Variation of Specific Gravity in Acacia mangium

The study involved 13-year old provenance trials of Acacia mangium which were established at five sites in Sabal, Jakar, Oya, Labang and Sawai in Sarawak, Malaysia. Five provenances were planted in the trial. Three provenances were from Australia and two from Indonesia. The main objectives of this study are to establish a radial trend of specific gravity from pith to bark and to establish the extent of variation contributed by planting site, provenance, tree, orientation and radial position on specific gravity. Radial variation in specific gravity increased from pith to bark. It ranged from 0.20 at pith to 0.80 at bark with a mean and coefficient of variation of 0.56 and 17.05%, respectively. Site, provenance and radial contributed significantly towards specific gravity in Acacia mangium. Interaction between provenance and site was highly significant which involved a change in provenance ranking across the sites. Radial was the largest contributor to the total variance component in specific gravity

Alexithymia and somatization in psychiatric and medical patients

315 subjects comprising of equal number of psychiatric and medical patients; and control group were randomly selected for the study. Neuroses and depressive illness of the psychiatric group was chosen through psychiatric clinic. The medical outpatients attending physician clinic formed the medical group while the control group was identified from staff and patients relatives. The selected patient was administered a series of questionnaires such as Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS), Middlesex Hospital Questionnaires (MHQ) and Duke Health Profile (DUKE) after the diagnosis was confirmed. The psychiatric patient was further evaluated using Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDS) and Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale (HAS) for assessment of severity of depression and anxiety respectively.172 (55%) subjects had positive TAS score and consider as alexithymia. The prevalence of alexithymia was significantly higher in psychiatric and medical patients than the control group. The number of alexithymia among patients with underlying depression and anxiety were significantly increased. In general individual with alexithymia had significantly higher number of personality trait than healthy volunteer. There were marked psychosocial impairments and physical disability in psychiatric and medical patients respectively. However the difference was small and did not reach the level of significant. Although we cannot link alexithymia with a specific factor, most likely it is the product of personality disturbances aggravated by medical and psychiatric illness, especially depression and anxiety

Self awareness curiculum activities and effectiveness to youth

This article discusses the self-consciousness of youth in co-curricular activities forming their personality. In addition, this article also discussed the core curriculum which has been outlined by the Ministry of Education (MOE) to adolescents who are still studying in higher education institutions as well as the effectiveness of the curriculum in shaping the personality of adolescents including studies that have been done in connection with extra-curricular activities. This article also touched on the education system nowadays

Pendekatan Wasatiyyah dalam Berfatwa: antara Keterikatan Literalis dengan Kelonggaran Liberalis

 Dalam era saat ini kemajuan ilmu pengetahuan dan teknologi, banyak masalah baru muncul, yang dikategorikan sebagai hukum Islam kontemporer. Putusan dari isu-isu tersebut memerlukan pendekatan ijtihad kolektif, sesuai dengan konteks saat ini untuk memastikan kesejahteraan manusia. Dengan demikian, artikel ini membahas pendekatan fatwa. Pada dasarnya, ada berbagai pendekatan antara dua faksi pemikiran, pendekatan yaitu ketegasan dan pendekatan kelonggaran. Namun, antara kedua pendekatan bertentangan, telah muncul media yang dikenal sebagai pendekatan wasatiyyah dalam mengeluarkan fatwa. Pendekatan ini secara signifikan memberikan solusi yang masuk akal untuk mengatur fatwa bebas dari kecenderungan menjadi terlalu ketat atau terlalu longgar dan tidak pernah menyimpang dari tujuan syariah

Automated Seed-Based Region Growing Using The Moving K-Means Clustering For The Detection Of Mammographic Microcalcifications.

Mammography is by far the proven method of early detection of breast cancer. However, mammography is not without its problems. It is amongst the most difficult of radiological images to interpret as the images are of low contrast and features indicative of abnormalities are very subtle and minute. In this study, a new method of automated edge detection technique is proposed to detect the abnormalities in a region of interest in a mammogram

Turning Natural Fiber Reinforced Cement Composite as Innovative Alternative Sustainable Construction Material: A Review Paper

In recent years, a great deal of interest in concrete leads to the most frequently used sustainable construction material. Using of natural fiber as fiber reinforcement effectively improved strength, ductility and durability requirements of high performance cement composites. Regretly, natural fibers are dumped as agricultural waste (e.g. coconut, bamboo, wood or chips, bast fiber, leaf fiber, seed and fruit fibers, etc), so can be easily available low cost. The applications of natural fiber for sustainable construction material design can be done as filler or masonry composites, reinforcement, thermal conductivity, cementations/binder, etc. Previous and current researchers focusing the natural fiber to improve the properties of lightweight composites still required a lot of investigations to make it improved. However, the present work consists of the availability of natural fiber waste substance, sustainable construction materials are evaluated for their physico-mechanical properties of sustainable construction materials, method of production and environmental impact of several materials. No doubt, the application of natural fiber provides a solution to conservation of natural resource and energy

Extracting carbon emission for industrial area by using landsat 8: case study of Klang, Malaysia

Industrial area attributed to 235.6% carbon emissions increase from 1990 to 2005. In 2009 Malaysia announced a voluntary commitment to reduce 40% of its greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions by 2020. The study aims to extract the carbon emission by industrial area using Landsat 8 processed through Land Surface Temperature (LST) data in quantifying carbon. The data required are obtained from the Sniffer4D drone, Landsat 8 LST and Department of Environment (DOE) data, which were analysed through comparative and statistical analysis. The findings showed that the high correlation of Site A, (= 0.7403) Site B, (= 0.607) and Site C, (= 0.0026) strength between data from the drone and satellite data. As a results, that band11 Thermal Infrared (TIRS) 2 in Landsat 8 can be used for extracting carbon value estimation and band 10 Thermal Infrared (TIRS) 1 for the measurement of the air temperature. These findings can assist in terms of calculating carbon emission using LST and determine the high concentration industrial carbon emission hence it can help in decision making in further industry area development

Green building in existing development: a review of current status, challenges, and implementation strategy

Green building development is on the rise with more new constructions receiving green building certification locally and globally. Starting with 247 papers in the first cycle searching of greening an existing building, this paper conducts a literature review over 30 relevant publications related to the effort towards greening the existing development from various countries especially in Malaysia, since three specific case studies on implementation of greening existing building were analyzed from this country. Regarding to the review on current development status, there occur several challenges of existing building standards from the regulatory that will slow the target achievement towards a sustainable plan besides the cost implication and project feasibility that resulting in most existing buildings do not embed green building elements. Therefore, retrofitting the existing structure might contribute to a positive, sustainable impact, including cost-saving, living comfortability, and environmental preservation. However, the decision-making on retrofitting action needs detailed analysis. This is especially in identifying expenditure on current building performance, potential cost benefits through lifecycle assessment and cost-benefit analysis. This paper presents three case studies of green retrofitting project in Malaysia and highlights twenty effective strategies towards successful retrofitting for sustainable development. According to the summative analysis of the strategies, the most important element to be addressed in retrofitting action towards a green building is thoroughly assessing the current performance and needs of the development to meet the sustainability impact. It is recommended for future researchers to conduct a survey on the details of the procedure from specific stakeholders with focus on regional-based existing building conditions

Comparison on some machine learning techniques in breast cancer classification

Breast cancer is the second most common cancer after lung cancer and one of the main causes of death worldwide. Women have a higher risk of breast cancer as compared to men. Thus, one of the early diagnosis with an accurate and reliable system is critical in breast cancer treatment. Machine learning techniques are well known and popular among researchers, especially for classification and prediction. An investigation was conducted to evaluate the performance of breast cancer classification for malignant tumors and benign tumors using various machine learning techniques, namely k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN), Random Forest, and Support Vector Machine (SVM) and ensemble techniques to compute the prediction of the breast cancer survival by implementing 10-fold cross validation. Additionally, the proposed methods are classified using 2-fold, 3-fold, and 5-fold cross validation to meet the best accuracy rate. This study used a dataset obtained from Wisconsin Diagnostic Breast Cancer (WDBC) with 23 selected attributes measured from 569 patients, from which 212 patients have malignant tumors and 357 patients have benign tumors. The performance evaluation of the proposed methods was computed to obtain accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. Comparison results between all methods show that AdaBoost ensemble methods gave the highest accuracy at 98.77% for 10-fold cross validation, while 2-fold and 3-fold cross validation at 98.41% and 98.24%, respectively. Nevertheless, the result with 5-fold cross validation show SVM produced the best accuracy rate at 98.60% with the lowest error rate

Process Control of Pink Guava Puree Pasteurization Process: Simulation and Validation by Experiment

Recently, process control has been applied extensively in many food processes include pasteurization process. The purpose is to control and maintain the product temperature at desired value. In order to be able to control the process properly, the model of the process needs to be obtained. This research aims to obtain the empirical model and to determine the best control strategy in pasteurization process of pink guava puree. The PID controller tuned by different tuning methods was simulated using Simulink and closed loop responses were observed. Simulation results revealed that PID controller tuned by minimizing of integral absolute error (IAE) method were satisfactory adaptable in this process in term of faster settling time, less overshoot, smallest values of IAE and ISE that less than 1. Then, experiment was performed using this method in order to validate simulation results. In general, a good agreement was achieved between experimental data and dynamic simulation result in control of pasteurization temperature process with  R2=0.83. As the conclusion, the results obtained can be used as the recommendation for a suitable control strategy for the pasteurization process of pink guava puree in the industry