The effect of perception on consumers' attitude towards purchasing Islamic Banking products

Islamic banking concept is highly regulated by emphasizing Shariah principles which is conventional banking does not apply in daily banking transaction. Islamic banking could be defined as a banking system that is based on the principle of Islamic law and guided by Islamic economics which focus on sharing profit and loss with the prohibition of the collection and payment of interest. The problem statement of this study can be divided into industrial problems and academic problems that connected to the gap of the study. The primary objective of this research is to examine the relationship between consumer perception and consumer purchase intention and evaluate the underlying determinants that influence consumer intention to consumer Islamic banking with the aim of developing a behavioral framework for analyzing and explaining consumer behavior regarding Islamic banking. This research has been undertaken using mixed method which incorporates aspects of qualitative and quantitative research both. This is selected because survey strategy provides different options of data collection such as; interviews, questionnaire and focus group. The sample size used in this research will be 600 customers of any of the listed Islamic bank in Malaysia. To be on the safe side, 620 respondents were approached and to eliminate the error of responses, the additional survey will be evaluated. Since, information for this research is gathered both qualitatively and quantitatively, consequently it is important to select suitable techniques for data analysis to viably translate the outcome in an understandable manner and achieve the finished conclusion. The researcher has performed appropriate data analysis techniques to examine the values such as Beta, chi square, sig value, standard error and t value. Moreover, the study likewise performed reliability test to access of the obtained data is reliable to use. The research is concluded that comprehensively covers the aspect of Islamic banking and its role on the minds of the customer. Furthermore, results also concluded that consumer intent to purchase Islamic banking products were significantly influenced by the certain factors that shaped their behaviour and perception of an Islamic banking product. Additionally, statistically strong relationship between the dependent variable i.e. intent to purchase and all four independent variables including attitude, consumer perception, perceived control behaviour and subjective norm confirmed the perception of consumers regarding Islamic banking and the way if influenced the their purchase intention

A review of the principle of good faith in English Contract Law / Bryan Ching-Wing Lo

Today, the question of “Is there a duty to negotiate in good faith?” still arises in most of the jurisdictions that practice English Law. This paper reviews the principle of good faith in English contract law to provide an insight of how the UK courts make judgment decisions. The main reference case to support this research paper is Walford v Miles which had been cited by many jurisdictions for their previous court decisions. Other sources of references were derived from legal journal articles and books. In the discussion, there were findings both supporting and rejecting the “agreement to agree”. However, the final outcome of the analysis revealed that a more explicit definition by the UK law is required to end the debate on the principle vagueness

On the Design of a Blockchain-based Fraud-prevention Performance Appraisal System

 The job recruitment process takes a lot of process and number of documents. It is very well known for applicants to exaggerated and falsify their work history data. It may put a company at legal risk and significant commercial losses. Generally, company use third-party to verify applicant’s work history data which is time-consuming and costly. It also makes companies relies on third-party which may not trustworthy and cause several other risks. Generally, experience letters is used as a proof of work history documents of employee. However, the process of publishing an experience letter may contain conflict of interest between company and employee. Yet, publishing an experience letter is not mandatory in several places. In this research, we propose a system to verify applicant’s work history data by using performance appraisal as proof of work history and utilizing Blockchain to provide secure system, tampered-proof and real-time verification. The proposed approach also minimizes trust issues and privacy of data sharing by adding encryption and digital signature schema using Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) algorithm. Furthermore, we have implemented a prototype to demonstrate how the proposed system work using a Quorum-based consortium blockchain

Meta-analysis of outcomes of patients with COVID-19 infection with versus without gastrointestinal symptoms.

This systematic review analyzed whether the presence or absence of gastrointestinal symptoms in patients with SARS-COV-2 infection is associated with adverse outcomes. Searching the Cochrane Center Register of Controlled Trials, we included any studies looking at patients with COVID-19 with gastrointestinal symptoms (nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain) compared to those with COVID-19 but without gastrointestinal manifestations as a control group. The final search yielded 186 articles, all of which were individually screened. Seven studies were identified but three were excluded: one due to lack of a control group without gastrointestinal symptoms, one reported as viral RNA in the stool, and one with only non-critically ill patients. Results of the meta-analysis showed a pooled odds ratio for mortality among those with COVID-19 and gastrointestinal symptoms of 0.91 (confidence interval 0.49-1.68) with heterogeneity of 0% and a pooled odds ratio for acute respiratory distress syndrome of 2.94 (confidence interval 1.17-7.40) with heterogeneity of 0%. In conclusion, gastrointestinal symptoms with COVID-19 are associated with a higher risk of acute respiratory distress syndrome, but do not increase the risk for mortality

Clinical outcomes in patients with heart failure with and without cirrhosis: an analysis from the national inpatient sample.

Outcomes of heart failure (HF) hospitalization are driven by the presence or absence of comorbid conditions. Cirrhosis is associated with worse outcomes in patients with HF, and both HF and cirrhosis are associated with worse renal outcomes. Using a nationally representative sample we describe inpatient outcomes of all-cause mortality and length of stay (LOS) among patients with and without cirrhosis hospitalized for decompensated with HF. We conducted a cross sectional analysis using Nationwide Inpatient Sample (2010-2014) data including patients hospitalized for decompensated HF, with or without cirrhosis. We calculated the adjusted odds of all-cause mortality, acute kidney injury (AKI), and target LOS after adjusting for potential confounders. Out of the 2,487,445 hospitalized for decompensated HF 39,950 had cirrhosis of which majority (75.1%) were non-alcoholic cirrhosis. Patients with comorbid cirrhosis were more likely to die (OR, 1.26; 95% CI, 1.11 to 1.43) and develop AKI (OR, 1.26; 95% CI, 1.16 to 1.36) as compared to those without cirrhosis. Underlying CKD was associated with a greater odds of AKI (OR, 4.99; 95% CI, 4.90 to 5.08), and the presence of cirrhosis amplified this risk (OR, 6.03; 95% CI, 5.59 to 6.51). There was approximately a 40% decrease in the relative odds of lower HF hospitalization length of stay among those with both CKD and cirrhosis, relative to those without either comorbidities. Cirrhosis in patients with hospitalizations for decompensated HF is associated with higher odds of mortality, decreased likelihood of discharge by the targeted LOS, and AKI. Among patients with HF the presence of cirrhosis increases the risk of AKI, which in turn is associated with poor clinical outcomes

Association Between Cirrhosis and 30-Day Rehospitalization After Index Hospitalization for Heart Failure.

There are limited data on clinical outcomes in patients re-admitted with decompensated heart failure (HF) with concomitant liver cirrhosis. We conducted a cross sectional analysis of the Nationwide Readmissions Database (NRD) years 2010 thru 2012. An Index admission was defined as a hospitalization for decompensated heart failure among persons aged ≥ 18 years with an alive discharge status. The main outcome was 30 - day all-cause rehospitalization. Survey logistic regression provided the unadjusted and adjusted odds of 30 - day rehospitalization among persons with and without cirrhosis, accounting for age, gender, kidney dysfunction and other comorbidities. There were 2,147,363 heart failure (HF) hospitalizations among which 26,156 (1.2%) had comorbid cirrhosis. Patients with cirrhosis were more likely to have a diagnosis of acute kidney injury (AKI) during their index hospitalization (18.4% vs 15.2%). There were 469,111 (21.9%) patients with readmission within 30 - days. The adjusted odds of a 30 - day readmission was significantly higher among patients with cirrhosis compared to without after adjusting for comorbid conditions (adjusted Odds Ratio [aOR], 1.3; 95% Confidence Interval [CI}: 1.2 to 1.4). The relative risk of 30 - day readmission among those with cirrhosis but without renal disease (aOR, 1.3; 95% CI: 1.3 to 1.3) was lower than those with both cirrhosis and renal disease (aOR, 1.8; 95% CI: 1.6 to 2.0) when compared to persons without either comorbidities. Risk of 30 - day rehospitalization was significantly higher among patients with heart failure and underlying cirrhosis. Concurrent renal dysfunction among patients with cirrhosis hospitalized for decompensated HF was associated with a greater odds of rehospitalization

Labuan IOFC offshore banking and industry: the growth through product/service innovation

Labuan IOFC is an International financial center located at the "positioned center" of the Asia-Pacific basin. The center is moving ahead to become a premier offshore financial center in the world. In the mean time, it promotes more activities and services to a great extent a truly integrated service provider center. Hence, new activities and innovative products are continuously being developed in Labuan which will benefit investors and other offshore players. It offers wide range of offshore financial products and services and complements Kuala Lumpur as a regional financial center. Besides, the legislative framework is not only business friendly but also prudent to safeguard Labuan's reputation and image as offshore financial center. The main objective of this research is to identify the growth of financial products and services in labuan IOFC Offshore Banking Industry. The significance of the research indudes contributing the direction of marketing financial products and services and attracting customers that has changed through the growth of financial product and service innovations. Through product and service innovations, the offshore bankers may consider the key product and service to achieve competitive edge. Moreover, by conducting this research, Labuan and national economy may be improved through better financial services and higher profit from the offshore banking industry

PQC Cloudization: Rapid Prototyping of Scalable NTT/INTT Architecture to Accelerate Kyber

The advent of quantum computers poses a serious challenge to the security of cloud infrastructures and services, as they can potentially break the existing public-key cryptosystems, such as Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). Even though the gap between today’s quantum computers and the threats they pose to current public-key cryptography is large, the cloud landscape should act proactively and initiate the transition to the post-quantum era as early as possible. To comply with that, the U.S. government issued a National Security Memorandum in May 2022 that mandated federal agencies to migrate to post-quantum cryptosystems (PQC) by 2035. To ensure the long-term security of cloud computing, it is imperative to develop and deploy PQC resistant to quantum attacks. A promising class of post-quantum cryptosystems is based on lattice problems, which require polynomial arithmetic. In this paper, we propose and implement a scalable number-theoretic transform (NTT) architecture that significantly enhances the performance of polynomial multiplication. Our proposed design exploits multi-levels of parallelism to accelerate the NTT computation on reconfigurable hardware. We use the high-level synthesis (HLS) method to implement our design, which allows us to describe the NTT algorithm in a high-level language and automatically generate optimized hardware code. HLS facilitates rapid prototyping and enables us to explore different design spaces and trade-offs on the hardware platforms. Our experimental results show that our design achieves 11$\times$ speedup compared to the state-of-the-art requiring only 14 clock cycles for an NTT computation over a polynomial of degree 256. To demonstrate the applicability of our design, we also present a coprocessor architecture for Kyber, a key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) chosen by the NIST post-quantum standardization process, that utilizes our scalable NTT core

Anticoagulation and bleeding risk in patients with COVID-19

BACKGROUND: There is no current standardized approach to anticoagulation in patients with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) while potential bleeding risks remain. Our study characterizes the patterns of anticoagulation use in COVID-19 patients and the risk of related bleeding. METHODS: This is a single center retrospective analysis of 355 adult patients with confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19 from March 1 to May 31, 2020. Chi-square was used to analyze the relationship between degree of anticoagulant dose and bleeding events by site. Multivariable logistic regression was used to look at factors associated with inpatient death. RESULTS: 61% of patients were being treated with prophylactic doses of anticoagulation, while 7% and 29% were being treated with sub-therapeutic and therapeutic anticoagulation (TA) doses respectively. In 44% of patients, we found that the decision to escalate the dose of anticoagulation was based on laboratory values characterizing the severity of COVID-19 such as rising D-dimer levels. There were significantly higher rates of bleeding from non-CNS/non-GI sites (p = 0.039) and from any bleeding site overall (p = 0.019) with TA. TA was associated with significantly higher rates of inpatient death (41.6% vs 15.3% p \u3c 0.0001) compared to those without. All patients who developed CNS hemorrhage died p = 0.011. After multivariable logistic regression, only age OR 1.04 95% CI (1.01 to 1.07) p = 0.008 and therapeutic anticoagulation was associated with inpatient mortality OR 6.16 95% CI (2.96 to 12.83) p ≤ 0.0001. CONCLUSION: The use of TA was significantly associated with increased risk of bleeding. Bleeding in turn exhibited trends towards higher inpatient death among patients with COVID-19. These findings should be interpreted with caution and larger more controlled studies are needed to verify the net effects of anticoagulation in patients with COVID-19