Labour Skill, Trade Structure and Comparative Advantage of Malaysia's Manufacturing Industries, 1978-1996

As a small open economy, Malaysia'S development strategy is best formulated with the view of trade-production paradigm. Its development targets should be driven by the condition of demand. A supply-driven approach is not only technically nonfeasible, but also will frustrate development efforts and bring about destabilising effects in the long term. In the context of the recent East Asian crisis, failure to recognise the important force of the external sector has gradually eroded economic fundamentals of the economies. Although a capital-intensive technique of production leads to higher labour productivity, the rate of increase in the physical capital accumulation has to match with that of human capital. In order not to frustrate the external account, skill requirement could be estimated by equalising the skill content for producing trade flows. In this way human capital requirements are integrated into the external account and thus ensure long-term sustainability. An input-output model is used to examine the country's resource allocation in production and trade. Also, an approach of H-O extension has been used to investigate the skill intensity of Malaysian trade by analysing skill content of exports and imports. The results found that Malaysia's comparative advantage lies in low skill while its discomparative advantage relies on the highly skilled

Impact Of Using Long Lasting Insecticidal Treated Nets (LLIN) And Indoor Residual Spraying (IRS), Single And In Combination On Insecticide Resistant Anopheles Arabiensis Patton (Diptera: Culicidae) In Republic Of The Sudan

Pengawalan vektor malaria di Sudan bergantung kepada penggunaan kelambu yang diimpregnasikan dengan insektisid yang tahan lama (LLINs) dan penyemburan residu dalam rumah (IRS) di kawasan perumahan Malaria vector control in Sudan depends on the deployment of long-lasting insecticidal treated nets (LLINs) and indoor residual spraying (IRS) in the domestic environmen

Design Construction and Performance Evaluation of Solar Still for Rural Dwellers

This paper is aimed at designing, constructing and performance evaluation of a solar still. The solar still is design and constructed with locally source materials for rural dwellers. The still absorber plate is constructed with 2 mm galvanised plate painted black with an area of 2 m2 to absorb solar radiation effectively. The side wall and the base is constructed with concrete. Sawdust and felt is used between the retaining wall and base to resist heat transfer from the system to the surrounding vice-versa. The top cover of the still is constructed with transparent glass pane of 4 mm housed in an aluminium frame. The catch basin that collects the condensate is constructed with PVC pipe channel of 50 mm. The performance of the still was evaluated with; Overall yield (sum of daily yield and over-night yield) at a different water depth of (20, 40, 60 mm), (5127 ml/m2/hr, 4558 ml/m2/hr, and 3852 ml/m2/hr). The efficiency of the system at different water depth (20, 40, 60 mm) 51.27 %, 45.58 %, and 38.52 %. The water analysis before and after distillation was certified safe and portable for human consumption

The influence of murabahah finance on the relationship between farm credit and agricultural output in Nigeria: a proposed framework

The objective of this paper is to explain the influence of Murabahah finance on the relationship between farm credit and agricultural output.This is because, in most of the advanced countries, agricultural output is a backbone of their economy in terms of food supply, industrial, provision of income, employment opportunities.The importance of agricultural output to the socioeconomic well being, specifically the third world countries are paramount.However, it has been shown that there is a decrease in agricultural output in African economies and Nigeria is inclusive.The decrease of agricultural output in Nigeria is resulted to increase in poverty rate, unemployment, fall in individual and government income, collapsed of the industries etc.Some researchers are of the view that poor credit facilities are part of the main problem hindering the growth of the Nigerian agricultural sector.The current paper proposed a research model which, if validated in an empirical source will assist the advancement of agriculture in Nigeria.Hence, the study seeks to propose the use of Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modelling PLS in relation to analysis of the data. This paper may directly or indirectly contribute to the policy makers of Nigerian agricultural cooperative and rural development banks and agricultural environment.It provides a sufficient approach for Murabahah finance as a potential moderator of the Model

The viability of Salam finance in the growth of agricultural production in Kano State, Nigeria

Salam finance (sales contract) is a Shariah product used by Islamic financial institutions.It is a transaction in which the payment of the sold commodity is to be made at a spot or immediately after signing the sales contract, while the delivery of the commodity is at the agreed future time.The paper intents to study this Islamic mode of financing agriculture in order to see the way and manner it can enhance the agricultural output of Kano state, being the most populous and agrarian state in Nigeria.This study explores the potentialities of Salam finance.It’s role in the growth of agricultural output to meet the demand level of the state population and provide raw materials for industries. It highlights the historical background of Kano state in terms of agriculture and agribusiness.Almost, 70 percent of the population as is solidly dependent on agriculture and agribusiness as their main source of livelihood.Agriculture contributes a higher percentage to the state revenue before the discovery of petroleum.This paper recommends that, the Kano state micro finance banks, mostly the ones in rural areas should adopt Salam mode of financing.It is expected that the adoption of Salam finance will improve the supply of agricultural output, create more employment opportunities and improve local and modern industries and commerce.It will also promote sustainable growth of the Kano state economy and Nigeria in general.This is a qualitative paper in terms of methodology

Exploration based Genetic Algorithm for Job Scheduling on Grid Computing

Grid computing presents a new trend to distribute and Internet computing to coordinate large scale heterogeneous resources providing sharing and problem solving in dynamic, multi- institutional virtual organizations. Scheduling is one of the most important problems in computational grid to increase the performance. Genetic Algorithm is adaptive method that can be used to solve optimization problems, based on the genetic process of biological organisms. The objective of this research is to develop a job scheduling algorithm using genetic algorithm with high exploration processes. To evaluate the proposed scheduling algorithm this study conducted a simulation using GridSim Simulator and a number of different workload. The research found that genetic algorithm get best results when increasing the mutation and these result directly proportional with the increase in the number of job. The paper concluded that, the mutation and exploration process has a good effect on the final execution time when we have large number of jobs. However, in small number of job mutation has no effects

Optimising Fault Tolerance in Real-time Cloud Computing IaaS Environment

YesFault tolerance is the ability of a system to respond swiftly to an unexpected failure. Failures in a cloud computing environment are normal rather than exceptional, but fault detection and system recovery in a real time cloud system is a crucial issue. To deal with this problem and to minimize the risk of failure, an optimal fault tolerance mechanism was introduced where fault tolerance was achieved using the combination of the Cloud Master, Compute nodes, Cloud load balancer, Selection mechanism and Cloud Fault handler. In this paper, we proposed an optimized fault tolerance approach where a model is designed to tolerate faults based on the reliability of each compute node (virtual machine) and can be replaced if the performance is not optimal. Preliminary test of our algorithm indicates that the rate of increase in pass rate exceeds the decrease in failure rate and it also considers forward and backward recovery using diverse software tools. Our results obtained are demonstrated through experimental validation thereby laying a foundation for a fully fault tolerant IaaS Cloud environment, which suggests a good performance of our model compared to current existing approaches.Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF

Technical Report on Deploying a highly secured OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure using BradStack as a Case Study

Cloud computing has emerged as a popular paradigm and an attractive model for providing a reliable distributed computing model.it is increasing attracting huge attention both in academic research and industrial initiatives. Cloud deployments are paramount for institution and organizations of all scales. The availability of a flexible, free open source cloud platform designed with no propriety software and the ability of its integration with legacy systems and third-party applications are fundamental. Open stack is a free and opensource software released under the terms of Apache license with a fragmented and distributed architecture making it highly flexible. This project was initiated and aimed at designing a secured cloud infrastructure called BradStack, which is built on OpenStack in the Computing Laboratory at the University of Bradford. In this report, we present and discuss the steps required in deploying a secured BradStack Multi-node cloud infrastructure and conducting Penetration testing on OpenStack Services to validate the effectiveness of the security controls on the BradStack platform. This report serves as a practical guideline, focusing on security and practical infrastructure related issues. It also serves as a reference for institutions looking at the possibilities of implementing a secured cloud solution.Comment: 38 pages, 19 figures