Move On, Move On! What it is to be Chinese in Australia today

The Chinese are all right now. On the whole the mainstream population is quite relaxed about the Chinese presence in their midst. That of course was not the case for the 100 years to the end of WWII. And so it should come as no surprise that now and again old scars will resurface. Yet the Chinese have metamorphosed in the psyche of mainstream Australia: honorary whites like Li Cunxin, lionized professionals like Victor Chang, are neon-lit signs of this change. All the same, as a huayi (overseas Chinese) immigrant, my observations over the last 50 years have compelled me to conclude that there is one last gate for the present-day Chinese to walk through, and that it is time for the remaining rearguards of White Australia to consciously remove themselves from that gate

Relationship between Ethical Work Climate and Ethics Factors, and Their Influence on Moral Judgement Competence of Academicians in Private Institutions of Higher Learning

The move towards corporatisation of Malaysian public universities and the establishment of a number of private institutions of higher learning were made to establish Malaysia as one of the regional educational hubs and a centre for providing educational excellence. However, the rapid expansion of private education institutions owned by profit-driven enterprises have posed a number of ethical problems and issues, such as the lack of a code of practice and the drive towards profit maximisation at the expense of a quality education. Issues such as corporate integrity and accountability are being questioned, and professionals are now finding ways to promote and inculcate ethical culture to these organisations. A number of studies have shown that there is clearly a relationship between the corporate organisations and individuals who work in the organisation when it comes to morals or ethics. Corporations could only act as a result of the choices and actions of human individuals in the corporations. This clearly shows that ethical culture of corporations, like the private institutions of higher learning can be affected by the ethical behaviour of the individuals, especially the academic staff. This study was conducted to determine the level of moral judgement competence of academic staff in the private institutions of higher learning, and its relationship with ethical work climate and ethics factors. The research design of this study was a correlational research using a cross-sectional survey approach. Four hundred and six (406) academic staff in Malaysia participated in this study by returning the self-administered questionnaire distributed to them. For computation and analysis of data collected, the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) for Windows program was used. The findings revealed more than 78.1% of the academic staff had a medium level of moral judgement competence. The findings also indicated the emergence of the instrumental and service dimensions as two dominant dimensions of ethical work climates in the private institutions of higher learning. The relationship between moral judgement competence, ethical work climate, demographic factors, professional factors, and ethic factors were tested and the conclusions of the findings were mixed. However, seven hypotheses tested in this research confirmed that the ethical work climate dimensions and the selected ethics factors had positive and significant relationship with moral judgement competence. The result suggests that consideration must be made with regards to demographic, professional and ethics factors when deciding on any human resource policies and development. The move towards institutionalising ethics through formulation of codes of ethics, formalising ethics training, factoring ethics in performance management and nurturing right ethical climate in the workplace can significantly accelerate the rate of moral development and moral judgement competence

Image of Taiwan held by Malaysian Muslim tourists: Motivational factors influencing overall image evaluations

In the recent years, the Muslim international tourists market has become the focus of the tourism industries in the Asia Pacific. Taiwan has also noticed the potential of this market segment, and started promoting its tourism products to the international Muslim tourists. In order to promote Taiwan effectively to this market segment, it is important to identify the factors that influence the perception of the Muslim tourists about Taiwan.With this notion, this study set out to establish the prevision tourism image of Taiwan held by the Muslim tourists, and determine the factors that influence the Muslim tourists’ image evaluations.This study employed both structured and unstructured methods in the survey, and the data was analysed using content analysis, factor analysis, and structural equation modeling.The findings indicated that Muslim tourists generally have a positive image of Taiwan; however, this image is fuzzy.Furthermore, the direct effect of travel motivation on effective images was significant, and the ‘Relax’ dimension of travel motivation has the greatest impact. However, the ‘Religious’ dimension of travel motivation did not have significant effect on effective image

Development Of High Cell Density Recombinant Pichia Pastoris Culture For Human Growth Hormone Production

Methylotrophic yeast, Pichia pastoris has been used as an excellent host to produce more than 400 recombinant heterologous proteins of academic and industrial interests. Pichia pastoris telah digunakan sebagai perumah yang unggul untuk menghasilkan lebih daripada 400 jenis protein heterologus kegunaan bidang akademik dan industri

Digital signal propagation delay in a nano-circuit containing reactive and resistive elements

The transient switching delay in a micro/nano-scale circuit containing resistive and reactive elements are sternly affected by the surge in the resistance arising from sub-linear current-voltage (I-V) characteristics limited by the velocity and current saturation. The saturation arises due to the realignment of randomly oriented velocity vectors to the unidirectional streamlined ones in a high electric field when voltage applied across a resistor exceeds its decreasing critical value with reduced channel length. The frequency response f = 1/2πτt is affected by a transit time delay τt is lower than that predicted from the application of Ohm's law. The resistance surge dramatically boosts the RC time constant and switching delay and attenuates the L/R time constant and switching delay

Optimizing contribution rate of socso’s invalidity pension scheme (IPS): an actuarial present value (APV) modelling / Mohd Zaki Awang Chek

This dissertation proposes the optimisation of the contribution rate for Social Security Organisation (SOCSO)’s Invalidity Pension Scheme (IPS). In performing this study, four objectives were set. Firstly, this study aims to statistically analyse the current situation of the contribution fund collection and the claim benefits payment under SOCSO’s IPS. Secondly, it seeks to develop an actuarial formulation based on the benefits coverage from SOCSO’s IPS. Thirdly, it attempts to determine an optimal contribution rate to support the benefits provided under SOCSO’s IPS using an actuarial approach. Fourthly, it proposes an appropriate contribution rate to be implemented by SOCSO. Currently, the contribution rate for SOCSO’s IPS is 1%, which is shared equally between employer and employee. This contribution rate is directly deducted from the employee’s monthly gross salary. This contribution rate needs to be adjusted upwards by SOCSO in the near future to ensure that all payments of claims are sufficiently covered

Design and evaluation of coexistence mechanisms for Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11b systems

Short-range wireless technologies are becoming increasingly important in enabling useful mobile applications. Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11b standards are the most commonly deployed technologies for WPAN and WLAN. However, because both standards share the same unlicensed ISM (Industrial, Scientific, Medical) radio spectrum, severe interference is inevitable and performance can be impaired significantly when heterogeneous devices using the two technologies come into close proximity. The most notable solution to this problem is a frequency domain noncollaborative coexistence mechanism called adaptive frequency hopping (AFH). However, we find that the efficiency of the 'channel classification' sub-process in noncollaborative mechanisms is by and large ignored in the literature. Moreover, we also find that there is no system resources awareness and no interference source genre concerns in IEEE 802.15 Task Group 2 AFH (TG2 AFH) design. Thus, we suggest a new approach called ISOAFH (Interference Source Oriented AFH). With the above considerations, we propose a customized channel classification process, thereby simplifying the time and space complexity of the mechanism. Through our detailed implementation of various coexistence mechanisms in MATLAB Simulink, it is observed that TG2 AFH performance is sensitive to memory and power limitations, while ISOAFH is much less sensitive to these constraints and can keep a much lower channel collision rate. On the other hand, We also study some open issues of a time domain mechanism called MDMS (Master Delay MAC Scheduling). We compare different coexistence mechanisms and find that the performance of each approach very much depends on the efficiency of its sub-processes.published_or_final_versio

On adaptive frequency hopping to combat coexistence interference between bluetooth and IEEE 802.11b with practical resource constraints

In contrast to traditional frequency hopping techniques, Adaptive Frequency Hopping (AFH) is a low cost and low power solution to avoid interference dynamically. While each AFH algorithm proposed previously is shown to be efficient, a detailed performance analysis of various AFH mechanisms under realistic resource constraints is yet to be done. In particular, based on our performance study on Bluetooth systems presented in this paper, we have found that the AFH mechanism adopted by IEEE 802.15 Task Group 2 (TG2) is very sensitive to memory and power limitations. We then propose a novel Interference Source Oriented Adaptive Frequency Hopping (ISOAFH) approach based on a cross-layer design, in which the baseband layer of Bluetooth considers not only the instantaneous channels condition but also the physical layer transmission characteristics of potential interference sources in determining the hop sequence. In our simulations using detailed MATLAB Simulink modeling, we find that our proposed method is much more robust in that it is insensitive to memory and energy constraints. Indeed, our approach generally achieves a lower collision rate and higher ISM spectrum utilization.published_or_final_versio