English language reform and the process of democratic change

Malaysian society has and is undergoing considerable social, political, economic and educational change. Scholars point to the forces of globalization and the needs to be able to meet the challenges of globalization as the central driver of language policy. Commentators, academics and many in the general public have focused on the need for Malaysia to adapt to globalization and the importance of English to this process given the needs and characteristic of the knowledge economy. However, there appears to be less recognition of the way such a change in Malaysian language policy needs to be engaged in a dynamically shifting knowledge society and developing public sphere. Language is a social act and the debate over language and its place and role in society is therefore a debate over the nature and quality of social interaction. Debate over language is thus inherently political. Due to the growth and development of an interactive and engaged public sphere and knowledge society in Malaysia, there is a need to approach to the idea of engaging English that grasps the plurality and complexity of its role in the world. The political approach to engaging English in Malaysia needs to engage democratic deliberation in a society that is increasingly fragmented but also showing signs of developing an active public sphere not beholden to top down authority. Disagreement over language and the way the debate is theorized hides from view the possibility of points of consensus on the issue of English language and Malaysian education. Establishing overlapping consensus through public deliberation and consultation is a necessary precondition to effective language policy in contemporary Malaysia. Failure to understand this only leads to policy paralysis.

Clinical, ethical and legal considerations in the treatment of newborns with non-ketotic hyperglycinaemia

Non-ketotic hyperglycinaemia (NKH) is a devastating neurometabolic disorder leading, in its classical form, to early death or severe disability and poor quality of life in survivors. Affected neonates may need ventilatory support during a short period of respiratory depression. The transient dependence on ventilation dictates urgency in decision-making regarding withdrawal of therapy. The occurrence of patients with apparent transient forms of the disease, albeit rare, adds uncertainty to the prediction of clinical outcome and dictates that the current practice of withholding or withdrawing therapy in these neonates be reviewed. Both bioethics and law take the view that treatment decisions should be based on the best interests of the patient. The medical-ethics approach is based on the principles of non-maleficence, beneficence, autonomy and justice. The law relating to withholding or withdrawing life-sustaining treatment is complex and varies between jurisdictions. Physicians treating newborns with NKH need to provide families with accurate and complete information regarding the disease and the relative probability of possible outcomes of the neonatal presentation and to explore the extent to which family members are willing to take part in the decision making process. Cultural and religious attitudes, which may potentially clash with bioethical and juridical principles, need to be considered.

Protecting legal rights when things go wrong : legal recourse if mandatory fortification of a food were to harm human health

Food laws can encompass considerations that extend beyond food safety. The recent food standard mandating the fortification of flour with folic acid in Australia illustrates the legal problems and legal risks when governments introduce food standards that aim to medicinalise the population through the food supply despite a lack of scientific consensus. Legal analysis of the process by which the folic acid fortification was introduced into flour in Australia demonstrates legal inadequacies, administrative and policy failures, as well as flaws in safety assumptions. An analysis of the restrictions on legal rights and remedies for any adversely affected consumers seeking legal redress, and the existence of statutory immunities for governments, demonstrates a need for legal reform and changes in policy development processes.

Australian legal regime on animal based bio-medical research

This thesis, by using evaluative criteria based on overseas law, scientific evidence, philosophy and ethics, concluded that the Australian legal regime regarding animal based bio-medical research for human benefit only partly met one of that regime's major objectives of adequately protecting research animals during the entire research process.

A model for stakeholder interactions in hospitals : towards understanding the patient flow process

The aim of this research is to understand how stakeholder interactions can facilitate the patient flow process within a hospital. An analysis of the findings reveals that nurses are in a perfect position to be a conduit between doctors and managers. This is due to several factors including the nurses understanding of both the clinical and control worlds, as well as nurses ability to form networks based on their pivotal characteristics. As a result of these findings, a model for better understanding stakeholder relationships is developed. In this research, a mixed methods approach was used by undertaking a cultural assessment via survey questionnaire, complemented by observations of interactions between organisational actors, including formal semi-structured interviews and reflections of many hours of observation. Glouberman and Mintzberg’s four world’s models is used as a foundation for the arguments of this paper. Mitchell, Agle and Wood’s (1997) model is used to discuss the three stakeholder groups of this research including doctors, nurses, and managers.

Applying genetic algorithm for optimizing broadcasting process in ad-hoc network

Optimizing broadcasting process in mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is considered as a main challenge due to many problems, such as Broadcast Storm problem and high complexity in finding the optimal tree resulting in an NP-hard problem. Straight forward techniques like simple flooding give rise to Broadcast Storm problem with a high probability. In this work, genetic algorithm (GA) that searches over a population that represents a distinguishable ‘structure’ is adopted innovatively to suit MANETs. The novelty of the GA technique adopted here to provide the means to tackle this MANET problem lies mainly on the proposed method of searching for a structure of a suitable spanning tree that can be optimized, in order to meet the performance indices related to the broadcasting problem. In other words, the proposed genetic model (GM) evolves with the structure of random trees (individuals) ‘genetically’ generated using rules that are devised specifically to capture MANET behaviour in order to arrive at a minimal spanning tree that satisfies certain fitness function. Also, the model has the ability to give different solutions depending on the main factors specified such as, ‘time’ (or speed) in certain situations and ‘reachability’ in certain others.

Modelling for injection moulding process based on principal component regression method

Determination of the optimal operating condition for moulding process has been of special interest for many researchers. To determine the optimal setting, one has to derive the model of injection moulding process first which is able to map the relationship between the input process control factors and output responses. One of most popular modeling techniques is the linear least square regression due to its effectiveness and completeness. However, the least square regression was found to be very sensitive to the outliers and failed to provide a reliable model if the control variables are highly related with each other. To address this problem, a new modeling method based on principal component regression was proposed in this paper. The distinguished feature of our proposed method is it does not only consider the variance of covariance matrix of control variables but also consider the correlation coefficient between control variables and target variables to be optimised. Such a modelling method has been implemented into a commercial optimisation software and field test results demonstrated the performance of the proposed modelling method.

Process/technology modifications in water pollution control

This article discusses the importance of modification in process/technology in various industries in order to control the pollution produced by those industries. Case studies on the modification of rinsing procedures for metal aprts and for the product line between two kinds of yogurts, changes in the mode of transportation in poultry industry and the introduction of biological degreasing of metals show huge benefit due to those modifications. Changing the products as well as input materials, too, bring waste minimization along with sustainable development.

Removal of ametryn using membrane bioreactor process and its influence on critical flux

Compared to the Conventional Activated Sludge Process (ASP), Membrane Bioreactors (MBRs) have proven their superior performance in wastewater treatment and reuse during the past two decades. Further, MBRs have wide array of applications such as the removal of nutrients, toxic and persistent organic pollutants (POPs), which are impossible or difficult to remove using ASP. However, fouling of membrane is one of the main drawbacks to the widespread application of MBR technology and Extra-cellular Polymeric Substances (EPS) secreted by microbes are considered as one of the major foulants, which will reduce the flux (L/m2/h) through the membrane. Critical flux is defined as the flux above which membrane cake or gel layer formation due to deposition of EPS and other colloids on the membrane surface occurs. Thus, one of the operating strategies to control the fouling of MBRs is to operate those systems below the critical flux (at Sub-Critical flux). This paper discusses the critical flux results, which were obtained from short-term common flux step method, for a lab-scale MBR system treating Ametryn. This study compares the critical flux values that were obtained by operating the MBR system (consisting of a submerged Hollow-Fibre membrane with pore size of 0.4μm and effective area of 0.2m2) at different operating conditions and mixed liquor properties. This study revealed that the critical flux values found after the introduction of Ametryn were significantly lower than those of obtained before adding Ametryn to the synthetic wastewater. It was also revealed that the production of carbohydrates (in SMP) is greater than proteins, subsequent to the introduction of Ametryn and this may have influenced the membrane to foul more. It was also observed that a significant removal (40-60%) of Ametryn from this MBR during the critical flux determination experiments with 40 minutes flux-step duration.

Data with abnormal shift pattern in a manufacturing process

The data represents a shift in process variable presented in a control chart due to the sudden change in the machine setting.

Data with abnormal cyclic pattern in a manufacturing process

The data represents a cyclic pattern in process variable presented in a control chart due to periodic rotation of operators, seasonal or environmental changes.

Data with abnormal systematic pattern in a manufacturing process

The data represents a systematic pattern in process variable presented in a control chart due to measurement gauge rotation and power fluctuations in manufacturing processes.

Virtual world security inspection : a software inspection process carried out on popular virtual world environments

 Virtual property theft is a serious problem that exists in virtual worlds. Legitimate users of these worlds invest considerable amounts of time, effort and real-world money into obtaining virtual property, but unfortunately, are becoming victims of theft in high numbers. It is reported that there are over 1 billion registered users of virtual worlds containing virtual property items worth an estimated US$50 billion dollars. The problem of virtual property theft is complex, involving many legal, social and technological issues. The software used to access virtual worlds is of great importance as they form the primary interface to these worlds and as such the primary interface to conduct virtual property theft. The security vulnerabilities of virtual world applications have not, to date, been examined. This study aims to use the process of software inspection to discover security vulnerabilities that may exist within virtual world software – vulnerabilities that enable virtual property theft to occur. Analyzing three well know virtual world applications World of Warcraft, Guild Wars and Entropia Universe, this research utilized security analysis tools and scenario testing with focus on authentication, trading, intruder detection and virtual property recovery. It was discovered that all three examples were susceptible to keylogging, mail and direct trade methods were the most likely method for transferring stolen items, intrusion detection is of critical concern to all VWEs tested, stolen items were unable to be recovered in all cases and lastly occurrences of theft were undetectable in all cases. The results gained in this study present the key problem areas which need to be addressed to improve security and reduce the occurrence of virtual property theft.

Data warehouse design and legal visualization – the applicability of H2 for reporting

The steady increase of regulations and its acceleration due to the financial crisis heavily affect the management of regulatory compliance. Regulations, such as Basel III and Solvency II particularly impact data warehouses and lead to many organizational and technical changes. From an IS perspective modeling techniques for data warehouse requirement elicitation help to manage conceptual requirements. From a legal perspective attempts to visualize regulatory requirements – so called legal visualization approaches – have been developed. This paper investigates whether a conceptual modeling technique for regulatory-driven data warehouse requirements is applicable for representing data warehouse requirements in a legal environment. Applying the modeling technique H2 for Reporting in three extensive modeling projects provides three contributions. First, evidence for the applicability of a modeling technique for regulatory-driven data warehouse requirements is given. Second, lessons learned for further modeling projects are provided. Third, a discussion towards a combined perspective of information modeling and legal visualization is presented.

Divergent directions in reforming legal responses to lethal violence

Over the past three decades, debates about legal reforms to lethal violence have been evident across Australia and in other jurisdictions. While these debates have often arisen from shared concerns, the resulting reforms have taken different approaches to reformulating the defences to murder. This article considers the divergent approaches taken to reform and the process of law reform itself, documenting the significance of localised histories and high profile cases. It also questions whether reforms to the defences to murder have responded adequately to the varying contexts within which men and women kill. The analysis reveals the limitations of law reform inquiries that fail to take a comprehensive approach to considering the operation of the laws in this area. The article calls for ongoing critical analysis of homicide within and beyond the law.