Promises of the "Book of Hope" : influences on the new Malaysian government

For more about the East-West Center, see http://www.eastwestcenter.org/Tommy K. S. Koh, former Summer Affiliate Scholar at the East-West Center, explains that "Written as an opposition manifesto, Buku Harapan's desire for greater parliamentary engagement reflected what Pakatan Harapan desired from an expected ruling Barisan Nasional government.

Chain configurations in light nuclei

The model of nuclear matter built from alpha-particles is proposed. The strong deformed shape for doubly even N=Z nuclides from carbon to magnesium has been determined according to this model. In this paper we undertake very simple approach, which assumes the existence of low lying chain configurations.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure

Creation of a brane world with Gauss-Bonnet term

We study a creation of a brane world using an instanton solution. We analyze a brane model with a Gauss-Bonnet term in a bulk spacetime. The curvature of 3-brane is assumed to be closed, flat, or open. We construct instanton solutions with branes for those models, and calculate the value of the actions to discuss an initial state of a brane universe.Comment: 9 pages, 10 figure

Financial Knowledge and Portfolio Complexity in Singapore

Financial literacy in Singapore has not been analyzed in much detail, despite the fact that this is one of the world’s most rapidly aging nations. Using the Singapore Life Panel®, we explore older Singaporeans’ levels of financial knowledge and compare them to those observed in the United States. We assess portfolio complexity for these older households, to examine how financial literacy is related to outcomes of interest. We show that older Singaporeans’ levels of financial literacy are comparable overall to those in the United States, even though older Singaporeans score slightly lower on some dimensions (knowledge of interest and inflation), and slightly higher on their knowledge of risk diversification. We document that women are less informed than men about stock diversification, and educated people tend to be more financially knowledgeable than their less educated counterparts. We also find that financial literacy is positively associated with respondents having both more wealth and more diversified and complex portfolios

Artificial Immune System based on Hybrid and External Memory for Mathematical Function Optimization

Artificial immune system (AIS) is one of the natureinspired algorithm for optimization problem. In AIS, clonal selection algorithm (CSA) is able to improve global searching ability. However, the CSA convergence and accuracy can be further improved because the hypermutation in CSA itself cannot always guarantee a better solution. Alternatively, Genetic Algorithms (GAs) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) have been used efficiently in solving complex optimization problems, but they have a tendency to converge prematurely. Thus, a hybrid PSO-AIS and a new external memory CSA based scheme called EMCSA are proposed. In hybrid PSO-AIS, the good features of PSO and AIS are combined in order to reduce any limitation. Alternatively, EMCSA captures all the best antibodies into the memory in order to enhance global searching capability. In this preliminary study, the results show that the performance of hybrid PSO-AIS compares favourably with other algorithms while EMCSA produced moderate results in most of the simulations

Artificial Immune System Based Remainder Method for Multimodal Mathematical Function Optimization

Artificial immune system (AIS) is one of the nature-inspired algorithm for solving optimization problems. In AIS, clonal selection algorithm (CSA) is able to improve global searching ability compare to other meta-heuristic methods. However, the CSA rate of convergence and accuracy can be further improved as the hypermutation in CSA itself cannot always guarantee a better solution. Conversely, Genetic Algorithms (GAs) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) have been used efficiently in solving complex optimization problems, but they have an inclination to converge prematurely. In this work, the CSA is modified using the best solutions for each exposure (iteration) namely Single Best Remainder (SBR) - CSA. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is able to enhance the performance of the conventional CSA in terms of accuracy and stability for single objective functions

Antibody Remainder Method Based Artificial Immune System for Mathematical Function Optimization

Artificial immune system (AIS) is one of the natureinspired algorithm for solving optimization problem. In AIS, clonal selection algorithm (CSA) is able to improve global searching ability. However, the CSA convergence and accuracy can be improved further because the hypermutation in CSA itself cannot always guarantee a better solution. Alternatively,Genetic Algorithms (GAs) and Particle Swarm Optimization(PSO) have been used efficiently in solving complex optimization problems, but they have a tendency to converge prematurely. In this study, the CSA is modified using the best solution for each exposure (iteration) namely Single Best Remainder (SBR) CSA. In this study, the results show that the performance of the proposed algorithm (SBR-CSA) compares favourably with other algorithms while Half Best Insertion (HBI) CSA produced moderate results in most of the simulations