Goods and services tax (GST) on construction capital cost and housing property price

Good and Service Tax (GST) an indirect broad-based conswnpti.on tax. Following with the implementation of GST in Malaysia on 1st April 2015, it is suspected that the construction capital cost and housing property price will increase accordingly. This study is aim to review the GST effect associated on construction capital cost and it influences towards housing developer and housing property price. Additionally, this study highlights what was the developer point of view on the GST given to them and also the housing price further proposes initiatives to the housing developers. Argument of GST effect is useful for the public administrators so that to re-consider the rate of GST and also beneficial to the construction parties to account with the GST implementation. As conclusion, this study review that GST do give an impact towards the construction capital cost, housing developer and housing property price in terms of knock-on effect

Corpus Linguistics based error analysis of first year Universiti Teknologi Malaysia students’ writing

The ability to write in English among Malaysian university students is generally not at the most satisfactory level although English is considered as a second language. There has been a growing research interest in the analysis of errors students make in their English writing. The purpose of this study is to identify the errors made by first year UTM students in their writing. Besides that, this study also seeks to find out how much students know about the errors that they produce in writing besides investigating how they react towards these errors. For this study, 66 questionnaires were distributed to first year UTM students from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and the Faculty of Civil Engineering. Besides that, students’ samples of paragraph were also used to collect the intended data. Findings from the study show that from the 66 paragraph samples analyzed, a total of 1202 errors were found and then tagged according to the types of error. Besides that, findings from the questionnaire show that many of the students are not sure about their English proficiency level and most of them agreed that they would like to improve their English writing by addressing the errors that they make. The paper concludes with the overall summary of the study, limitations of the study as well as the pedagogical implications of the study

Goods and services tax (GST) on construction capital cost and housing property price

Good and Service Tax (GST) an indirect broad-based conswnpti.on tax. Following with the implementation of GST in Malaysia on 1st April 2015, it is suspected that the construction capital cost and housing property price will increase accordingly. This study is aim to review the GST effect associated on construction capital cost and it influences towards housing developer and housing property price. Additionally, this study highlights what was the developer point of view on the GST given to them and also the housing price further proposes initiatives to the housing developers. Argument of GST effect is useful for the public administrators so that to re-consider the rate of GST and also beneficial to the construction parties to account with the GST implementation. As conclusion, this study review that GST do give an impact towards the construction capital cost, housing developer and housing property price in terms of knock-on effect

Global optimization methods for calibration and optimization of the hydrologic tank model's parameters

The tank model, a lumped conceptual hydrological model, is well known due to its simplicity of concept, simplicity in computation while achieving forecasting accuracy comparable with more sophisticated models. However, the calibration of the hydrologic tank model required much time and effort to obtain better results through trial and error method. With the development of artificial intelligence, three probabilistic Global Optimization methods namely Genetic Algorithm (GA), Shuffle Complex Evolution (SCE) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) were adopted for model calibration. The objective of the study is to find the best type of Global Optimization Methods and the best configuration to calibrate tank model that will produce the best fit between the observed and simulated runoff. The selected study area is Bedup Basin, located at Samarahan Division, Sarawak. Input data used for model calibration is a single storm event. The optimal parameters obtained will then be validated with 11 other single storm events. The performance of the optimization techniques is measured using Coefficient of Correlation (R) and Nash-Sutcliffe coefficient (E 2 ). Results show that all three probabilitic GOMs are able to obtain optimal value for 10 parameters of tank model. However, the best GOMs for hourly runoff simulation is PSO. SCE appeard to be the second best performance GOMs and the least performed is GA technique

Experimental validation of the mechanical coupling response for hygro-thermally curvature-stable laminated composite materials

Stacking sequence configurations for hygro-thermally curvature-stable (HTCS) laminates have recently been identified in 9 classes of coupled laminate with standard ply angle orientations +45, "1245, 0 and 9

Lipid and fatty acid contents in red tides from tropical fish ponds of the coastal water of South China Sea

Microplanktonic red tide blooms (dominated by dinoflagellates) were observed in brackish water fish ponds of Terengganu between March 1992 to January 1993. The first short-lived bloom (2-3 days) occurred in October 1992 while the second long-lived bloom (6-7 days) occurred in January 1993. The dominant dinoflagellate species comprised of Peridinium quinquecorne (>90% total cell count) with considerable proportion of Protoperidinium excentricum. Ciliophora consisting of Tintinopsis sp. and Favella sp. were also present during the bloom period. The total ash, chlorophyll, phaeopigment, lipid and fatty acid content of the microplankton were studied. Considerable amounts (6-11% of the total fatty acid) of the polyunsaturated fatty acid 18:3w3 (linolenic acid ) were present in the microplankton. However, high amounts of 20:5w3 (eicosapentanoic acid) and 22:6w3 (docosahexaenoic acid) were present with variable but usually high amounts of 22:4w6 and 22:5w6 acids. The latter microplankton bloom contained higher amounts of 20:5w3 and 22:6w3 acids than the earlier bloom. Lipid content were three to five times higher than chlorophyll a. There was an increase with successive day after bloom outbreak in the relative proportion of total C18, C20, and C22 fatty acid components. The algae microplankton contained the w3-polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) probably needed for the growth and survival rate of grazing pond animals

Corpus analysis of primary one science textbooks for designing ELT materials

To make use of words or lists of words in various forms for various purposes is not new. We have been using lists of vocabulary words for tourists and students from various levels of education in the form of glossaries, lists of jargons, indexes and the like. Such lists are called corpus.The government’s recent policy on the teaching of Science in English calls for a fundamental support from language practitioners and researchers of these fields. Here, we highlights some important issues regarding the use of English as the medium of instruction for the teaching and learning of Science in primary schools. Among others, the language issue related to the lexical, syntactic and semantic patterns of English in Science and Technology (EST) has been ‘under-researched’. This, therefore, sets the focus of our study which undertakes to examine the language patterns existing in science authentic texts. Among the many conventional methods that can be adopted, such as functional-notional @ communicative method (Wilkins, 1976), structural @grammar approach (Chomsky, 1965), procedural approach (Prabhu, 1987) or instrospective and retrospective methods (Pressley and Afflerbach, 1995) which often times are limited and unsystematic, we propose to employ the method which involves the making of corpus of this subject area using lexical approach (Lewis, 1994). The lexical approach (Lewis, 1993; Willis, 1990, Willis & Willis, 1988, 1989) is chosen for a number of reasons: 1) it emphasises on the importance of co-text (i.e. language is not de-contextualised), 2) it provides a range of awareness-raising activities that direct the learner’s attention to chunks text composed, 3) it focuses on different forms of lexical item. The corpus produced can then be used by other researchers in this area for teaching and learning purposes. In this paper, we will discuss the preliminary stage of an ongoing research which aims to design teaching and learning materials through an analysis of a corpus of texts taken from Science textbooks for Primary One students in Malaysia. The topic of our research is ‘EST Teaching and Learning Materials via WWW Based on Corpus Analysis of Mathematics, Science and English Text Books in Malaysian Primary Schools’. This paper, however, only focuses on the use of the frequency list and corpus of Science texts to develop teaching and learning materials for English language learners of Primary One students

Design, Construction and Testing of Freeze Concentrator

The main aspects of this study, were the design, construction and performance of a freeze concentrator. The design process consists of three main parts: a vertical tube heat exchanger, an auger to scrape the ice formed and a refrigeration unit to bring the temperature to below freezing. Basically, the freeze concentration process used involves ice formation from a juice solution at the surface of a vertical tube heat exchanger. The ice will be scraped by a rotating auger, which pushes it out through a window and collected in a reservoir. This results in a product of higher solute concentration than its concentration in the feed. The potential application of the freeze concentrator was experimented using sugar solutions at three different feed concentrations i.e. 7.5%, 10.3% and 12% brix, as well as pineapple juice at 11.4% brix. The freezing point depression for the solutions were respectively -l.O7°C, -l.15°C, -1.49°C and -1.49°C. The feed flow rates used for the solutions were respectively 0.65 Vmin, 0.5 Vmin, 0.43 Vmin and 0.45 Vmin. Using these process parameters, the total mass of ice after 180 min is 1.75kg for a feed of 7.5% brix and 1.46kg for a feed of 12% brix. From theoretical analysis, the expected total mass of ice produced is 2.6kg for the 7.5% brix and 1.97kg for the 12% brix solution. Therefore, the performance efficiency for the freeze concentrator is around 67% of theory for all three sugar solutions. Base on the heat balance analysis, the overall thermal performance of this freeze concentration process for the three different feed concentrations shows that about 80010 of the refrigeration load is loss. If these losses were not considered, about 87% of the cooling energy transferred is for sensible heat removal and 13% for ice formation

Study on Microstructure and Strength of Friction Stir Spot Welding On Copper Alloy Sheet

Friction Stir Spot Welding is the derivative of Friction Stir Welding (FSSW). It is a solidstate joining process of metal sheets with the thickness not more than 3 rnrn. Most of the process is being used in the automotive industry. FSSW is a process without lateral movement of the tool compared to Friction Stir Welding. Two sheets of different combinations of material were welded by using the FSSW process. The thickness of the sheet 0.9 rnrn. The combinations of material are Aluminum alloy to Aluminum alloy, Copper Alloy to Copper Alloy and Copper Alloy to Aluminum alloy. For each of the combination, the tool rotational speed were varied with 2000, 3000, 4000 rpm each. Then, 3 samples of welded sheets with tool rotational speed of 3000 rpm were observed on the microstructure using the optical microscope. Three different welded areas of affected by the FSSW were seen under the microscope to be characterized. The other samples were taken to be tested on the tensile strength using the Universal Tensile Strength Machine. The load resulted from the test were calculated to get the value of tensile strength for the welding process