Muslim Family Law in Southern Thailand: A Historical Overview

Muslims have long a history of practicing Islamic law where Muslim communities are the minority. In Thailand, past governments have positively included Islamic law as a legitimate source of personal law for Muslims in the southern regions. Consequently, Muslims are governed by two different sets of laws in Thailand, one is Islamic law and the other is the secular law. However, only Islamic law is applicable for Muslims especially in settling their matrimonial disputes and inheritance. Islamic family law has a long history and has been preserved for the betterment and benefits of Muslim citizens especially in the four Muslim provinces of Thailand. This study aims to describe the development of Islamic law through the different periods of governments in southern Thailand. The development of Islamic family law and the application of Islamic law along with its judicial aspects under the administration of Thailand will also be discusssed.     

A New Malaysian Quality of Life Index Based on Fuzzy Sets and Hierarchical Needs

The Malaysian Quality of Life Index (MQLI) released by the Economic Planning Unit (EPU), has led authors to search for alternative method of expressing this index. One of the limitations in MQLI computations is the failure to recognise unequal weights for each accounted component. This paper offers a new way of expressing the quality of life index using a mathematical modelling based on fuzzy sets theory and the proposed weights based on Maslow’s theory of hierarchical human needs. The indices of 11 components that were used to compute MQLI, again be gathered as a basis in expressing a new Malaysian Fuzzy Quality of Life Index (MFQLI). The new indices for each component yielded through a normalisation process prior weighting and aggregation to compose a new MFQLI. It was found that a fuzzy sets approach with the inclusion of weights based on human needs yielded a better index of quality of life than the MQLI.     

Soil organic carbon stock in different urban land uses: high stock evidence in urban parks

Urban Ecosystems - Urban areas are major producers of atmospheric CO2 emissions, but at the same time they can offset some of the associated C losses by retaining stable organic carbon in their...     

Implementation of Child Rights in the Children's Homes in Malaysia

The objective of this study was to examine the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in the Children Homes under the Social Welfare Department (SWD) in Malaysia. Data was collected from 402 registered children who were staying in six Children Homes across the country. This study employed self‐report surveys where multiple data collection methods, such as face‐to‐face structured interviews, key informant interviews (KIIs), and documentation survey, were used. The study found that the SWD failed to comply with most of the commitments of CRC in Children Homes at its implementation level, and it is still needs based. The findings of this study present important guidelines for government and policy makers in improving child welfare services in the Children Homes in Malaysia.     

“It's Really a Roller Coaster”: Experience of Parenting Children with Developmental Disabilities

The aim of this research was to explore the experience of parenting a child diagnosed with a developmental disability. The in-depth interviews were semistructured and open-ended, covering topics such as positive and negative experiences and time demand in raising a child with a developmental disability, their effects on family relationship and on physical and mental health of the parents, and the strategies for managing the negative experiences. Overall, the participants indicated that parenting a child with a developmental disability is both challenging and rewarding, depending on the circumstances facing parents in a particular day. The findings are interpreted in five thematic structures: (1) negotiating joys and sorrows, (2) physical and mental exhaustion, (3) negotiating with family matters, (4) social stigma, and (5) hope in the midst of despair, each of which comprised several subthemes/categories. The discussion includes implications of the findings.     

Risk measure estimation under two component mixture models with trimmed data

Several two component mixture models from the transformed gamma and transformed beta families are developed to assess risk performance. Their common statistical properties are given and applications to real insurance loss data are shown. A new data trimming approach for parameter estimation is proposed using the maximum likelihood estimation method. Assessment with respect to Value-at-Risk and Conditional Tail Expectation risk measures are presented. Of all the models examined, the mixture of inverse transformed gamma-Burr distributions consistently provides good results in terms of goodness-of-fit and risk estimation in the context of the Danish fire loss data.     

Bootstrap tests for multivariate directional alternatives

Tests on multivariate means that are hypothesized to be in a specified direction have received attention from both theoretical and applied points of view. One of the most common procedures used to test this cone alternative is the likelihood ratio test (LRT) assuming a multivariate normal model for the data. However, the resulting test for an ordered alternative is biased in that the only usable critical values are bounds on the null distribution. The present paper provides empirical evidence that bootstrapping the null distribution of the likelihood ratio statistic results in a bootstrap test (BT) with comparable power properties without the additional burden of assuming multivariate normality. Additionally, the tests based on the LRT statistic can reject the null hypothesis in favor of the alternative even though the true means are far from the alternative region. The BT also has similar properties for normal and nonnormal data. This anomalous behavior is due to the formulation of the null hypothesis and a possible remedy is to reformulate the null to be the complement of the alternative hypothesis. We discuss properties of a BT for the modified set of hypotheses (MBT) based on a simulation study. The resulting test is conservative in general and in some specific cases has power estimates comparable to those for existing methods. The BT has higher sensitivity but relatively lower specificity, whereas the MBT has higher specificity but relatively lower sensitivity.     

On the robustness of right and middle censoring schemes in parametric survival models

This article considers the exponential and Weibull distributions for studying the robustness of their parameters estimates in the case of right and middle types of censoring. As might be expected, the simulation studies indicate that the mean square error (MSE) decreases with larger sample sizes, increases with the contamination level and censoring proportion. But somewhat surprisingly, our study shows that, regardless the parametric model and for given values of the other factors, estimates for middle censoring are more robust compared to those for right censoring.     

Statistical Inference Based on Progressively Type II Censored Data from Weibull Model

In this article, we consider the problem of estimating the shape and scale parameters and predicting the unobserved removed data based on a progressive type II censored sample from the Weibull distribution. Maximum likelihood and Bayesian approaches are used to estimate the scale and shape parameters. The sampling-based method is used to draw Monte Carlo (MC) samples and it has been used to estimate the model parameters and also to predict the removed units in multiple stages of the censored sample. Two real datasets are presented and analyzed for illustrative purposes and Monte carlo simulations are performed to study the behavior of the proposed methods.