Structural ambidexterity and contextual ambidexterity have dominated the discussion on organisational
ambidexterity, where the similarities and differences between them are being emphasised. One of the critical
views is that although both of them are essential, the impacts on performance may be dissimilar. Since there are fewer empirical studies been done to demonstrate this view, this study aims to compare and contrast the effects of structural ambidexterity and contextual ambidexterity on the firms‟ performance of new product development (NPD). This study is examined in the case of manufacturing sector in Malaysia. The data was collected via a questionnaire survey targeting product/production managers, and processed with SPSS v.19 statistical technique. The results of correlation and linear regression analyses have shown that structural ambidexterity and contextual ambidexterity are indeed dissimilar in their effects on NPD performance, but at the same time are complementing each other. It is concluded that both of them are important, but must be applied according to the right contexts. Since this is a preliminary study, more empirical works need to be done to generalise the findings.

Firms may gain monopoly power from their innovation through Intellectual Property Right (IPR) as it gives protection to the firms’ intellectual assets. Based on the statistics from Malaysian Intellectual Property Corporation (MyIPO) trademark is chosen by most firms as their choice among other IPR. In this paper, we introduce a model to analyze the relationship between trademark activity and financial performance of Malaysian firms. The theory of the firm focusing on profit maximization is adopted as the underpinning theory for the study. In order to conduct the study quantitatively, secondary data will be gathered and estimated by using panel data model. Malaysian public listed firms are taken as the unit of analysis which amounted to 296 firms and the data spans from year 2009 to 2014. The trademark variables will be measured based on trademark registration and financial performance will be measured using profit. It is to be expected that there is a significant relationship between trademark activity and the performance of Malaysian firms as past research claimed that trademark has a positive significant impact on firm performance. This study may contribute theoretically in the academia by introducing the new models in measuring firm performance connected with trademark activity. It gives insights on how the utilization of IPR such as trademark can lead to the sustainable growth of the firms. Further research on trademark is suggested as it may give a clear picture on the practice of trademark.

Consumers nowadays have a broad range of products and services to choose from. The purchase decisions of most consumers do not only focus on the functionality, but also in its design. Therefore, most firms strive to produce new designs and connect with the intellectual property right (IPR) together to comprise a monopoly power for firms’ sustainable growth. As a result, industrial design is one of the chosen IPRs in order to protect the designs and it is crucial as it will lead to the success of the designs. This study will analyze the impact of industrial design protection on the financial performance at the Malaysian firm level. Penrosean Views will be employed as the theoretical underpinning of the study. It is theorized that the sources of profits take place when the firm possess the function of complementary resource or IP assets. It is expected that there is a significant impact between industrial design protection and financial performance that leads to the firms’ sustainable growth. Due to competitive market condition, it is expected that the impact is small and the signs of the coefficients are mixed.

 

The objective of this study is to assess the implementation of supply chain risk identification and its relevant techniques in the electrical and electronics industry in malaysia. In this regard, a questionnaire based survey was developed and accomplished to explore the extent of implementation in 5 main uncertain areas namely supply, demand, environment, process and control. The average mean score and standard deviation were calculated for the each of these key areas. Moreover, this paper surveyed issues associated to risk identification such as the level of understanding among the respondent companies, the benefits of adoption, the level of adoption for each risk identifying technique as well as its difference between smes and large companies. The result indicated that most of responding companies have been committed toward implementation of supply chain risk identification and its techniques. Although large companies are more interested into implement risk identification techniques in each area, two areas of supply and demand predominately are in the center of attention for both types of business. In general, every uncertain area, investigated, serves as a useful guide for companies when they attempt to implement the risk identification step of supply chain risk management. Furthermore, the findings show the number of adopted techniques increases along to the years of implementation regardless size of business. However, the current study is the first that investigating the extent of risk identification implementation in electrical and electronics industry in malaysia.

With the intense competition in the retail sector, achieving high store equity can be a means to gain competitive advantage for retailers. Retailers’ sole reliance on store attributes may not be sufficient to build relationship with customers, as prior studies demonstrate the high likelihood of customer opting to shop at stores with loyalty programs. Accordingly, the current study aimed in examining the contribution of loyalty program attributes and store attributes to store engagement and store equity in the context of department stores in Malaysia. Survey responses from 484 department store cardholders were collected, and PLS-SEM structural equation modelling was used to test the hypotheses. While all of the proposed hypotheses were supported, the relative contribution of both attributes towards store engagement and store equity provides insightful implication in terms of theory and practical. From a theoretical perspective, the integration of social exchange theory and S-D logic offers significant contribution in understanding the effect of loyalty program attributes and store attributes on the relationship between the cardholder and the store. From the practical perspective, retailers should pay more attention in putting more value in their offering by incorporating experiential and interactive marketing approach to stimulate customer relationship in order to further enhance the store equity.

Water conservation continues to remain a priority on the international agenda. It is therefore all the more important that we continue to do as much as possible to conserve our already scarce water supply. This research aims to quantify the current awareness levels of the water crisis in South Africa. All one hundred members of staff at a faculty at one of the leading tertiary education institutions in the country formed the population for the study. Data collection took place through questionnaires, with a response rate of 25%, after which a quantitative analysis took place. The research found that a fair level of awareness does exist regarding the water crisis in South Africa, despite the fact that people are largely unaware of existing awareness campaigns. People are however willing to learn more and to become more responsible water users, as they have shown an interest in receiving more information. Although current awareness campaigns do accomplish a fair bit, future research should focus on not only maintaining these campaigns, but also on improving their efficiency and reach. Increasing the awareness and acceptance of the virtual water concept can also have far reaching implications for water scarce countries.

Arabic and Islamic manuscripts are valuable sources of information about the mediaeval period. So, the detailed study, digital analysis and classification of these manuscripts are among priority tasks of the researches.
To the date, the study of handwritten Arabic documents is limited to the study of their textual content and the digitalization as a rule means creation of the digital copy of the layout picture of the written document while cataloging is based on authors‟ name, date and theme of the text. Meanwhile there are a lot of formal markers, such as density of handwriting, type of the Arabic script, graphical layout of the individual columns, text color, illuminations, proportions of graphics to each other, the ratio of text fields, proportions between text and gaps, etc.Handwritten artifacts often have traces of later impacts of different kind, such as damages, supplements, contamination, which may be considered as indirect indications to the origin and the history of the „life‟ of the document.Given the fact that each manuscript is an inherent set of such individual characteristics, it allows to determine the date and place of its creation, its authorship as well as its relation to particular manuscript school. All these characteristics can be described in terms of digital parameters.Formation of such metadata bases which include information from different libraries as well as the use of the principles of analysis which takes into account the maximum number of characteristics of handwritten document necessitates the implementation of computer technologies which in its turn allow to optimize the process of classification and comparative analysis of Arabic manuscripts from different sources. It is also necessary to develop common principles of codicological analysis as a whole.

The paper identifies the place of the Arabic language acquisition in all kinds of Islamic Studies programs and
best practices for Arabic teaching. Modern trends in the spread of radical movements make give an extra
thought to the role of Islamic Studies, both as a scientific field and educational program. Arabic, as the main
language of Islam, holds an important place in the content of educational programs in Islamic Studies. Our study
of teaching methods of the Arabic language worldwide demonstrates that the Arabic language is often taught as
a separate discipline without taking into consideration main specialization of a student. In present study we
review such issues as the optimal number of hours devoted to the study of Arabic, the most appropriate
textbooks, methodological literature and variety of Arabic should be primarily taught (Modern Standard Arabic,
Classical Arabic, Vernacular Arabic) etc. The research is based on a study of the practices of Arabic teaching in
Russia (both in secular and Islamic educational institutions) and worldwide.
The result of the research shows that the obligatory competence of specialists with in-depth knowledge of the
history and culture of Islam is a high level of knowledge of Arabic. However, the analysis of the implemented
programs indicates that only a limited number of hours of the curriculum is given to the subject. Study of Arabic and historical sources in Arabic should take at least 30 % of the whole disciplines in Islamic Studies programs and study of the classical texts should have the priority. Such approach to the teaching of Arabic is applied in St. Petersburg State University (Russia) as a part of new Bachelor‟s Degree program “History and Culture of Islam,” that will start this year.

This study was conducted to investigate the effects of “Mother-Child Communication Skills Education” on preschool period 6-year-old children’s skills to express emotions. The work group of the study, which was conducted in the pretest-posttest control group experimental model, included children of 68 mothers, 34 in the experimental group and 34 in the control group, who lived in the Selcuklu district of the province of Konya, whose children attended preschool education and were in the age group of 6. “Expression Test for Emotions”, whose validity and reliability was tested by Ergin (2003), was used as the data collection tool of the study. Furthermore, “Personal Information Form” was used to determine the demographic characteristics of the mothers and their children. Expression Test for Emotions was administered to the children as pretest within the scope of the sample. During the study, “Mother-Child Communication Skills Education” program, which was prepared by the researchers to investigate its effect on 6-year-old children’s skills to express emotions, was administered, in the form of group education, to the mothers in the experimental group in 3-hour sessions for 15 weeks. At the end of the implementation of the education program, Expression Test for Emotions was administered to the experimental and control groups as posttest, and eight weeks after the administration of the posttest, Expression Test for Emotions was administered to the experimental group once again as a follow-up test in order to monitor the permanence of “Mother-Child Communication Skills Education” in children’s skills to express emotions. The findings obtained in the study is that “Mother-Child Communication Skills Education Program” makes positive contribution to the children’s of the mothers in experimental group skills to express emotions.

This research examined the effects of computer assisted preschool educational activities on children’s intuitive
mathematical ability. The research group is composed of five year olds attending nursery school in 2011 – 2012
school year in Selcuklu county of Konya in Turkey. The participants composed of five year olds were randomly
selected. The research was designed with pre-test and post-test model with a control group. A total of 40
children (20 children in experimental group and 20 children in control group) were included in the research.
Intuitive Mathematical Ability Test was applied to the children which was developed by Güven (2001) and it
was used to determine children’s intuitive mathematical ability. The test was administered to children before
and after the experimantation. Mann Whitney U test was used to analyze the data with SPSS 15.0. The general
result indicated that the computer assisted preschool educational activities makes positive contribution to five year old children’s intuitive mathematical ability.

Eco-brick is an important environmentally-friendly strategy to mitigate carbon dioxide emission in building construction. For energy and resource efficient eco-brick manufacturing, natural fibre and biomass waste can be utilised as matrix. The present study aims to evaluate the properties of concrete eco-brick manufactured using kenaf fibre matrix. The brick was produced by mixing 0.5-2.0% kenaf fibre (MR grade), Portland cement and sand. The physical and mechanical properties of the eco-brick were evaluated according to the ASTM C73 method. The data showed that, water absorption values of the eco-brick were in the range of 9.0-12.5 %. Eco-brick produced from 0.5, 1.0, 1.5% and 2.0% kenaf fibre have flexure resistance to compression of 4693.9, 4335.6, 3879.3 and 3294.5 psi respectively. According to the ASTM C73 guidelines, the properties of eco-brick from mixture of 0.5-1.5% kenaf fibre produced in this study meet building material criteria for construction in moderate weather conditions.

Poor performance of Malaysian students in Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS) and Program for International Students Assessment (PISA) indicated that more efforts are needed to elevate students’ performance in science and mathematics. Past studies have shown that students’ performances in the subjects are strongly associated with teachers’ content knowledge, pedagogical skills as well as pedagogical content knowledge, implying that teachers play vital roles in ensuring the effectiveness of teaching and learning in classroom. Recently, many issues related to teachers’ attitudes, knowledge and skills have come to light. The fundamental aspect that needs to be addressed is teacher’s continuous professional development. This study was conducted to identify the nature of in-service training that Malaysian science teachers attend. A descriptive qualitative research design was employed whereby interviews and document analysis served as primary means of data collection. The objectives were to find out the nature of in-service trainings offered, the impact of those trainings and the actual training needs that Science teachers require for their professional development enhancement. The findings revealed that there exist mismatch between the in-service training courses that have been carried out and the teachers’ actual needs. The repercussions include wastage of time, money and other resources as well as the poor perception of school-based in-service training as being insignificant and of little benefit. However, there were also courses valued by science teachers and have had positive impacts towards improvement of pedagogical skills, knowledge in ICT, and understanding of new policies. There is also an emerging need for ICT-based instruction courses as requisite to approach millennial students in more creative and appealing manner. A guideline to assist school management in planning for impactful continuous professional development courses was also put forward.

This paper will discuss meaning relevance in text translation in order to discover similarities and differences in meaning forms between original and target texts. The writer has focused on ten text translation from Malay to Spanish. The grammatical structural difference between Malay and Spanish has been seen as one of the obstacles in translating without changing the grammatical structures of both languages. The writer will use Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory (1986 and 1995) in discussing translation equivalents for textual verb expressions from Malay to Spanish. Next, the writer will analyse the translation equivalents based on their fuctional similarities and differences to ensure the meaning conveyed remain the same to the original text. This research applies field research and textual references methods. Findings from this research can assist the teaching and learning of Spanish as a foreign language specifically in verb formation.

Past research suggested that the number of young people who hurt themselves is growing significantly in the recent years and is becoming a public health problem in the West. Some Asian researchers claimed that self-hurt behaviour was reported not only to be prevalent in the West, but also in the developing world. World Health Organization reported that self-hurt behaviour has been emerging as one of the problems contributing to the rise in morbidity and mortality rates. Surveys also revealed that adolescents and young adults are at higher risk of engaging in self-hurt behaviour. Malaysia, as a developing country, with a population of 30.8 millions up to May 2015 has a relatively young population. However, relatively little self-hurt research has been done in Malaysia. Although there were some counselling records found, there is virtually no study that has been designed to identify young people’s self-hurt behaviour. Thus, this research was carried out to find out the prevalence of self-hurt behaviour among the young people in Malaysia. At the same time a qualitative data revealed that adolescents did not seek help for their self-hurt problems. Therefore the reasons for not seeking help was explored.

In this era of Internet and information, communication, technology (ICT) advancement, most novice and expert researchers share their intellectual output virtually. In the beginning, this was done as part of their personal page on departmental websites or blogs. Now, asynchronous tools, which perform as idea management or argumentation channels such as, blogs, wikis, chats, forums, Q&A or FAQ sites, and social networks provide unprecedented opportunities for online engaged communities or organizations to express a discourse and act at a wide scale. This indicates the researchers’ aspiration for informal learning circles as well as expanding their work cost-effectively. By creating informal online learning through collective intelligence, it means organizing the random posting of these scholarly communications and interactions into well structured, secured and attractive virtual spaces. The expected benefit of this informal online learning is included as a supplement to the consultation and supervisory process, provides institutional visibility and prestige and also to serve as a basis for a new model of consultation and supervisory communication. Understanding how and why researchers engage in these kinds of activities is important for developing better new tools for the research going forward. Based on the findings of an online pilot survey with 39 respondents (i.e. postgraduate students), this study endeavours (1) to ascertain the validity and reliability of the questions in the full study questionnaire; (2) to identify preliminary understanding of the use of asynchronous informal learning tools among the postgraduate students.

This is a case study to explore the practices of virtual reference services at one of the academic libraries at a university. The library supports the needs of about 4500 to 5000 users from various programs, from undergraduate to postgraduate levels. The library provides reference services via various channels, from face to face to electronic mediums. The study is conducted to understand more about the current practices of reference services, particularly through electronic mediums at the campus, to identify issues faced by the librarians in supporting those users’ demands, and to provide several recommendations. Library users have various needs and librarians have to support those needs through the services that they provide on a daily basis. A quick response and feedback from librarians are expected. Some of the questions that the librarians receive everyday from their users could have been avoided if proper database systems are available to store them for future retrieval. However, having a system in place and enforcing people to use it can be challenging. The library needs to revisit their policy and processes related to reference services to support virtual reference services. It is good to have various ways of communicating with the users to give them flexibility; however, the library should have the capability to support them. Reference librarians should give equal attention to enquiries directly from e–mails as they would give to enquiries directly from users at the reference desk. The study has revealed that the services they provide through electronic mediums to users can be improved to reduce manual management of questions and answers between the librarians and users. Thus, the study has resulted in the development of a system prototype to support virtual reference services. In addition, librarians need to be well–trained and competent in using social media tools to take full advantage of the benefits offered by these technologies.

Eco-brick is an important environmentally-friendly strategy to mitigate carbon dioxide emission in building construction. For energy and resource efficient eco-brick manufacturing, natural fibre and biomass waste can be utilised as matrix. The present study aims to evaluate the properties of concrete eco-brick manufactured using kenaf fibre matrix. The brick was produced by mixing 0.5-2.0% kenaf fibre (MR grade), Portland cement and sand. The physical and mechanical properties of the eco-brick were evaluated according to the ASTM C73 method. The data showed that, water absorption values of the eco-brick were in the range of 9.0-12.5 %. Eco-brick produced from 0.5, 1.0, 1.5% and 2.0% kenaf fibre have flexure resistance to compression of 4693.9, 4335.6, 3879.3 and 3294.5 psi respectively. According to the ASTM C73 guidelines, the properties of eco-brick from mixture of 0.5-1.5% kenaf fibre produced in this study meet building material criteria for construction in moderate weather conditions.

This paper reports the physical-chemical characterization of polyacrylamide-со- methylcellulose and applications in concrete. Three ratio of polymers were used for the synthesis of copolymers: 95:5 (MC-PAAm), 85:15 (MC-PAAm), and 75:25 (MC-PAAm). In this process acrylamide was considered more stable than methylcellulose. The materials obtained were analysed by TG, FT-IR and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) techniques. In the nutshell, the results can be used to improve most of the characteristics of concrete. As the dosage of water-soluble copolymer increased, the demand of water gets decreased. The combined water content, absorption and compressive strength of the hardened cement pastes were increased by changing different ratio of polymers.

The copolymerization of N-isopropylacrylamide onto maize starch has been carried out at 70°C using ammonium persulfate (APS) as initiator. The N-isopropylacrylamide-modified copolymers were characterized by Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) techniques. The influence of these copolymers on the physico-mechanical properties of Portland cement (PC) pastes was determined using various characterization methods such as compressive strength, water absorption and workability.

In this study, a feed forward multilayer back propagation with Levenberg-Marquardt training algorithm artificial neural network (ANN) was developed to predict the particle size from extraction of ginger rhizome using supercritical carbon dioxide in Rapid Expansion Supercritical Solution (RESS). Sizes of solid oil particle formation analysis are carried using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and Image processing and analysis software, ImageJ. The ANN model account for the effect of extraction temperature (40, 45, 50, 55, 60, 65 and 70°C) and pressure (3000, 4000, 5000, 6000 and 7000psi) on the size of particle. A two-layer ANN with two inputs variables (extraction temperature and pressure) and one output (particle size) with 35 experimental data was used for the modelling purposed. Different network were trained and tested by changing the number of neuron in hidden layer. Using validation data set the network having the highest (nearest to value of one) regression coefficient (R) is 0.99721 and the lowest (nearest to value of zero) mean square error (MSE) is 0.00031 was selected as an optimum ANN model. The suitable ANN model is found to be one hidden layer with 7 hidden neurons.

Customers differ greatly in terms of their demographics, lifestyles, needs, perceptions, preferences and behaviours. A business entity needs to understand the profitability of each individual customer in a segment as well as their potential lifetime profitability. In this paper our focus is on the application of sentiment analysis to analyze feedback of passengers obtained from airline forum. For this purpose Multinomial Naive Bayes and Linear Support Vector models are used. Training data consists of 1217 positive reviews and 955 negative reviews. Sentiments were predicted for 868 reviews. This work also aims at finding suitable data model that achieve a high accuracy and the dependence of accuracy on various pre-processing approaches. The result of sentiment analysis is plotted as a bar graph visualization and evaluated against overall trip rating obtained from forum. By this work we would like to help the airline industry to maximize the delivery and service to meet the customer expectation and build customer loyalty.

Polymer suspensions with narrow particle size distribution and a diameter of 0.2-0.4μm was synthesized by two different routes, suitable for use in biotechnology:(1) – emulsion polymerization in conditions of surfactant synthesis at the interface, and (2) – without surfactant, in the presence of the polymer which is incompatible with formed polystyrene and participating in the formation of structural and mechanical barrier in the interfacial adsorption layer of particles.