Visual problems of new Malaysian drivers

Purpose: The objective of this study was to determine the prevalence of poor visual acuity, colour blindness and visual field defect of new Malaysian drivers. Methods: A total of 3717 new drivers (50.2% males and 49.8% females) age 19±6 years, voluntarily participated in this study. Standard optometric apparatus such as LogMAR Charts, Ishihara plates and HandHeld Bernell Perimeter were used and standard procedures were applied. Results: The visual examination showed 6.7% (n=250) of subjects achieved less than 0.3 LogMAR with better eye whilst 2.2% (n=83) had failed the Ishihara Test (2.1% males and 0.1% females). Most of the affected drivers were deutranopia. Only 2094 subjects had their visual field using a mobile Handheld Bernell Perimeter. 1.72% (n=36) subjects have less than 120 degrees of peripheral field of vision. Conclusions: The visual status among new Malaysian drivers needs to be taken seriously to ensure safe driving. Other factors such as colour vision and visual field screening have to be considered seriously when evaluating the visual performance of a driver. Good visual performance is indispensible for safe driving

Optimising cutinase enzyme recovery in thermo-induced phase separation of LS54/DX ATPS by enhanced volume exclusion effect

Low recovery of cutinase enzyme in water-enriched phase after thermo-induced separation stage of LS54/Dx aqueous two-phase system was improved by enhanced volume exclusion effect in the polymer-water extraction system. It was done by increased the polymer concentration in the polymer-water system. After primary phase separation, more LS54 (polymer) which is the system’s component itself were added into polymer-enriched phase and mixed thoroughly before thermo-induced separation step proceeded. The compositions of LS54 added into the polymer-enriched phase were 0.25, 0.5 and 0.75 g LS54/g top phase. The thermo-induced phase separation was carried out at 37°C. It was found that cutinase recovery in water-enriched phase was increased up to 5-13% with the increment of polymer concentration in the system as compared to a system without polymer addition. The optimum concentration obtained for the polymer added was 0.5 g LS54/g top phase whereby it attained 82% recovery of cutinase enzyme in water-enriched phase after thermoseparation step. Although the increment of enzyme recovery was not exceptionally high as compared to another method such as adding ligand, an affinity tag or neutral salt, still this method is applicable because of its more straightforward work, polymer recycle capability, and enzyme recovery in water phase would definitely give benefit to further downstream processing

Refractive surprise in post-cataract surgery in post Epi-LASIK patient : a lesson learnt

Post-myopic laser refractive surgery corneal power measurement for intraocular lens power calculation is one of the most challenging issues in cataract surgery. Standard keratometry measurement is likely to be overestimated which could lead to false-low intraocular lens power. As a result, this can lead to hyperopic surprise. Contact lens method is an alternative method which is relatively inexpensive and accessible procedure in many optometry and ophthalmology centres. The contact lens method with optimised equations have been used for this case to obtain an accurate postoperative corneal power

Malaysian graduates of Middle-Eastern universities: perspectives on human capital development

Malaysian youth who graduate from Middle-Eastern Universities are important and suitable human capital for Malaysia as they are equally knowledgeable and skilful as any local or western university graduates. In fact, the additional components in their study programmes such as Islamic philosophy, principles and ethics based on the al-Quran and Hadith form the foundation for integrity and accountability. Science, technology and Islamic knowledge are critical ingredients of human capital development in any organisation to ensure high productivity embedded with integrity, professionalism and accountability. The main purpose of this study was to determine the factors affecting human capital development among Malaysian graduates of Middle-Eastern universities. The factors identified were their preparation before leaving for their studies, their studying practices, their academic achievements, their personality development and their experiences (good and bad) while they were in Middle-Eastern universities. This study used the quantitative design on 386 Malaysian graduates who graduated from Middle-Eastern universities; these graduates were serving in several government and private-sector agencies. The findings indicated that all the independent variables had significant positive relationship with the dependent variable, that is, the process of human capital development with r values ranging from .280 (preparation before going to Middle- Eastern universities) to .546 (personality development). The findings of this study suggest that Malaysian graduates of Middle- Eastern universities are an important source of human capital that can steer the future development of the nation alongside their peers who graduate from local and western universities

In vitro antigenicity and cross-reaction of the outer membrane proteins of Pasteurella haemolytica A2, A7 and A9

The outer membrane proteins of Pasteurella haemolytica A2, A7 and A9 were subjected to SDS-PAGE and immunoblotting. The molecular weights of the polypeptide bands ranged between 33 to 97 kDa. The major polypeptide bands for P. haemolytica A2 were 33.4, 39.2 and 45 kDa while the minor polypeptide bands were 50, 58.7, 66.2, 84.7 and 97.4 kDa. Analysis of the outer membrane proteins of P. haemolytica A7 revealed two major protein bands of 33.4 and 45 kDa and three minor polypeptide of 40, 50 and 66.2 kDa. There were three major (33.4, 37.5 and 45 kDa) and one minor protein band (50 kDa) in the outer membrane proteins of P. haemolytica A9. There was one major protein band from each of the P. haemolytica A2, A7 and A9, which was unique to the respective serotype and appeared to represent the respective serotype. These were the 39.2 kDa band for P. haemolytica A2, the 40 kDa band for P. haemolytica A7 and the 37.5 kDa band for P. haemolytica A9. Following homologous immunoblot, all the serotypes showed pronounced antigenicity at the 30 kDa band. Heterologous immunoblot using the antiserum of P. haemolytica A2 did not reveal any antigenic band of P. haemolytica A9 but revealed antigenic bands at 30 and 31 kDa of P. haemolytica A7. Heterologous immunoblot using the antiserum of P. haemolytica A7 revealed antigenic band at 30 kDa of all the three serotypes while the antiserum of P. haemolytica A9 failed to reveal any common antigenic band between all three serotypes. Thus, the 30 kDa band of P. haemolytica A7 may be a suitable candidate for a sub-unit Vaccine against pneumonic pasteurellosis of sheep and goats

Hybrid memristor-CMOS implementation of logic gates design using LTSpice

In this paper, a hybrid memristor-CMOS implementation of logic gates simulated using LTSpice. Memristors' implementation in computer architecture designs explored in various design structures proposed by researchers from all around the world. However, all prior designs have some drawbacks in terms of applicability, scalability, and performance. In this research, logic gates design based on the hybrid memristor-CMOS structure presented. 2-inputs AND, OR, NAND, NOR, XOR, and XNOR are demonstrated with minimum components requirements. In addition, a 1-bit full adder circuit with high performance and low area consumption is also proposed. The proposed full adder only consists of 4 memristors and 7 CMOS transistors. Half design of the adder base on the memristor component created. Through analysis and simulations, the memristor implementation on designing logic gates using memristor-CMOS structure demonstrated using the generalized metastable switch memristor (MSS) model and LTSpice. In conclusion, the proposed approach improves speed and require less area

Accuracy of contact lens method by spherical and aspheric rigid gas permeable lenses on corneal power determination in normal eyes

Contact lens method (CLM) is an alternative option to measure corneal power by evaluating the difference of patient’s over-refraction with rigid gas permeable (RGP) lens to manifest refraction. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the accuracy of CLM using spherical (CLMspherical) and aspheric (CLMaspheric) RGP lenses in measuring corneal refractive power of normal corneas. This prospective study recruited 45 normal eyes of 45 healthy subjects. The corneal power measurements were determined by CLMspherical using Boston ES RGP and CLMaspheric using Boston Envision RGP based on alignment fitting strategy. Manifest refraction and over-refraction were determined using a standard procedure of objective and subjective refraction methods. IOLMaster was set as the reference method for comparison. The mean arithmetic difference, mean absolute difference and 95% limits of agreement (LOA) of corneal powers obtained from CLMspherical and CLMaspheric to IOLMaster value were evaluated for the accuracy assessment. The mean arithmetic difference and mean absolute difference of corneal power s obtained from CLMspherical and CLMaspheric to IOLMaster values were 0.10 ± 0.21 D and 0.20 ± 0.11 D, and 0.04 ± 0.09 D and 0.08 ± 0.05 D, respectively. The 95% LOA between CLMspherical and IOLMaster ranged from -0.30 to 0.51 D, whereas between CLMaspheric and IOLMaster was ranging from -0.14 to 0.21 D. CLM in estimating corneal power is more accurate with application of aspheric RGP compared to spherical RGP. Hence, aspheric RGP is suggested for CLM when determining corneal power in normal eyes

Sentiment classification from reviews for tourism analytics

User-generated content is critical for tourism destination management as it could help them identify their customers' opinions and come up with solutions to upgrade their tourism organizations as it could help them identify customer opinions. There are many reviews on social media and it is difficult for these organizations to analyse the reviews manually. By applying sentiment classification, reviews can be classified into several classes and help ease decision-making. The reviews contain noisy contents, such as typos and emoticons, which could affect the accuracy of the classifiers. This study evaluates the reviews using Support Vector Machine and Random Forest models to identify a suitable classifier. The main phases in this study are data collection, data preparation, data labelling and modelling phases. The reviews are labelled into three sentiments; positive, neutral, and negative. During pre-processing, steps such as removing the missing value, tokenization, case folding, stop words removal, stemming, and applying n-grams are performed. The result of this research is evaluated by looking at the performance of the models based on accuracy where the result with the highest accuracy is chosen as the solution. In this study, data is data from TripAdvisor and Google reviews using web scraping tools. The findings show that the Support Vector Machine model with 5-fold cross-validation the most suitable classifier with an accuracy of 67.97% compared to Naive Bayes with 61.33% accuracy and Random Forest classifier with 63.55% accuracy. In conclusion, the result of this paper could provide important information in tourism besides determining the suitable algorithm to be used for Sentiment Analysis related to the tourism domain

Comparison of driving difficulty between bilateral cataract and non-cataract patients among elderly drivers: a preliminary study

An age-related ocular disease such as cataract that causes reduction of visual functions would affect the individual driving performance. The aim of this study was to compare driving difficulties between Malaysian drivers with bilateral cataracts and without cataract. This cross-sectional study involved measurement of visual functions [visual acuity (VA) and contrast sensitivity (CS)] and driving difficulty of 61 subjects who are actively driving with valid driving license. Subjects were divided into bilateral cataract group (n=30) and non-cataracts group as control group (n=31); which age and gender matched. Results showed that the mean±SD for composite driving difficulty score in the bilateral cataract group and in the control group were 72.08±15.95 and 87.50±12.60 respectively. It showed that both groups had lower mean composite score which indicates difficulty in driving. Results also showed significant mean difference composite driving difficulty score between cataract and control group (p<0.001). Drivers with bilateral cataracts were also found to have significant difficulty when driving the rain (p=0.034), at night (p=0.013) and when driving on local or highway (p=0.005) compared to drivers without cataract. Subsequent Spearman’s Rho showed significant moderate positive correlation between driving difficulty and binocular CS (rs =0.404, p=0.027). This study showed that drivers with cataract would experience driving difficulties compared to the drivers without cataract