Empowering Malaysian Consumers through Legislation: Does ‘small print’ in contract influence consumer behaviour and affect the quality of life?

Consumers faced with contract do not know what 'small print' contains or understand its effect. Exclusion clauses may deprive a consumer of specific rights in which he deserves protection. The Consumer Protection Act 1999 in Malaysia, allows the consumers to identify between procedural unfairness and substantive unfairness. However, Consumer Protection Act 1999 does not adequately protect consumer. By applying the content analysis research method, this paper reviews the legislative and judicial intervention on unfair terms in consumer contracts. This paper advocates that Malaysia should establish a specific framework on consumer law protection against unfair terms in consumer contracts.Keywords: Exclusion clauses; unfair terms; consumer contracts; judicial-legislative interventioneISSN: 2398-4287 © 2018. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BYNC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia.https://doi.org/10.21834/e-bpj.v3i9.148

The multiple intelligence based enrichment module on the development of human potential: examining its impact and the views of teachers

Purpose – Howard Gardners’ concept of multiple intelligence (MI) offers an alternative perspective on intelligence which highlights the importance of acknowledging learner diversity, individual talents and the development of human potentials. MI has been used as a basis for the construction of modular enrichment activities to facilitate the development of human potential among boarding school students.This study examines (1) the effects of such activities on students of different multiple intelligence profiles and (2) the teachers’ views of the MI based module and activities.Methodology – The study employs a quasi-experimental design with pre- and post-tests administered before and after treatment of the modular enrichment activities. Two groups of students from two Mara Junior Science Colleges (MRSM) in Malaysia participated in the study as the control and treatment groups. McKenzie’s multiple intelligences instrument was used as the pre- and post-test measure. A semi-structured interview protocol was used to obtain teachers’ views of the enrichment activities. Findings – The study found that the MI post-test was favourable towards the treatment group. Students in the treatment group improved on each multiple intelligence profile compared with students in the control group. The qualitative analysis of the interview data revealed favourable responses from the teachers towards the modular enrichment activities and the inclusion of MI. Significance – This study highlights the importance of recognising that each student has his/her distinct potential. These differences can be captured through the construction of various enrichment activities that emphasise on the different multiple intelligences.The modular learning experience simplifies the process of teaching and learning. It enables students and teachers to understand the objectives to be achieved through diverse problem solving and creative production activities.It is hoped that through this study, educators and teachers will gain ideas about ways in which a MI perspective can help them to tap student potential

Aesthetics of the Bidayuh Community Kasah Mat Annah Rais Longhouse

Kasah mat or Kelasah mat is one of the handicrafts known in the Bidayuh ethnic group. Weaving the Kasah mat is a heritage art made of rattan and woven using wood bark. This study is about the aesthetics of Kelasah mat of the Bidayuh community located in Annah Rais Longhouse. Annah Rais Longhouse is a village located in the foothills of the Borneo Highlands and must -visit tourism which are located near Kuching; Sarawak Therefore, the focus of this study is the material of mat production. This study was conducted with qualitative method and interviewed the residents of this longhouse also known as the producer of this Kasah mat. The study revealed that besides concentrating on reviving the culture value, the community of Bidayuh can generated their income through selling this culture product. As a conclusion, the materials used by the manufacturer is to highlight the aesthetics of a mat that is the pride of the Bidayuh people

Principal’s Coalition Building and Personal Traits Brings Success to a Struggling School in Malaysia

This paper presents findings from a single site case study of a school in a rural part of Malaysia. Based on data collected through semi-structured interviews of the principal, teachers, students and parents, and observations, document scanning and field notes, the study attempts to identify the context under which the school operates, the core practices of the school principal and the enactment of these core practices. The data analysis was carried out through data reduction resulting in initial themes which were further refined several times until consensus was achieved. The themes were then discussed under the light of theories resulting in the final categories. The findings reveal that personal traits of the principal and her strength of building strong coalitions enabled her to successfully meet her contextual challenges. In conclusion, we argue that leadership practices are multidimensional and although successful principals draw from the similar repertoire of core practices, they enact these core practices in response to their own unique contexts to bring success. The findings would provide important insights for principals and future researchers who might be interested in conducting similar studies to enrich the successful school leadership literature from Malaysian context

The Philosophy of Research Methodology: A View from Islamic Civilization.

The aim of this article is to highlight the philosophy of research methodology as view from Islamic civilization. Scientific research has no central focus in our modern terms apart from further dominance of nature, refining our materialistic gain and maximizing the control of wealth, improving our health and live a life full of sensual pleasure with no misery. Sadly what was vision was never fully materialized, the upper echelon of the society gained the full benefit while the lower societies were left out and further denigrated

Exploration of instrumental and integrative motivation for reading English as a second language among second year pre-university students of Government MAO College, Lahore (Pakistan)

Since the 1970s work of Gardner and Lambert, studies on language learning motivation have received much consideration in second language research. More recently, studies on reading motivation have also gained much interest. This study was conducted among 40 male second year pre-university students of Government MAO College, Lahore (Pakistan) to investigate the levels of instrumental and integrative motivation for reading English as a Second Language (ESL). Data were collected through an adapted version of Dornyei’s language learning motivation questionnaire, and analyzed by means of descriptive statistics.The findings indicate that the students were more strongly instrumentally motivated for reading English in their context.It was also found that the students have relatively lower levels of integrative motivation for reading English.Based on the findings and implications, recommendations are made for the enhancement of motivation for reading English in the Pakistani context

Digitized Engineering Notebook

The GSURobotics.org is a Digitized Engineering web based application which will allow the students to upload projects details thru the website. Each team needs to create their account and can be able to create or edit their project details such as texts, images or even the team videos. It’s an annual robotics competition where in each team will be reviewed by a team of pioneers and awards will be facilitated to the team that shows creativity and innovation. The competition is completely online. Goals • Challenge students to apply skills in creative ways. • Encourage participation by the public and private firms. • Integrate technology and creativity skills. It’s a new application which can provide the following: • Competitions are open to all school clubs. • Each team can submit as many projects as they want. • There is no time limit for the projects. • Projects will be ranked for their creativity, structure, and their functions. • As per the project deadline the application will be released on April 17 2017. Methods or Algorithms: GSURobotics.com is a rock-solid web application and easy to navigate, dynamic web application with multiple features. We have planned to implement this project by using ASP.net technology for the front end and to store the data in the backend we will be using SQL server. The front page will guide for the team registration. Once the registration is done then the student can upload their project with the project documents, videos and images

I’ll read in English if...: A glimpse into the nature of tertiary ESL reading motivation

Reading is a process that involves effort and choice, hence the significance of motivation. In Malaysian public universities, students usually function in an academic domain where two literacies, English and Bahasa Malaysia, exist side by side, often within the same classroom.This rather unique context adds a new dimension to research on the multifaceted nature of reading motivation.The main objective of this paper is to describe various aspects of motivation for reading in English among undergraduate Malaysian ESL readers, along the constructs of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, and in relation to gender and language proficiency.319 students responded to an adapted version of the Motivation for Reading Questionnaire (MRQ).Although motivation for reading in English was only at moderate levels, results showed a significantly higher level of extrinsic motivation, compared with intrinsic motivation.There was a preference for English reading for reasons related to tests, compliance and recognition.These findings were consistent across proficiency groups.However, females tended to have a higher level of motivation, especially in reading for test purposes.Findings suggest a performance orientation to reading, with external rewards and a competition to score good marks playing a bigger role than personal or social reasons in reading decisions

Implementing ISO 14001 and Environmental Performance Evaluation: A Logistic Regression Model

Due to the growing popularity of environmental management systems and the ongoing debate among practitioners and researchers concerning the influence of environmental management systems on environmental performance, there is a need to assess how the implemented environmental management systems impact the environment. The current study examines the relationship between the guidelines provided by the ISO 14031 and ISO 14001 standards from three aspects, namely, utilizing information and data, planning for environmental performance and reviewing and improving environmental performance. This study will utilize a binary logistic regression to model and analyse the link between ISO 14001 and ISO 14031 using a 7-point Likert scale questionnaire. A total of 590 companies operating within the Saudi Arabia industrial sector were invited to take part in the study. The collection of data using questionnaires lasted from January to March 2019, and the results were analysed and compared with those of related studies. The model included a dependent variable representing whether the company is certified or not for ISO 14001 and 13 independent variables representing the main ISO 14031 guidelines. The research findings revealed that the developed model predicts 92.8% of the values, and the remaining 7.2% of the values are not covered. Thirteen independent variables were positively correlated with the dependent variable, indicating that the company is certified. The results of this study contribute significantly to the determination of the relationship between environmental performance and ISO 14001 certification

An Information-Theoretic Analysis of Self-supervised Discrete Representations of Speech

Self-supervised representation learning for speech often involves a quantization step that transforms the acoustic input into discrete units. However, it remains unclear how to characterize the relationship between these discrete units and abstract phonetic categories such as phonemes. In this paper, we develop an information-theoretic framework whereby we represent each phonetic category as a distribution over discrete units. We then apply our framework to two different self-supervised models (namely wav2vec 2.0 and XLSR) and use American English speech as a case study. Our study demonstrates that the entropy of phonetic distributions reflects the variability of the underlying speech sounds, with phonetically similar sounds exhibiting similar distributions. While our study confirms the lack of direct, one-to-one correspondence, we find an intriguing, indirect relationship between phonetic categories and discrete units.Comment: Accepted in Interspeech 202