Provocation as a partial defence in murder : a study on its applicability in relation to the battered women in Malaysia and the United Kingdom / Mimi Sintia Haji Mohd Bajury

In criminal law, provocation is a possible defence by excuse or exculpation alleging a sudden or temporary loss of control (a permanent loss of control is in the realm of insanity) as a response to another's provocative conduct sufficient to justify an acquittal, a mitigated sentence or a conviction for a lesser charge. Provocation can be a relevant factor on a court's assessment of a defendant's mens rea, intention, or state of mind, at the time of an act of which the defendant is accused. This paper aims to examine the differences between the laws of provocation in Malaysia as compared to United Kingdom and to identify whether the Court in Malaysia will accept "battered women syndrome" as an element to qualify for the defence of provocation. In completing the paper, library based method is adopted to collect and analyse data gained from various sources. The major statute analysed in this paper is the Penal Code of Malaysia and the Homicide Act 1957 of the United Kingdom. A hypothesis of various decided cases by the courts in the United Kingdom involving battered women suffering from battered woman syndrome was done according to the law of provocation in Malaysia. This is to make an analogy of the outcome of those cases should they were decided in Malaysia. To date, evidence of battered woman syndrome had not been sought to be admitted in a local trial proceeding. It remains a big question mark whether it will be accepted by the court in Malaysia should such evidence is adduce during trial. It is proposed that the court in Malaysia should consider such evidence as to protect those wives who had been battered by their abusive husbands and still remained in the household due to several reasons, but one day decided to retaliate when they could not take it anymore. Therefore, it is hoped that this research paper could be a catalyst to some legal revolutions in protecting the "victim" who killed their abusive partner as a means of retaliation and self-defence when they could not tolerate further abuse

Artificial Intelligence in the Tourism Industry: A privacy impasse

Artificial Intelligence (AI) adoption in the tourism industry has resulted with privacy concerns as companies feed a vast amount of consumer data into AI, creating sensitive customer information. Therefore, this research aims at investigating the adequacy of the Personal Data Protection Act 2010 in addressing the privacy challenges raised by AI. Combining the doctrinal methodology and a case study, this research produced systematic means of legal reasoning pertinent to AI applications in the tourism industry. Ensuring privacy and security through every phase of the data lifecycle is pivotal to avoid legal liability for the tourism players while preserving customer confidence. Keywords: Artificial Intelligence and Law, Privacy and Artificial Intelligence, Privacy Engineering Model, Data Protection and Artificial Intelligence eISSN: 2398-4287 © 2022. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open-access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under the 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. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21834/ebpj.v7iSI7.381

Artificial Intelligence-Powered Criminal Sentencing in Malaysia: A conflict with the rule of law

Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises to heighten human decision-making, including in court. AI sentencing would be better at detecting, organizing, and calibrating all of the variables correlated to sentencing, such as prior criminal records, educational background, substance abuse history, and employment history, resulting in consistencies that traditional sentencing may not be able to provide. AI pervades the Malaysian judiciary system when AI criminal sentencing was launched for the first time to augment the process of meting out sentences in Sabah courts. Despite its promising benefits, AI sentencing may infringe the fundamental principle of due process, presents unacceptable risks of error and implicit bias, and reliance on AI to predict recidivism which forms significant components of the rule of law. The rule of law guarantees that all entities are subject to and accountable to a clear and known law. It enables the judicial branch of the government to be independent and to resolve dispute in a fair manner while upholding the presumption of innocence and preventing the exercise of arbitrary powers. The present research, therefore, examines the use of AI in supporting court processes and human judges, discovering its technical characteristics, practical constraints, and legal theoretical consequences for decision-making processes. Employing jurisprudential analysis as the method of research, this research explores an adjudicatory paradigm that prefers standardisation over discretion, leading in the waning of the notion of rule of law pertinent to the justice system. The metamorphosis to AI adjudication will undoubtedly promote the growth of digitalized dispute resolution by providing efficiency and at least a semblance of impartiality, but it is also poised to birth concerns by making the legal system data-driven, alienating, and disillusioning. Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence in Courts, Artificial Intelligence in Criminal Justice  eISSN: 2398-4287© 2022. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open-access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under the responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians/Africans/Arabians), and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21834/ebpj.v7iSI7.381

Governing the Risks of Cyber Bullying in the Workplace During the Era of Covid-19

With the advancement of ICT, cyberbullying has become more common than ever before, particularly in modern workplaces. With the requirement of working from home during the pandemic, cyberbullying within the workplace has skyrocketed within the past year. Cyberbullying can be classified as a traditional crime that has transcended to cyberspace as a result of technological advancements and the proliferation of numerous social media platforms. Despite widespread public concern about such crime in Malaysia, the legislative response to this crime is still somewhat slow due to the gaps in the current legislation governing cyberbullying. The legal landscape governing cyberbullying is still insufficient, due to the current legal framework being too general, making investigation and prosecution of the crime difficult. Cyberbullying can result in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, psychological problems, major physical and mental health problems, and even suicide. The purpose of this article is to investigate the notions of cyber bullying harassment, the risks associated with such crimes, and the legal and management mechanisms for dealing with such crimes. This research makes use of a doctrinal content analysis as well as secondary data from the law, academic journals, books, and online sources. According to the authors, unequal power relations in the workplace, anonymity, and cross-border connectedness are some of the rationales for cyberbullying, which can be expressed in a variety of ways with negative consequences for employers and employees alike. The inadequacy of the present traditional and computer-specific legislation in dealing with such crime necessitates the management of such crime

Copyright Concerns for Educators: Online Learning Post Pandemic Effect

Online distance education was once a process that was not easily been accepted by students, even by the educators, but when the pandemic strikes, they had to adopt and adapt the process in order to gain knowledge. The COVID-19 has resulted in shutting down schools, including tertiary institutions, all across the world. Consequently, education changed dramatically, and the mode of teaching was done remotely and on a digital platform. One of the adoptions of online learning involves using numerous online platforms and inserting interactive programs, music, animated graphics, photos in the teaching material to attract the interest of students. These types of works are, more often than not, copyrighted works that belong to someone. Generally, a license or permission must be sought before these works can be used by anyone. The permission or license, once granted, would involve a licensing fee or royalty payments to the copyright owner. However, this article looks at the law relating to the copyright exploitation awareness in the context of the law of intellectual property and the exceptions to this law, in particular, the scope of the hybrid fair dealing defence for education. This paper employs a doctrinal analysis using secondary data from academic journals, books, and online databases. The findings will respond to the legal framework for the understanding of copyright exploitation and its exception in the post-pandemic era

Prebiotic evaluation of red seaweed (Kappaphycus alvarezii) using in vitro colon model

Red seaweed (Kappaphycus alvarezii) cultivated from Sabah (RSS) and Langkawi (RSL) were digested using in vitro mouth, gastric and duodenal model. The digested seaweed then fermented in a pH-controlled batch culture system inoculated with human faeces to mimic the distal colon. Bacterial enumeration were monitored using fluorescent in situ hybridisation, and the fermentation end products, the short chain fatty acids (SCFA), were analysed using HPLC. Both RSS and RSL showed significant increase of Bifidobacterium sp.; from log10 7.96 at 0 h to log10 8.72 at 24 h, and from log10 7.96 at 0 h to log10 8.60 at 24 h, respectively, and shows no significant difference when compared to the Bifidobacterium sp. count at 24 h of inulin fermentation. Both seaweeds also showed significant increase in total SCFA production, particularly acetate and propionate. Overall, this data suggested that K. alvarezii might have the potential as a prebiotic ingredient

Bioengineering approaches to simulate human colon microbiome ecosystem

Background Several diseases associated to colon microbial imbalance (dysbiosis), such as obesity, diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, cardiovascular disease and cancer, are being reverted by modulation of gut microbiota composition through treatment with prebiotics and probiotics. Multiple in vitro models have been developed over the past three decades, with several experimental configurations, as they provide a quick, easy, and cost-effective approach to study the gut microbiome, as compared to troublesome and time-consuming in vivo studies. Scope and approach This review aims to provide an overview of the most relevant available in vitro models used to mimic the human colon microbiome dynamics, including macro-scale and microfluidic-based models. Main characteristics, functionalities, current applications and advantages or disadvantages of the models are discussed in order to provide useful information for end users (namely food and pharmaceutical researchers), when selecting the most appropriated model for assessing health claims and safety of novel functional food and drugs. Finally, the use of these colon models as a tool to study prebiotic and probiotic response in host-microbiota interaction is reviewed. Key findings and conclusions A wide range of in vitro models representing specific colon parts have been developed. However, none of these models can simultaneously cover all the key conditions found in the human colon (namely anatomical, physical, biochemical, and biological characteristics), as well as the complex microbiome-host interaction. Thus, there is a significant opportunity for further improvement of the models experimental setups towards more realistic operating systems, including mucosal surfaces, intestinal cells and tissues allowing microbiomehost crosstalk representation.SFRH/BD/139884/2018 from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). This study was supported by the FCT under the scope of the strategic funding of UIDB/04469/2020 unit and the Project ColOsH PTDC/BTM–SAL/30071/2017 (POCI–01–0145–FEDER–030071)info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Prebiotic properties evaluation of red seaweed (Kappaphycus alvarezii) using in vitro colon model

The red seaweed Kappaphycus alvarezii is rich in carrageenan polysaccharides that are used in hydrocolloids industry for gelling and thickening agents in pharmaceutical, biotechnology and food application. It has been claimed that the carrageenan is not digestible by human. Present study builds on that knowledge to test the potential of red seaweed as a prebiotic through in vitro digestion and fermentation. The objectives of this study are to determine the digestibility of K. alvarezii through in vitro gastric and duodenal digestion, to analyze the metabolite short chain fatty acids (SCFAs) generated by the fermentation of seaweeds by using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and to evaluate the fermentation selectivity of seaweeds by the human feces microbiota by using fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) technique. The digestibility of red seaweeds (Kappaphycus alvarezii) cultivated from Sabah (RSS) and Langkawi (RSL) was determined using in vitro gastric and duodenal digestion model that mimicking human gastrointestinal tract condition. The resulting fractions of seaweeds that resisted gastric and duodenal digestion were used as substrates for fermentation in pHcontrolled batch culture system inoculated with human feces to mimic human distal colon condition. Inulin was used as positive control and samples were taken at 0, 6, 12 and 24 h of fermentation for bacterial enumeration and SCFAs analysis. Red seaweed from Sabah (RSS) showed no significant difference with inulin for its non-digestibility while red seaweed from Langkawi (RSL) showed the highest digestibility (4.55%) by in vitro gastric and duodenal digestion. Both RSS and RSL showed significant increase of Bifidobacterium sp.; from log10 7.96 at 0 h to log10 8.72 at 24 h, and from log10 7.96 at 0 h to log10 8.60 at 24 h respectively, but at 24 h both seaweeds showed no significant difference when compared to the Bifidobacterium sp. count at the end of the inulin fermentation. The growth for Clostridium sp. in RSS (from log10 at 0 h 6.78 to log10 7.27 at 24 h) and RSL (from log10 6.78 at 0 h to log10 7.24 at 24 h) also showed no significant difference in comparison to inulin (from log10 6.78 at 0 h to log10 7.26 at 24 h). Inulin and RSS showed significant increase in total SCFA production after 24 h of fermentation, particularly in acetate and propionate. While for RSL, the total SCFA showed significant increased at 6 h, however, the total SCFA showed no significant difference after 12 and 24 h. Overall, this data suggested that RSS have potential as a prebiotic similar to the positive control, inulin compared to RSL. This is because RSS shows more bifidogenic factor and high total SCFAs production compare to RSL

Evaluation of potential prebiotics: a review

Prebiotics are any undigested food ingredients that are selectively fermented and allow for specific changes in the gut microbiota, thus improving the hosts’ health. In order to assess the potential of a food component to be considered as a prebiotic ingredient, several in vitro and in vivo experimentations need to be performed to provide scientific substantiation. In vitro studies are widely used because they are faster, cheaper, and more ethical compared to in vivo studies. However, in vitro studies faced difficulties in simulating the highly complex physiological and physiochemical events occurring in animal and human digestive tracts. Therefore, it is recommended that the results of in vitro studies be justified with in vivo experimentations to support their specific methodologies. Devised standard procedures for the evaluation and validation of prebiotic ingredients will boost confidence among the scientific community, approval of regulators, and acceptance from consumers on prebiotics and functional food science