An action research on promotion of health ageing and risk reduction of chronic disease : a need assessment study among rural elderly Malays, care givers and health professionals

Prior to the development of a healthy ageing and risk reduction of chronic diseases intervention package for older people in Malaysia, a need assessment study was conducted to identify nutritional knowledge status and information needs, as part of an action research process. Design: A cross sectional study was conducted among 267 elderly people, 54 care givers and 66 health professionals in two rural areas of Peninsular of Malaysia (i.e Sabak Bernam, Selangor and Kuala Pilah, Negeri Sembilan). Information on nutritional knowledge was obtained from an interview based questionnaire for older subjects and caregiver and through self administered questionnaire from the health professionals. Anthropometric and functional measurements were also conducted among elderly subjects. Results: It was found that the elderly subjects had poor nutritional knowledge with 43.8% of them classified as having unsatisfactory nutritional knowledge, followed by moderately satisfactory (33.7%), very unsatisfactory (15.7%) and good (6.7%). Talks, counselling sessions with health professionals and electronic media such as television and radio were the most preferred nutrition education sources among elderly subjects and their care givers. The majority of health professionals studied (98.5%) had good nutritional knowledge. Although most of them (93.6%) were involved in management of the elderly, only 45.5% incorporated nutritional information component in this activity. Most of the health professionals used the guidelines for management of elderly patients (63.6%). However, nutritional knowledge was very minimal in these guidelines. Multiple regression analysis indicated that ‘level education’, involvement in ‘social activities’, presence of ‘hearing problems’, the Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL) score, having previous ‘nutritional information’ and ‘participation in healthy eating programme’ were the major predictors of nutritional knowledge score among elderly subjects. Conclusion: Based on the above findings it is thus, imperative that an appropriate nutritional intervention package and programme be developed so as to help improve nutritional knowledge and subsequently the nutritional status of the rural elderly Malays

University of Malaya dental students' attitudes towards communication skills learning: Implications for dental education

The Ministry of Higher Education in Malaysia has called for the implementation of a soft skills module in all public universities in Malaysia. In response to this and as part of curriculum development efforts for a new integrated program for 2011, a study was undertaken to improve the University of Malaya (UM) Faculty of Dentistry's communication skills course. One of the study objectives was to investigate dental students' attitudes towards communication skills learning and the association between their attitudes and demographic and education-related characteristics. A cross-sectional survey-using a self-administered twenty-four-item adapted Communication Skills Attitude Scale (CSAS) that contained both positive (PAS) and negative (NAS) attitude subscales-was carried out targeting all final-year dental students at the UM and the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM). A total of 148 students completed the survey, yielding a response rate of 88.1 percent. Overall, UKM students had significantly more positive attitudes towards communication skills learning (PAS score: mean=48.69, SD=4.48, p<0.001) than UM students (mean=46.03, SD=4.22). There was no statistically significant difference in negative attitudes between the two groups. UKM students with more positive attitudes tended to be female (p<0.05). UM students with more negative attitudes perceived themselves as poor communicators (p<0.05), and UKM students with more negative attitudes tended to have poor English proficiency (p<0.05). This study found that both UM and UKM final-year dental students have positive and negative attitudes towards learning communication skills. These attitudes were significantly associated with certain background and education-related attributes. Outcomes of this study served as a valuable guide in strengthening the communication skills course for the UM's new, integrated dental curriculum

The impact of subprime mortgage crisis to long-run and short-run volatility components of indonesian and malaysian equity markets

This study investigates the long-run and short-run movements of various stock market volatilities using a volatility decomposition methodology (Ding and Granger, 1996; Engle and Lee, 1999). We studied the impact of 2007-2008 subprime mortgage crisis on both the transitory and permanent volatility components in terms of two empirical stylized facts, the leverage effect and volatility persistence. In order to do so, the long spanning data are separated into three different periods. For the former stylized fact, the Crisis Impact on the leverage effect is mainly temporary with no long-run effect to the stock markets. This finding explained that the leverage effect is mostly difficult to adjust in the short-run transitory volatility during the crisis periods. However with proper risk management and long term strategies, most of the market participants are able to anticipate and handle this news impact in the long-run. For the latter stylized fact, the crisis has slightly increased the volatility persistence in all the markets. From the viewpoint of heterogeneous market hypothesis, the higher intensity of volatility persistence implied that the stock markets are less informationally efficient

Morphological Variations of Amorphophallusspp. Blume ex Decne. in Peninsular Malaysia

Amorphophallus has attracted much attention as it contains glucomannan and also possessother medicinal properties. Prior to the collection of propagating materials and cultivation, identification and diversity information of the Amorphophallus species areessential as different species perform differently under cultivation. Sixty accessions of Amorphophallusspp., with 10accessions representing six locations, were used to assess morphological of vegetative characters variations. Thirty-four morphological characters of each accession were observed and recorded. Cluster and principal coordinate analysis using Gower’s similarity coefficient classified the accessions into two groups. The first group included all 10 accessions. The second group consisted of 50 accessions. The component analysis (PCA) results revealed the diversity among 60 Amorphophallus spp. accessions with the first three principal components contributed 66.34% of the total variability. The PCA show that there were variationsinmorphological characteristics among accessions of Amorphophallus spp. basedon corm size, corm shape, cormel number per corm and petiole nature. The morphological analysis results suggest that two different species, A. paeoniifoliusandA. prainii,were identified

Flexible pavement crack's severity identification and classification using deep convolution neural network

Effective road maintenance program is vital to ensure traffic safety, serviceability, and prolong the life span of the road. Maintenance will be carried out on pavements when signs of degradation begin to appear and delays may also lead to increased maintenance costs in the future, when more severe changes may be required. In Malaysia, manual visual observation is practiced in the inspection of distressed pavements. Nonetheless, this method of inspection is ineffective as it is more laborious, time consuming and poses safety hazard. This study focuses in utilizing an Artificial Intelligence (AI) method to automatically classify pavement crack severity. Field data collection was conducted to allow meaningful verification of accuracy and reliability of the crack's severity prediction based on AI. Several important phases are required in research methodology processes including data collection, image labelling, image resizing, image enhancement, deep convolution neural network (DCNN) training and performance evaluation. Throughout the analysis of image processing results, the image ouqJUt was successfully classified using MATLAB software. The good agreement between field measurement data and DCNN prediction of crack's severity proved the reliability of the system. In conclusion, the established method can classify the crack's severity based on JKR guideline of visual assessment