A Quantitative Study of Quality of Life (QOL) on Postgraduate Students in Universiti Sains Malaysia

A Quantitative study was done to analysis Quality of Life (QOL) between Iranian and Malay postgraduate students in Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM). For this purpose, data were elicited from 35 Iranian and 35 Malay students through a WHOQOL-BREF questionnaire. WHOQOL-BREF has 26 questions and four broad domains namely: Physical health, Psychological, Social Relationships and Environmental domains. Sample characteristics were determined using means and standard deviation and Independent t-tests uses to consider differences for the domain of QOL in two groups of postgraduate students. The participants were of the same language proficiency. Results showed that the internal consistencies (Cronbach alpha) in physical health, psychological, social Relationships and environmental domains are 0.74, 0.79, 0.61, and 0.72, respectively. Moreover, domains are evaluated 60.5 ±10.6, 62.9±11.3, 64.5±14.5, 60.2±10.1 for Malay postgraduate students, and 66.5±13.5, 64.5±16.1, 63.6±17.7, 59.4±13.4 for Iranian postgraduate students, respectively. According to these results, the physical domain is only significant between two groups (P<0.008). Furthermore, our study indicates QOL is in the middle level (50 – 75 %) for all postgraduate students. This study provides comprehensive information that can be applied to improve education quality in national and international students

THE EFFECT OF COMMUNITY LANGUAGE LEARNING (CLL) METHOD ON THE STUDENTS’ ACHIEVEMENT IN ENGLISH CONVERSATION AT THE SEVENTH GRADE STUDENTS OF ISLAMIC MODERN BOARDING SCHOOL OF AS-SAKIENAH INDRAMAYU

Mohamad Dziky Z. “The Effect of Community Language Learning (CLL) Method on The Students’ Achievement in English Conversation at The Seventh Grade Students of Islamic Modern Boarding School of As-Sakienah Indramayu”. The mastery of speaking skills in English is a priority for many second or foreign language learners. Speaking is a crucial part of a second language learning and teaching. But the seventh grade students of Islamic Modern Boarding School of As-Sakienah are too shy and afraid to take a part then the achievement of their English conversation is low. Then the writer applied Community Language Learning (CLL) method to the students learning process. The writer hoped that students will get the high score in English conversation (speaking) through Community Language Learning (CLL) method. The aims of the research are to find out the students’ response to the application of Community Language Learning (CLL) method, to find out the students’ achievement in English conversation before and after the application of Community Language Learning (CLL) method and to find out the effect of Community Language Learning (CLL) method on the students’ achievement in English conversation. The approach of the research in writing this thesis is a quantitative approach. It means that data which is obtained from the field of research then analyzed statically, especially by using the formula of t-test. The writer gives pre-test and post-test. The population of the research is all of students of the seventh grade of Islamic Modern Boarding School of As-Sakienah. All of students at seventh grade consist of three class. In this research the writer took one class consist of 22 students as the sample. The analysis of the tests show that the response of the student seventh grade of Boarding School of As-Sakienah Indramayu majority chose the answer “B” and the mean of the students’ response is 62. It means that the students’ response to the application of CLL method is positive or good. The average score of pre-test was 64.8 and the average score of post-test was 73.9. From those results, the writer got that the result of post-test was higher than pre-test. And the gain of pre-test and post-test is t= 8,47, it is consulted with the table value of t, the two-tail attachment is t0,05= 2,08. So t > t0,05 or 8,47 > 2,08 or 8,47 is bigger than 2.08 by 5% of t formula significance. In other words, there is a positive and significant effect of Community Language Learning (CLL) method to the students’ achievement in English conversation

Children in Prostitution: A study of young women in the rehabilitation centres in Malaysia

Child prostitution has been a major cause of concern in recent years. It is a global phenomenon, which has spread widely in both developing and developed countries. In Malaysia, child prostitution does exist, but it is a phenomenon that the public does not really acknowledge or understand. This study is an attempt to investigate the nature of child prostitution in Malaysia and to identify the key characteristics of victimized children to raise awareness of the phenomenon in the public, government, and NGOs. Two methods of data collection were used in this study; that is semi-structured interview and narrative interview. Altogether, 63 young women safeguarded from prostitution in two rehabilitation centres participated in this study as respondents. The findings suggest that the vast majority of prostituted young women in this sample are likely to: have experienced family dysfunction, family breakdown or domestic violence; be emotionally and physically abused during childhood; suffer from family problems and poor relationship with the family; leave school and home at an early age; and be sexually abused or exploited before they were drawn into prostitution. Ninety-two percent of the respondents entered prostitution between the ages of 13 to 17 years old. The youngest was nine years old. About 48 percent were engaged in prostitution after being deceived by 'boyfriends' who really acting as pimps and 38.1 percent were influenced by peers. Most of them 'served' sex to between 6-10 men per day, 'worked' seven days a week, and were abused by pimps and customers. About 83 percent used drugs, most commonly psychotropic pills and marijuana. The vast majority of them did not use any contraception during prostitution. Implications of the findings are discussed and suggestions made for an effective response to the problem and in aiding the young women in prostitution and the rehabilitation centres, as well as for further research

Pendidikan Moral dalam Kisah Yusuf AS

Pemaparan kisah-kisah dalam al-Qur\u27an bukanlah tanpa tujuan, tetapi diungkapkan sebagai pesan pengajaran yang disampaikan pemberi pesan (Allah Swt) kepada pembaca melalui rangkaian peristiwa, kehidupan sosial dan karakter para tokohnya. Kisah-kisah merupakan bagian petunjuk yang diberikan oleh Allah swt tentang berbagai hal yang berhubungan dengan moralitas, sistem nilai, tingkah laku, dan sebagainya. Ketika membaca kisah-kisah dalam al-Qur\u27an, orang-orang beriman hendaknya mengambil intisari pesan yang dikandung, kemudian menjadikannya sebagai pelajaran, patokan, dan idealisme yang dipegang dalam hidup bermasyaraka

Integrating vocational training in culinary arts and Islamic studies at juvenile rehabilitation centres: Malaysian experience

The Juvenile Rehabilitation Centres (JRC) in Malaysia aims to provide shelter, counselling and skills training to juveniles specifically for those who wish to transform themselves from the regrettable misdeeds they have committed. At JRCs, an integrated Culinary Vocational Training and Islamic education forms part of their training curriculum. The skills acquired should enable trainees to secure jobs upon completion of training. However, there are some training institutions that lack systematic training structures resulting in trainees becoming less skilful in both vocational and Islamic education. The objective of this research is to identify the effectiveness of an integrated Culinary and Islamic Education curriculum implemented at JRCs in Malaysia. This is a descriptive survey and data was obtained using questionnaire and interview. Respondents comprised 92 trainees, four managers, four culinary trainers and four Islamic education teachers, all from four different JRCs. The findings show that the trainees are happy with their trainings that brought about positive effects for them. Some suggestions have been made to provide improvements in the implementation of the course among them the inclusion of prayers in the Islamic education syllabus

Unfamiliar facial identity registration and recognition performance enhancement

The work in this thesis aims at studying the problems related to the robustness of a face recognition system where specific attention is given to the issues of handling the image variation complexity and inherent limited Unique Characteristic Information (UCI) within the scope of unfamiliar identity recognition environment. These issues will be the main themes in developing a mutual understanding of extraction and classification tasking strategies and are carried out as a two interdependent but related blocks of research work. Naturally, the complexity of the image variation problem is built up from factors including the viewing geometry, illumination, occlusion and other kind of intrinsic and extrinsic image variation. Ideally, the recognition performance will be increased whenever the variation is reduced and/or the UCI is increased. However, the variation reduction on 2D facial images may result in loss of important clues or UCI data for a particular face alternatively increasing the UCI may also increase the image variation. To reduce the lost of information, while reducing or compensating the variation complexity, a hybrid technique is proposed in this thesis. The technique is derived from three conventional approaches for the variation compensation and feature extraction tasks. In this first research block, transformation, modelling and compensation approaches are combined to deal with the variation complexity. The ultimate aim of this combination is to represent (transformation) the UCI without losing the important features by modelling and discard (compensation) and reduce the level of the variation complexity of a given face image. Experimental results have shown that discarding a certain obvious variation will enhance the desired information rather than sceptical in losing the interested UCI. The modelling and compensation stages will benefit both variation reduction and UCI enhancement. Colour, gray level and edge image information are used to manipulate the UCI which involve the analysis on the skin colour, facial texture and features measurement respectively. The Derivative Linear Binary transformation (DLBT) technique is proposed for the features measurement consistency. Prior knowledge of input image with symmetrical properties, the informative region and consistency of some features will be fully utilized in preserving the UCI feature information. As a result, the similarity and dissimilarity representation for identity parameters or classes are obtained from the selected UCI representation which involves the derivative features size and distance measurement, facial texture and skin colour. These are mainly used to accommodate the strategy of unfamiliar identity classification in the second block of the research work. Since all faces share similar structure, classification technique should be able to increase the similarities within the class while increase the dissimilarity between the classes. Furthermore, a smaller class will result on less burden on the identification or recognition processes. The proposed method or collateral classification strategy of identity representation introduced in this thesis is by manipulating the availability of the collateral UCI for classifying the identity parameters of regional appearance, gender and age classes. In this regard, the registration of collateral UCI s have been made in such a way to collect more identity information. As a result, the performance of unfamiliar identity recognition positively is upgraded with respect to the special UCI for the class recognition and possibly with the small size of the class. The experiment was done using data from our developed database and open database comprising three different regional appearances, two different age groups and two different genders and is incorporated with pose and illumination image variations

Unmasking of myoclonus by lacosamide in generalized epilepsy

Lacosamide is a new-generation antiseizure medication that is approved for use as an adjunctive treatment and monotherapy in focal epilepsy. Its use in generalized epilepsy, however, has not been adequately evaluated in controlled trials. We report a 67-year-old woman who experienced new-onset myoclonic seizures after initiation of lacosamide. We presume that she had an undiagnosed generalized epilepsy syndrome, likely juvenile myoclonic epilepsy. Myoclonic seizures were not reported before introducing lacosamide and completely resolved after lacosamide was discontinued. This suggests that lacosamide may have the potential to worsen myoclonus, similar to what has been reported with another sodium channel agent, lamotrigine, in some individuals with genetic generalized epilepsy (GGE)

The Determinants that Influence Household Debt Case in Malaysia

The level of household debt in Malaysia may in turn cause another financial crisis as it is at worrying stage. Therefore, the aims of this study is to identify the relationship between household debt and its determinants as well as to determine the most significant factor that affect the household debt. The mode of empirical investigation is Ordinary Least Square Method with the multiple regressions which are applied to monthly time series data spanning from 2012 to 2016 for four variables such as Interest Rate, Inflation, Unemployment Rate and Consumption. Data collected from Eikon Thomson Reuters and Monthly Statistical Bulletin. The study implies that interest rate, unemployment rate and consumption are positive and significantly related with household debt whereas the result illustrates an insignificant yet positive relationship between inflation and household debt. As a conclusion, these findings bear important implications for Malaysian policymakers. &nbsp; &nbsp; Keywords: Interest Rate, Inflation, Unemployment Rate and Consumption