Characterization Of Fungi Associated With Leaf Spot Of Mango (Mangifera indica L.)

Mangga (Mangifera indica L.) merupakan tanaman buah-buahan yang popular di Malaysia dan mudah terdedah kepada penyakit bintik daun disebabkan oleh pelbagai kumpulan kulat Askomiset dan mitosporik. Penyakit ini akan mengganggu fotosintesis dan mengurangkan pertumbuhan pokok mangga. Kajian ini dijalankan untuk mengenalpasti dan mencirikan kulat yang berasiosiasi dengan penyakit bintik daun mangga. Ujian kepatogenan telah dijalankan untuk menentukan patogen penyebab penyakit ini. Berdasarkan pengecaman secara morfologi, 264 pencilan kulat telah dikenalpasti secara tentatif kepada 11 genus dan 18 spesies, iaitu Colletotrichum (n = 93, C. acutatum dan C. gloeosporioides), Fusarium (n = 90, F. proliferatum, F. semitectum, F. mangiferae, F. solani dan F. chlamydosporum), Pestalotiopsis (n = 28, P. theae dan P. mangiferae), Phomopsis (n = 13, Phomopsis sp.), Curvularia (n = 12, Cur. geniculata dan Cur. lunata), Guignardia (n = 9, G. mangiferae), Lasiodiplodia (n = 9, L. theobromae), Nigrospora (n = 5; N. sphaerica), Botryosphaeria (n = 3, B. dothidea), Nodulisporium (n = 1, Nodulisporium sp.) dan Corynespora (n = 1, Cor. cassiicola). Mango (Mangifera indica L.) is a popular fruit crop in Malaysia and is susceptible to leaf spot disease caused by diverse groups of Ascomycete and mitosporic fungi. The disease will interrupt photosynthesis and reduce the growth of mango trees. The present study was conducted to identify and characterize fungi associated with leaf spot of mango. Pathogenicity test was performed to determine the causal pathogen of the disease. Based on morphological identification, 264 fungal isolates were tentatively identified into 11 genera and 18 species, namely Colletotrichum (n = 93, C. acutatum and C. gloeosporioides), Fusarium (n = 90, F. proliferatum, F. semitectum, F. mangiferae, F. solani and F. chlamydosporum), Pestalotiopsis (n = 28, P. theae and P. mangiferae), Phomopsis (n = 13, Phomopsis sp.), Curvularia (n = 12, Cur. geniculata and Cur. lunata), Guignardia (n = 9, G. mangiferae), Lasiodiplodia (n = 9, L. theobromae), Nigrospora (n = 5; N. sphaerica), Botryosphaeria (n = 3, B. dothidea), Nodulisporium (n = 1, Nodulisporium sp.) and Corynespora (n = 1, Cor. cassiicola)

Towards sentiment analysis application in housing projects

In becoming a develop nation by 2020, Malaysia Government realized the need in providing affordable house to the public. Since Second Malaysia Plan, government has implemented various affordable housing projects and it continues until recent Malaysia Plan.To measure the effectiveness of the initiatives taken, public opinion is necessary.A social media platform has been seen as the most effective mechanism to get information on people’s thought and feeling towards certain issues. One of the best ways to extract emotions and thoughts from what people post in social media is through Sentiment Analysis (SA).This paper will propose a new framework that focuses on the application of sentiment analysis to assist the decision maker in understanding the real voice of the public in regard to property industry in Malaysia.The framework will consist of two components; sentiment classification at feature/aspect level and sentiment visualization to show the results of the analysis

Towards Sentiment Analysis Application in Housing Projects

In becoming a develop nation by 2020, Malaysia Government realized the need in providing affordable house to the public. Since Second Malaysia Plan, government has implemented various affordable housing projects and it continues until recent Malaysia Plan. To measure the effectiveness of the initiatives taken, public opinion is necessary. A social media platform has been seen as the most effective mechanism to get information on people’s thought and feeling towards certain issues. One of the best ways to extract emotions and thoughts from what people post in social media is through Sentiment Analysis (SA). This paper will propose a new framework that focuses on the application of sentiment analysis to assist the decision maker in understanding the real voice of the public in regard to property industry in Malaysia. The framework will consist of two components; sentiment classification at feature/aspect level and sentiment visualization to show the results of the analysis

A Sentiment Analysis Visualization System for the Property Industry

The usage of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, either by the public or by organizations, has been rapidly increasing. The decision-makers in the organizations use social media to engage with their customers since public users tend to express their opinions about certain products and services through this popular mechanism. Hence, this valuable data can be useful for marketing and business decisions. However, the main obstacle is obtaining meaningful information from these platforms due to the unstructured data they present. Sentiment analysis is seen as the best tool to analyze insights or opinions in this huge amount of data. In this article, we extract data on public opinion about property in order to understand the reason behind the imbalances of supply and demand currently faced by the property industry in Malaysia. In addition, we visualized the sentiment results in the form of a dashboard so that it may help property players to understand the public sentiments toward their housing or construction projects

Field of study of higher education selection by using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) / Ameera Husna Azeme, Nurul Aqila Abdul Hadi and Marhaizathul Norshazwaniee Omar

Higher education field selection is important for student before they enter the higher education institutions such as colleges and universities. There are a lot of field selection for students to choose whether it's based on their self-interest, parent's influence or academic performance. Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method illustrated the ranking of most important higher education field selection among students by multi criteria decision making. The purposes of this paper are to determine the main important criteria for higher education field selection among students by using AHP and to specify the preferable higher education field selection by using AHP method. The selection of higher education field selection is difficult to decide. Students tends to faced difficulty to choose higher education filed whether to follow their passion or to choose the most preferable choice of higher education field such as medic. As the analysis suggest the most preferable higher education field selection among students is education with the weightage of 0.1726 while the most important criteria for two school's students is self-interested with the weightage of 0.1850

Home made cake batik / Aronick Edward Majimbun... [et al.]

For this semester of July 2010 - November 2010, under the Business Plan Project of ENT 300, we altogether 4 person have decided to establish a new business which are known as Home Made CAKE BATIK. This business is about food production. We are planning to start running this business on January 2011. Our business chooses this food industry field because this is something that can be recognizing as an innovation and new product in Malaysia. Cake Batik is typically known all around Malaysia for the taste of “Cocoa” and “Milo” and it’s a traditional delicacy of Malaysia during “Hari Raya” but it doesn’t have any shop outlet and not been recognized by outside our Malaysian country. As an entrepreneur, we can see this is something new, and therefore we want to take the opportunity start from now on. Cake Batik is a cake that being mixed with Marie biscuit and with only two taste which is Milo and Cocoa. That is why we are taking this kind of business opportunity. The histories about this Cake Batik never reveal but for sure it has been discovered in Malaysia. That is why we are taking a step ahead to run this business opportunity to take the advantage to upgrade the making of Cake Batik into more creative and innovative way. So, we take this opportunity to do this food production business with a small starting cost as a start. Our base of operation is in Putatan area where there is a very developing area and very suitable condition for this business to grow. So, our main operation is to produce Cake Batik and distribute it directly to the customer. Last but not least, we believe that our Home Made CAKE BATIK has high potential in commercial business and we are very confident, our objective will be achieved

Prototype development and pre-commercialization strategies for mobile based property analytics

Government agencies are constantly looking for viable strategies to strengthen their newly implemented policies for nation building. Grassroots or customer sentiments are very important to develop an inclusive policy with a mixed of bottom-up approach to incorporate customer opinion. However, due to the unique political and multiracial landscape in Malaysia, current commercial off-the-shelf Social Analytics are irrelevant to capture sentiments of the multilingual characteristics of Malaysian native speakers. Current Social Analytic tools lack the quality of analysis for foreign languages, such as Malay, which limits businesses to localize advertisement for a specific geographical area. Hence, this research was to develop a real-time social media analytic tool with sentiment analysis specifically in the Malaysian context, in order to engage and analyze customer reviews and opinions. The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate an approach to utilize data from social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, in gaining valuable insights to drive and improve marketing strategy in the property industry. This research developed a tool, namely Property Analytics, to assess public sentiments on specific property projects or services. The methodology and approach to enhance from lab scale to pre commercialization activities are outlined in this paper. It is anticipated that this work is relevant to real world application, improve stakeholder’s decision making, and the people’s quality of life

Supervisor Feedback, Ergonomics and Job Performance: A Study at One of Malaysia's Frontline Government Agency

A well-managed organization usually sees an average worker as the root source of quality and productivity gains. Such organizations do not look to capital investment, but to employees, as the fundamental source of improvement. Therefore, in order to increase employee performance, many factors such as supervisor feedback and ergonomics are very important especially for organization that involves frontline staffs who has to entertain customers all the time. Hence, this study focuses on effect of supervisor feedback and ergonomics towards job performance among employees at one of Malaysia's frontline government agency. The study was quantitatively conducted using standardized questionnaires that was participated by 82 respondents. The results showed that supervisor feedback and ergonomic were significantly and positively impacted job performance. Thus, this study provides references to academics and practitioners on the effectiveness of giving quality feedback and good ergonomically working conditions towards improving performance of frontline staffs. Keywords: Supervisor Feedback; Ergonomics; Job Performance JEL Classifications: M54; M1

Molecular detection and characterisation of feline morbillivirus in domestic cats in Malaysia

Feline morbillivirus (FeMV), a novel virus from the family of Paramyxoviridae, was first identified in stray cat populations. The objectives of the current study were to (i) determine the molecular prevalence of FeMV in Malaysia; (ii) identify risk factors associated with FeMV infection; and (iii) characterise any FeMV isolates by phylogenetic analyses. Molecular analysis utilising nested RT-PCR assay targeting the L gene of FeMV performed on either urine, blood and/or kidney samples collected from 208 cats in this study revealed 82 (39.4%) positive cats. FeMV-positive samples were obtained from 63/124 (50.8%) urine and 20/25 (80.0%) kidneys while all blood samples were negative for FeMV. In addition, from the 35 cats that had more than one type of samples collected (blood and urine; blood and kidney; blood, urine and kidney), only one cat had FeMV RNA in the urine and kidney samples. Risk factors such as gender, presence of kidney-associated symptoms and cat source were also investigated. Male cats had a higher risk (p = 0.031) of FeMV infection than females. In addition, no significant association (p = 0.083) was observed between the presence of kidney-associated symptoms with FeMV status. From the 82 positive samples, FeMV RNA was detected from 48/82 (58.5%) pet cats and 34/126 (27.0%) shelter cats (p < 0.0001). Partial L and N gene sequencing of the RT-PCR-positive samples showed 85–99% identity to the published FeMV sequences and it was significantly different from all other morbilliviruses. A phylogenetic analysis of the identified Malaysian FeMVs was performed with isolates from Japan, Thailand and China. Molecular characterisation revealed high relatedness of the Malaysian isolates with other Asian FeMVs, indicating that the virus had been circulating only within the region. Therefore, this study confirmed the existence of FeMV among domestic cats in Malaysia. The findings suggest further characterisation of the local isolates, including the whole genome sequencing and that studies at determining the direct consequences of FeMV infection in domestic cats are needed