RE-EVALUATING SUSTAINABILITY OF MICROFINANCE INSTITUTIONS BY USING TOPSIS

Purpose: The measurement of sustainability for microfinance institutions (MFIs) has been a serious problem for both practitioners and researchers over the last few decades. A multicriteria decision-making approach is used to develop an index that measures the sustainability of microfinance institutions based on the double bottom line. Methodology: The sustainability score of MFIs operating in Pakistan for the year 2006-2015 is measured using the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). During the assessment, equal weights are assigned to all indicators of sustainability. Additionally, a hypothetical organization was assigned the industry threshold to generate composite scores using TOPSIS. Later, sustainability levels of individual MFIs were compared with this industry threshold. Findings: Microfinance institutions that attain higher financial sustainability and positive outreach are ranked high. The result shows that the threshold sustainability level of the microfinance sector in Pakistan from 2006-2015 was 23.52, 26.31, 23.80, 45.83, 45.83, 66.67, 77.77, 91.60, and 88.88 percent respectively. Although the sustainability level in 2015 decreases with respect to 2014, still the overall growth of the sector is remarkable. Practical implications: The results obtained from TOPSIS for evaluating the sustainability of MFIs under the double bottom line highlight its practical applicability. MFIs are under immense pressure by regulatory bodies, investors, donors, and financial experts to achieve sustainability. This index would help MFIs to track progress and improve their sustainability. Novelty/Originality: This study is the first of its kind to determine the sustainability of MFI by using all the four indicators of sustainability, including financial self-sufficiency, operational self-sufficiency, depth of outreach and breadth of outreach. Existing sustainability indicators does not provide the threshold level of sustainability. Instead, they provide a ranking of MFIs from top to bottom only. This study is novel to identify whether MFIs have met or failed to achieve sustainability by providing the threshold level

Intelligent grading of kaffir lime oil quality using non-linear support vector machine

This paper presents kaffir lime oil quality grading using the intelligent system classification method, a non-linear support vector machine (NSVM). This method classifies the quality kaffir lime oil into two groups: high and low quality, based on their significant chemical compounds. The 90 data of kaffir lime oil were used in this project from high to low quality. The abundance (%) of significant chemical compounds will act as the input and high or low quality as an output. The 90 data will be divided into two sets: training and testing data sets with a ratio of 8:2. The radial basis function (RBF) optimization kernel parameters in NSVM. Using the implementation of MATLAB software version R2020a, all data and analysis work was performed automatically. The results showed that the NSVM model met all performance criteria for 100% accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and precision

VACCINATION ATTITUDE AMONG HEALTHCARE WORKERS AT THE EARLY PHASE OF COVID-19 IN MALAYSIA

Background: Healthcare workers’ (HCWs) vaccination hesitancy during a pandemic can be problematic for the health system as these workers need to be fully vaccinated. Aims: This study aimed to determine the level of vaccine hesitancy and its associated factors among HCWs at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among randomly selected HCWs of a tertiary hospital in the state of Selangor, Malaysia, using an online questionnaire. The questions were designed to collect information on HCWs’ sociodemographic and health status and attitude towards vaccination. Higher scores for the four scales on attitude towards vaccination denote a higher level of vaccine hesitancy. Results: Of the 380 respondents (98% response rate), the overall score depicted low vaccine hesitancy despite the scores being slightly higher on worrying over unforeseen future effects and concerns about commercial profiteering. Women demonstrated a lower preference for natural immunity compared to men. Conclusion: In the context of this study, vaccine hesitancy among HCWs was low, which may indicate good acceptance. However, concerns about unforeseen future effects and commercial profiteering need to be addressed, and health education and promotion activities on the male workers in terms of preference for natural immunity need to be enhanced. Keywords: attitude, COVID-19, healthcare workers, vaccine hesitanc

Design of Multiplication and Division Operation for 16 Bit Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU)

Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) is one of the most crucial components of an embedded system and have being used in many devices such as cell phones, calculator, computers, and many other applications. It performs all the arithmetic and logical operations such as addition, subtraction, logical AND and OR. An Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) is a multi-functional circuit that conditionally performs one of several possible functions of two operands A and B depending on control inputs. It is nevertheless the main performer of any computing device. The objective of this project is to design ALU 16-bit using VHDL. The Altera Quartus II software is used as tool to create the designed operation of multiplication and division. The simulation results show the proposed ALU design successfully perform the operation of multiplication and division of 16 bits operation. &nbsp

Noninvasive Methods for Condition Monitoring and Electrical Fault Diagnosis of Induction Motors

This chapter provides a comprehensive analysis of noninvasive methods to diagnose stator winding insulation faults of an induction motor. Further, a novel noninvasive method is proposed to diagnose the root cause of winding failure due to unbalanced voltage to avoid catastrophic failure. Therefore, a winding function approach is utilized to derive an analytical expression for stator winding distribution and magnetomotive force (MMF). This tactic qualifies the conductor segment that generates MMF, and it also helps to analyze a healthy current spectrum. One can easily observe higher order harmonics in current spectrum; therefore, a new series of rotor harmonics is introduced to diagnose unbalanced supply. The locus of these harmonics is dependent on the poles, rotor bars, and slip. Due to the rapid complexity in industrial plants, it is inconceivable to continue human inspection to diagnose the faults. Thus, to avoid human inspection, in addition to new series of rotor harmonic, a fully automatic method based on neural network is proposed. This method not only diagnoses unbalanced voltage but it also recognize the percentage of unbalanced voltage by use of feed-forward multilayer perceptron (MLP) trained by back propagation. Finally, the experimental results shows the validation of this research work proposed method

Antimicrobial susceptibility pattern and distribution of ExoU and exoS in clinical isolates of Pseudomonas Aeruginosa at a Malaysian hospital.

This study was conducted to determine the antibiotic susceptibility pattern and distribution of exoU and exoS among 44 clinical isolates of P. aeruginosa collected from different patients over a 3-month period in 2010 at a major Malaysian hospital. Susceptibility data by disk diffusion method for cefepime (30 μg), ceftazidime (30 μg), gentamicin (10 μg), piperacillin-tazobactam (100/10 μg) and ciprofloxacin (5 μg) were available for 38 isolates. Resistance to ceftazidime and piperacillin-tazobactam was the most common (74%) with five isolates not susceptible to three or more different antibiotics. PCR detection of exoU and exoS of all 44 isolates showed the former gene to be present in 18 and exoS in 41. In analyzing the two genes together, 17 isolates were detected for exoU and exoS with only two being negative for both genes. Only one isolate was detected for exoU alone whereas 24 for exoS alone. Distribution of the genes in relation to antibiotic susceptibility was inapplicable due to the majority of the isolates having similar susceptibility patterns, but the tendency of exoU-carrying isolates to be present in male patients (83%) and respiratory sites (61%) was observed (p < 0.050). The finding warrants further investigation in a larger sample of isolates

The stability of diaphragm wall for deep excavation

Rapid urbanisation and the increase in population has led to massive use of underground spaces, especially in the city. Before an underground structure is built, the use of retaining structure is crucial in order to prevent the excavation from failure. Diaphragm wall is a widely used retaining structure, particularly for deep excavation. A holistic understanding of the performance and its behaviour is essential to provide stability of the soil retained. A parametric study by using Plaxis2D has been conducted to determine the factors affecting the stability of diaphragm wall and the excavation sites in underground Mass Rapid Transit station of Hospital Kuala Lumpur (HKLX). The objectives of this study are to determine the effect of diaphragm wall stiffness, groundwater drawdown and the depth of wall for deep excavation. The stability is captured based on the lateral deflection of wall, bending moment, safety factor and ground movement near the diaphragm wall. From the study, it is found that the diaphragm wall with high stiffness can reduce wall deflection up to 20% with the addition of 49% bending moment and achieve a high factor of safety. Furthermore, groundwater drawdown is seen reducing lateral deflection of the wall up to 1.08% as well as increasing the factor of safety. Finally, decreasing wall depth reduces the wall deflection by 0.38% and also the basal heaving

Kefahaman umum terhadap perdagangan matawang (FOREX) dan kedudukannya dalam syarak

Kertas ini bertujuan memahami perdagangan matawang semasa pada peringkat global secara ringkas.Kajian juga akan melihat secara ringkas amalan perdagangan matawang di Malaysia dan seterusnya mengkaji secara lebih terperinci amalan perdagangan matawang di kalangan masyarakat umum dan membahaskannya berpandukan petunjuk al-Quran dan al-sunnah melalui perbahasan ulama-ulama muktabar dan ahli akademik kontemporari

Productivity change in the efficiency of the insurance and Takaful industry of Pakistan

This paper will use the Malmquist Productivity Index (MPI) synchronized with the inputoriented Data Envelopment Approach to evaluating the productivity change for the insurance and takaful industry of Pakistan for the period of 2008 to 2016. Total factor productivity (TFP) change for the industry is measured and then it is decomposed into Technical efficiency change and technological change to measure the reason for the productivity change. The results of the study reveal that overall insurance industry in Pakistan was enjoying the increase in the total factor productivity during the above mentioned period. Change in factor productivity for the takaful companies was better than insurance firms. Therefore, pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency made takaful operators more productive comparative to the conventional insurers