Understanding social media usage by females in Saudi Arabia: a descriptive finding

Recently, Social Media (SM) platforms are not only functioned for entertainment but also for the exchange of information, collaboration and overcoming of cultural boundaries. Social media can provide many opportunities to Saudi females who are faced with many cultural boundaries such as unemployment and segregation between genders. However, the use of SM by Saudi females is still lesser than that of Saudi male. Few studies have yet investigated the involvement of Saudi females in SM. This study was conducted to determine the effects of SM on Saudi females. A comprehensive online survey was conducted and 632 valid responses were collected from Saudi females. Saudi females use SM to spend their spare time or for entertainment, to stay up-to-date with news and current events and to connect with friends and family. The study reveals a low percentage of SM use among Saudi females for business purposes. The finding also show that SM is potential to play a significant role in empowering the life of Saudi females at early age hence more effort should be undertaken to encourage more uptake of SM for business and commerce regardless of gender.Keywords: Social media, Saudi Arabia, females, data screenin

A proposed conceptual success model of citizen-centric digital government in Malaysia

The emergence of Digital Government throughout the world is reflecting how governments are trying to find innovative digital solutions towards empowering social, economic and political advantage. Effective service delivery to citizens through Information Communication Technology application such as integrated citizen service information systems is a prerequisite to achieve citizen-centric digital government. Measuring success of such systems is a growing concern. However, very few studies have attempted to find success factors using Information Systems theoretical approach in the context of digital government, particularly in Malaysia. Therefore, this study is designed to bridge the gap by identifying such factors and propose a conceptual model. This study addresses success factors from system and personal traits’ perspectives, behavioral intention, satisfaction, trust and citizen empowerment as determinants of digital government success.Keywords: Digital government; e-government; trust; digital services; information system

Augmented reality to memorize Al-Quran for hearing impaired students: a preliminary analysis

Quran learning among the hearing impaired has not been given much attention and exposure. This is due to the difference in the learning method among the hearing impaired compared to the non-hearing impaired. In lieu with this, a preliminary study has been conducted by using a qualitative approach. An interview was conducted with five experienced teachers to identify hearing impaired students’ behaviours and the method used to learn Al-Quran. Meanwhile, an observation with the hearing impaired students was also conducted. The findings show that the Tahfiz Akhyar method is used to memorize the surahs of Al-Quran by orderly arranging the verses using numbers. The memorization technique is based on the teaching of Prophet Muhammad when He taught the companions to learn Al-Quran. However, the result shows that, there are still errors in arranging the verses of the surahs in the correct order using the existing teaching aid. Therefore, these findings will be used as a guideline to develop the teaching aid application integrated with the Augmented Reality technology to help hearing impaired students to memorize the surahs of Al-Quran.Keywords: Augmented Reality, Quran learning, Hearing Impaired, and Memorizatio

Content validation of an enterprise architecture (ea) readiness assessment instrument

Although Enterprise Architecture (EA) is becoming an important agenda to align business with information technology plan, not many organisations, especially in the public sector, are ready to implement it. Therefore, there is a need to identify the readiness factors that affect the implementation of EA in the Malaysian Public Sector (MPS). Even though the readiness factors identified are influenced by a previous study, the instrument used to validate the factors needs to be re-evaluated to increase the probability of obtaining a supportive construct validity. Thus, the objective of this study is to present the content validity of an EA readiness instrument designed to validate EA readiness factors. This study used the content validity index (CVI) to quantify the relevance of EA readiness factors. To examine the content validity in the judgement stage, professional individual judgement is required. Questionnaires with four-point Likert scale were used for collecting feedback from experts. Item–Content Validation Index (ICVI) was used to check the validity of individual factors and items for MPS with experts' feedback. Seven experts with information system background specifically in EA and having a wide experience on EA implementation were selected to participate in this study. The result showed that all 14 factors and 42 items scored above 0.857, suggesting that the instrument is valid and accepted for further studies

Student's opinions on online educational games for learning programming introductory

Use of educational games is an approach that has potential to change the existing educational method. This is due to games popularity among younger generation as well as engagement and fun features of games compared to conventional learning method. In addition, games are among the most widespread media amongst younger generation or so-called "digital natives" apart from movie, music and internet technology. Game play activities is an important issue to be thoroughly understood due to the facts that many of them are addicted to game play activity. In contrast, conventional learning approaches are not interesting enough to the younger generation. Thus, integration of games technology into education is potentially believed to increase student interest and motivation to learn. This study developed and evaluates an online educational game for learning Programming Introductory course at a university in Malaysia. A total of 180 undergraduate students from computer and engineering background participate in the study. Findings shows that about 80% of students have positive attitude towards the games with around 84% of them find that the games is a fun way to learn, at the same time, an average of 80% agreed that the game provide them with opportunity to learn. Furthermore, about 75% of the students agreed that the game make them able to do self-assessment for Programming course. It was interesting to find that almost 85% of the student said that they will want to use educational games as their future learning approach. Despite many more evidence will be needed especially in Malaysia context, this study is important to rationalize that games can be one of the new learning approaches in the future

Malaysian politicians’ connection pattern on twitter using sna: a case of Najib Razak

Najib Razak is one of the most prominent politicians in Malaysia whose popularity has risen worldwide over the years due to his political sharp-witted strategy and various political scandals. He is also identified as one of the most followed Malaysian politicians on social media, especially Twitter. Hence, this study aims to apply Social Network Analysis (SNA) to further examine the interactions between Twitter users and the relationship formed with Najib Razak. A complete network of Najib Razak's Twitter account is used to study the connection pattern, influence, and groups developed between account users in the network. Netlytic is used to extract the data on Twitter, and based on the extracted dataset, it is discovered that 1004 nodes that represent Twitter users, follows and mentions the @najibrazak Twitter account. The dataset was further analyzed using R to explore the interaction and the connection patterns were visualized using Gephi. Based on the findings, the connectivity, centrality and clustering of the top 10 most influential Twitter users that contribute to the discussion and mention of Najib Razak on Twitter were determined. The previous work using Najib Razak's twitter account focused on finding the relations between public and politicians by analyzing the issues discussed through language processing at topical and lexical level. Unlike the previous achievement, the results from this proposed SNA technique can be further analyzed to gather greater insights on the hidden relationship built between politicians to strengthen their position and distinguish their possible future followers for further investigations

Study of Qos performance in optical burst switched networks (OBS)

One of the main challengers of the future Internet is to ensure QoS for various types of traffic characteristics with differentiated service requirements. It has been highlighted that OBS can provide high bandwidth data transmission in alloptical Internet network. However, the provisioning of QoS in OBS network is still an issue. The focused of this study is to develop QoS provisioning mechanism at the ingress and core node of OBS network. The proposed QoS provisioning ensures that the differentiated traffic is able to achieve their respective demands. This study proposed a DiffServ-aware ingress node with priority queueing (PQ) and burst assembly mechanisms. In addition, a core node with contention resolution scheme using FDL_WA_WPremp is developed as part of the integration of the proposed OBS network

Recent advancements in investigations of elbow pipe fatigue under various loading conditions

The elbow pipe is a critical pipe component that is broadly used in petroleum and power plant industries. Due to its asymmetrical shape, this component has a more complex mechanical behavior and critical stress and strain locations compared to a straight pipe. The elbow of the pipe subjected to cyclic loading will undergo plastic failure, which leads to collapse, ratcheting, and fatigue, in the end causing failure to the component. Because of this situation, this article presents recent advancements in analytical analysis, numerical analysis, and experimental investigations of the ratcheting behavior of elbow pipes. In the analytical analysis section, several common equations for estimating elbow fatigue life are listed and elaborated together with their results. Common equations include Paris' law, Neuber's law, and the Manson- Coffin equation. In the numerical analysis section, recent studies employing Finite Element Analysis are reported with details on the constitutive model, software, and results. In the experimental analysis section, the most recent elbow fatigue studies are thoroughly discussed and experimental details listed. Finally, some suggestions for elbow pipe fatigue studies are also proposed

Proposed computer forensic approach for cloud computing environment

The security perimeter in computing has changed from a fixed boundary to an elastic boundary that is constantly changing and also the threats are evolving, making the Incident handler more difficult to analyze the information system based attacks. Therefore, the purposes of this study are introducing a new approach in identifying computer forensic attacks using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in a cloud computing environment. First will identify and classify the different types of attacks on cloud infrastructure. Next, based on the attacks we are going to suggest an appropriate approach that can be utilized to collect as much data possible to perform a detailed investing of the incidents or attacks. Furthermore, the proposed approach will be tested in a virtual environment in order to check its effectiveness. Finally, refinement will be performed based on the results obtained and will be bench marked against the existing computer forensic approaches. Thus, this study contributes to better provide many data sources that can be used by the investigators to conduct forensics investigation in the infrastructure layer of the cloud computing. The findings will benefit the organizations which deploy private cloud services and infrastructure services which include virtual machines. Therefore, this paper discusses in detail the proposed computer forensic approach