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Abstract Although the word "PEACE" has a clear meaning for most people, 'peaceful act' and 'peaceful individual' can have different interpretations. In conflict to the common assumption, the state of the peaceful person is not one we can achieve only through good deeds. This state is obtained through perceptions that result in making peace with God, with the universe, with one's self, and with the others. The peaceful individual has no conflict with any of them. Consequently, the individual's thoughts, actions and words are also formed on the basis of this internal and multilateral peace. When a person is striving toward conflicts, their being does not work in integrity; hence, the brain orders the secretion of poisonous chemical hormones. In other words, the conflict factor is one of the poisonous factors that harms human's health and takes away their inner peace. It is one of the factors causing mentosomatic diseases

Investing Attributes in Real Estate Investment Trusts

Recently, studies on behavioral finance have gained interest among academicians. The study of investors' behavioral perspective is deemed important to understand the decision-making process pertaining to investment. Decision making processes involve factors that influence investor's behavior to invest. Various topics and areas have been discussed to further understand the behavior of investors. However, only a few researches have actually been conducted in the area of behavioral finance resulting in a lack of conclusive findings. Findings gained thus far are insufficient to specifically identify investors' intention to invest in certain investment portfolios. Therefore, the objective of this paper was to identify the factors that influence investor's behavior to invest in Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). This paper reviews literatures on factors that influence investors' decision-making process and proposes a model of influencing factors. The findings from this paper would aid and facilitate future research on investors' behavior to invest in REITs. This paper is expected to add to the current literature on behavioral finance of REITs

Encouraging factors for whistleblowing in public sector: Malaysian case evidence

Abstract The objective of this study is to examine the extent of encouraging factors of whistleblowing intention in the public sector organisations in Malaysia, particularly in the selected case study organisation. The survey questionnaire was adopted to explore what are the factors that would encourage whistleblowing in this selected public sector organisation. Research questions such as to what extent do predictive factors such as 1) Consequences of Wrongdoing, 2) Management Reaction to the Report and 3) Witness Protection have to be addressed in understanding the whistleblowing behaviour. The consequences of wrongdoings were found as a predictive variable of whistleblowing intention in this selected case study organisation

Adoption of the performance measurement system in the Nigerian public sector: Challenges and prospects

Abstract Assessing the performance of organizations using the performance measurement system has gradually become a common practice in the public sector entities. This has been established to be a direct fall out of the ripple effect of the new public management (NPM). Adoption of the performance measurement system in the public sector world over (not particularly in Nigeria) has been experiencing a myriad of challenges. This is imperative to point out owing to the fact that, the processes of adoption have been difficult, monotonous and time-consuming. In some public sector organizations where the adoption has been successful, such feat was achieved after intense difficulties, trial and error. In Nigeria, for instance, the analytical challenges in the adoption of the performance measurement system are too apparent to be ignored. Conversely, it is quite interesting to highlight that, in some countries, the development of measures to manage and evaluate public sector performance has reached a strategic height, therefore tracking of output, outcomes and input have been reasonably straightforward and significant progress is somewhat recorded. Finally, it is a general consensus among the public sector managers and academia that, adoption of the system of performance measurement in the public sector is a powerful tool that guarantees improved performance, quality of decision making and service delivery

Writer Identification for chinese handwriting

Abstract Chinese handwriting identification has become a hot research in pattern recognition and image processing. In this paper, we present overview of relevant papers from the previous related studies until to the recent publications regarding to the Chinese Handwriting Identification. The strength, weaknesses, accurateness and comparison of well known approaches are reviewed, summarized and documented. This paper provides broad spectrum of pattern recognition technology in assisting writer identification tasks, which are at the forefront of forensic and biometrics based on identification application

Sekolah Unggulan: Pendekatan Pengembangan Kapasitas Sekolah

. One of the major themes in educational effectivenessresearch is about school capacity building. This study investigates the implementation of the International Standard School (SBI) policy in Indonesia which can be seen as an effort of school capacity building improvement in the particular country. Using program coherence dimension from capacity building framework, a qualitative study conducted in a secondary school that located in a small city in West Java, Indonesia, that involved in the program. It is found that the interpretation to the SBI policy was changing, which established International standard classrooms is the salient aspect of the implementation of the policy. It is discovered that become an SBI school has positive consequence with regard to acknowledgment its quality by the central government, besides the school can collect extra fund from parents with amount nearly ten times that received from the central government. Document analysis reveals the school difficulties to reach ?óÔé¼?£International requirements?óÔé¼Ôäó with particular to master in English by its teachers

New Technique for Hiding Data in Audio File

Summary Hiding information inside audio files becomes a challenging discipline, since the Human Auditory System (HAS) is highly sensitive. One of the main obstacles of the data hiding in audio is to develop a system which has the quality to include a big amount of data and without affecting the quality of sound. This paper proposes an information-hiding method to hide more information into audio media file (MP3). The bits of information will be hidden between frames (BF) in MP3 file. In the experimental results, we hide more characters in audios and extract them correctly. The audios with secret information are indiscernible to human ear

A New Hybrid PSOGSA Algorithm for Function Optimization

Abstract-In this paper, a new hybrid population-based algorithm (PSOGSA) is proposed with the combination of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA). The main idea is to integrate the ability of exploitation in PSO with the ability of exploration in GSA to synthesize both algorithms' strength. Some benchmark test functions are used to compare the hybrid algorithm with both the standard PSO and GSA algorithms in evolving best solution. The results show the hybrid algorithm possesses a better capability to escape from local optimums with faster convergence than the standard PSO and GSA

Evaluation of Palm Biodiesel -Diesel Blending Properties, Storage Stability and Corrosion Behavior

Abstract. Palm Biodiesel, which can be produced from transesterification palm oil with methanol, is an alternative fuel for diesel engines. It can be mixed with diesel fuels and used in diesel engines with no or slight modification. Therefore, in this study, commercially available diesel fuel was blended with biodiesel produced from transesterification of palm oil. The stability of the pure palm biodiesel (B100) was investigated over a storage time of 2, 4 and 6 months. The study assessed the corrosion rate of metals exposed to palm biodiesel. The kinematic viscosity, density and flash points of the blends increased with biodiesel amount in the fuel blend. However, pour point of the blends decreased as the amount of biodiesel in the blends is increased. Kinematic viscosity, pour point and flash point slightly increased with storage time. The average corrosion rate for copper is 0.5341 mpy, 0.2438 mpy for aluminium and 0.1802 mpy for mild steel