Media and the Kadazandusun People’s Way of Life

This study aims at exploring the inclination of belief about the ways of living among Kadazandusun people – whether leaning towards spirituality or materialism. Nowadays humanity are greatly consumed with the idea that happiness would only be achieved when someone accumulate huge worldly possessions and wealth. Obsession to acquire and accrue a great deal of material possessions to gratify people’s needs, wants and desires has been said to be promoted by the mass media. Therefore, apart from exploring the choice of living styles, this study also examines the role that media might have in propagating materialistic values among the Kadazandusuns in Sabah.  The outcomes of study show that Kadazandusun people are yet to indulge into extreme materialistic lifestyles, instead they are generally inclined quite strongly towards religious way of life. This study also found out that TV viewing appears to cultivate spiritual values instead of materialism. Keywords: Advertising, Kadazandusuns, Spirituality and Materialis

How normalization can be linked with theory of planned behavior towards the actual behavior of green practice on mobile phone

The evolution of mobile phones into smart multi-functional mobile computers have led to a serious Abnormal Battery Drain (ABD) issue. This has spurred the need for green practice in mobile phone to overcome ABD concern. However, far too little attention has been paid to the green practice that focuses on ABD. Hence, this paper aims to conceptualize the actual behavior of green practice on mobile phones by integrating the Theory of Planned Behavior and Normalization Process Theory. Previous studies have found that current green marketing has failed to predict the actual green practice; the intention does not come with actual behavior. Actual green practice only can be achieved through normalization of green practice across the board. Therefore, normalization is strongly suggested to be integrated with the Theory of Planned Behavior to ensure the actual behavior in green practice can be achieved. Apart from conceptualization, the paper also proposes a total of 400 self-administered questionnaires to be distributed among mobile phone users, in main cities in Malaysia via a snowball sampling technique. The Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) approach has been used for data analysis. The final section of this paper involves a discussion of the findings and limitations of the study

The Impacts of Development on Avifauna at Gaya Island: A Preliminary Survey

The aim of this study was to investigate the impacts of development (due to tourism) on the understory avifauna in Gaya Island. Three study sites in Gaya Island were selected on three levels of development (based on anthropogenic noise), i.e., Low, Medium and High. Mist netting was performed for three consecutive days at each of the three study sites. Data from this study was analyzed using descriptive and statistical analysis. Correlation analysis was performed to investigate the strength, association and direction between the development levels with the numbers of birds captured. There were a total of 20 birds netted during the survey that consisted of five families from Turdidae, Muscicapidae, Sylviidae, Timaliidae, and Pycnonotidae. Based on the descriptive analysis, the results show a trend of decline in the number of species and the number of individual as the development level (anthropogenic noise) increases. The correlation results indicated a significant association between development levels and the number of capture at r = -. 423; P<0.05. The strength of the association in the two variables is moderate at negative direction. The preliminary results of this study show that development (anthropogenic noises) negatively impacts avifauna community by the low species richness and low occurrences of individuals at high developed area. There is an urgent need to conduct further research to incorporate anthropogenic noise into the park management plan for the benefit of sustainable tourism in Gaya Island

Non-business e-commerce in Malaysia: An investigation of key adoption

Problem statement: Non-business EC is a relatively new research niche in the general e-commerce stream. Application of e-commerce by profit oriented organization already become bread and butter but still limited applied in non-business sectors such as academic institutions (as in the present study), non-profit organizations, religious organizations and government agencies. Nowadays e-commerce becomes crucially essential in reducing their expenses and improving their operations.Therefore, application of this new innovation should enhance to no non-business sectors to be livelier.Understanding the key factors of facilitating and adopting the e-commerce in non-business are still need to enrich in particularly within Malaysian context. A field survey was conducted to determine key factors that facilitate the adoption of non-business EC in Malaysian Universities. Approach: One main focus of IT implementation research has been to determine why people accept or reject new technology. The current research will explore why Non-business institutions will accept or reject e- commerce. Since e-commerce adoption decision is a strategic one, a comprehensive list of potential facilitators and non-facilitators for the strategic use of information technology was derived from past research. Thus factors used as the basis for collecting data from 65 schools, centers and units from 5 public universities in Kota Kinabalu and Kuala Lumpur. These data were factor-analyzed to determine the key underlying dimensions of facilitators. On the basis of the resulting 5 dimensions namely, relative advantage, network orientation, information efficiency, innovativeness and competitiveness, regression analysis was done to determine the impact of the 5 dimensions on adoption. Results: They suggest that relative advantage, network orientation and information efficiency are the most important facilitators to the used of e-commerce in non-business sectors. Inhibitors were not estimated eventually, as there were no non-users among the respondents. Conclusion: The results implies the non-business sectors should look into advantages, network orientation and information efficiency as a strategic based for implementing e-commerce in more effective manner to achieve their goals

Media use and Obesity in Sabah, Malaysia

This study explores the effects of media consumption, which are thought to be mostly sedentary in nature, towards the problem of obesity among youths in Sabah, Malaysia. This study surveyed 549 respondents from 12-19 years old categories from various secondary schools in Sabah, Malaysia. Some interesting findings of this study include the high preference among youths in Sabah to choose foods offered by franchised restaurants. It was also found that youths in Sabah are not active physically because most of their time was spent engaging with various forms of information and communication technology (ICT), particularly hand phone and computer. Excessive usage of media appears to replace the time for physical activities, which deprive them the chance to burn the calories absorbed from franchised restaurants‟ foods. Such situation was made worst when youths tend to consume unhealthy foods, such as snacks and crisps, when engaging with media. This indirect effect of media was also indicated in this study

The Preliminary Survey of Bird Populations in Kinabalu Park with Different Noise Level

Birdwatching activity has become one of the main attractions among tourists in Kinabalu National Park. Therefore, the number of tourists that come inside the park were directly contribute to the increasing number of vehicles inside the park. To date, there is no studies that have been done in Malaysia to investigate the response of birds on traffic noise. Therefore, this research was conducted to study the impact of traffic noise on bird population in Kinabalu Park. The study includes two methods, i.e., traffic noise mapping and bird survey. Traffic Noise Mapping involves identifying High Traffic Noise Zone and Low Traffic Noise Zone based on the existing trails by using a digital sound level meter. High Traffic Noise Zone was classified as noise level above ≥60dB and Low Traffic Noise Zone was classified as noise level below <60dB. One control site was selected which was far from the traffic noise. Bird survey was done by using point count method. A total of 1150 birds were recorded of which were 35 species and 20 families. Pearson Correlation shows very significant and negative correlation of traffic noise with bird’s species richness and bird abundance of which were (r = -0.671, p<0.000) and (r = -0.753, p<0.000), respectively. The results in this study show birds’ population in Kinabalu Park was very significantly reduce both in species richness as well as abundance in High Traffic Noise Zone. We recommend that there should be a mechanism that is established by the Park management to control the number of vehicle that enters the Park. Alternative mode of transportation inside the Park such as electric powered buggy is recommended to address the issue of traffic noise around the park

An investigation of key adoption of non-business e-commerce in Malaysia

Non-business EC is a relatively new research niche in the general e-commerce stream.It denotes the use of e-commerce by non-business institutions such as academic institutions (as in the present study), not-for profit organizations, religious organizations, and government agencies to reduce their expenses or to improve their operations and customer service.A field survey was conducted to determine key factors that facilitate the adoption of non-business EC in Malaysian Universities.Since e-commerce adoption decision is a strategic one, a comprehensive list of potential facilitators and non- facilitators for the strategic use of information technology was derived from past research and used as the basis for collecting data from 65 schools, centres and units from 5 public universities in Kota Kinabalu and Kuala Lumpur. These data were factor-analysed to determine the key underlying dimensions of facilitators.On the basis of the resulting five dimensions namely, relative advantage, network orientation, information efficiency, innovativeness, and competitiveness, regression analysis was done to determine the impact of the five dimensions on adoption. The results suggest that relative advantage, network orientation, and information efficiency are the most important facilitators. Inhibitors were not estimated eventually, as there were no non-users among the respondents

Perceived product quality, perceived value, customer satisfaction and their relation to brand loyalty

There has been a substansial body of evidence to relate trust as an important component to business trends.The study of trust has been exponentially discussed in various forms and context which expands across broad fields and sciences.This paper aims to provide additional rationale and foundational support for the advancement of knowledge pertaining to trust and its relation to the adoption of open innovation. Based from the literature review, this paper view trust from the light of adoption of innovation studies to better understand how it can best used to measure the readiness to adopt open innovation