridized elevator system is shorter than the multicar elevator system in all the three traffic modes, i.e. up-peak, down-peak and inter-floor traffics. For the up-peak traffic mode of the hybridized elevator system, it manages to achieve the best result of 33.5% shorter of the average journey time compared to the multi-car elevator system