Re-testing the link between youth receptivity to tobacco promotion and their susceptibility to smoke

The Index of Receptivity to Tobacco Industry Promotion (IRTIP) is a model that is used by hundreds of articles. The causal claim based on findings from this model is even more pervasive, and has resulted in much of the modern post 1998 tobacco legislation that is still enforced. This thesis tested the link between adolescent receptivity to tobacco industry promotion and susceptibility to smoking. Pierce et al. (1998) reported that they had found a positive and causal association between receptivity and susceptibility by using IRTIP. They claimed that receptivity to tobacco industry promotion was the only significant causal factor affecting adolescent susceptibility to smoking. Exposure to peer and parental smoking was not found to be a significant effect. A review of the literature found that many sections of IRTIP differ from accepted marketing theory on how cigarette advertising and promotions affect adolescent adoption of cigarette smoking. The proxy measures used in IRTIP were shown to diverge from those previously used for measuring the constructs of Attention, Intention, Desire and Action (AIDA) in marketing communications. IRTIP also differs from previous theory by including measures that attempt to quantify the effect of tobacco premiums into a model that was designed to measure the effects of advertising.

Reformulating higher education and renewing legitimacy through advancing sustainability : the alternative approach of Universiti Sains Malaysia

The Universiti Sains Malaysia Accelerated Programme for Excellence (APEX) program is an attempt to engage the difficult and complex problems of competition, moral leadership and responsibility in Malaysian education. This paper discusses and gives an analysis of some central issues with regards to USM' s reform agenda. I seek to place the USM project within a broader debate over the nature of reform and the possibilities of business unusual in the Malaysian and global environment. The paper is part of a broader project of theorization of USM in the context of understanding what APEX is and how it truly offers a new and vigorous engagement with the problems of higher education in Malaysia. 

Structure and thickness optimization of active layer in nanoscale organic solar cells

 This paper presents the development of a two-dimensional model of multilayer bulk heterojunction organic nanoscale solar cells, consisting of the thickness of active layer and morphology of the device. The proposed model is utilized to optimize the device parameters in order to achieve the best performance using particle swarm optimization algorithm. The organic solar cells under research are from poly (3-hexylthiophene) and [6,6]-phenyl C61-butyric acid methyl ester type which are modelled to be investigated for performance enhancement. A three-dimensional fitness function is proposed involving domain size and active layer thickness as variables. The best results out of 20 runs of optimization show that the optimized value for domain size is 17 nm, while the short-circuit current vs. voltage characteristic shows a very good agreement with the experimental results obtained by previous researchers. © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York