Strategies for urban conservation: A case example of George Town, Penang

George Town, Penang has more than 200 years of urban history and the largest collection of heritage shophouses in Southeast Asia. These heritage buildings have remained unchanged since the 1800s in spite of the lack of conservation legislation. The objective of this paper is to determine which public policy instruments have been effective in protecting the urban heritage of George Town. In particular, the role played by the Control of Rent Act, 1966, is evaluated. Upon examination of records on property transaction, rent-control records, development applications and demographic trends, no conclusive evidence was found that this Act was instrumental in protecting heritage buildings. Instead it was the unintentional effects of various development policies that saved George Town's urban heritage.     

Cultural case workers in child disability services: an evidence-based model of cultural responsiveness for refugee families

The medical/disabled category for quota refugees selected for resettlement in New Zealand allows entry to those who have either a medical condition that can be treated or helped in New Zealand or a disability that requires support. Children from refugee and other culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds with impairments comprise an increasing proportion of the caseloads of Auckland region child health and disability services. For people from refugee backgrounds, the New Zealand disability system can be complex, difficult to understand and hard to navigate. Disability therapeutic, rehabilitative and support services are often non-existent in countries of origin. The interventions offered in western countries such as physiotherapy, occupational therapy and speech language therapy may be unknown and therefore poorly understood by refugee clients and families. This article presents the findings of an evaluation of the establishment of cultural caseworker positions in the Waitemata District Health Board Child Development Service.     

Identifying predictors of violent behaviour among students using the conventional logistic and multilevel logistic models

Analysing individual-, school- and class-level observations is a good and efficient approach in epidemiologic research. Using data on violent behaviour among secondary school students we compared results from the conventional logistic modelling with multilevel logistic modelling approach using the gllamm command in Stata. We illustrated the advantage of multilevel modelling over the conventional logistic modelling through an example of data from violence experience among secondary school students. We constructed a logistic model with a random intercept on the school and class levels to account for unexplained heterogeneity between schools and classes. In the multilevel model, we estimated that, in an average school, the odds of experiencing violence are 3 (OR=2.99, 95% CI: 1.86, 4.81, p<0.0001) times higher for students who use drugs as opposed to the odds of experiencing violence for students who do not use drugs. However, the estimates in the conventional logistic model are slightly lower.

We estimated that a normally distributed random intercept for schools and classes that accounts for any unexplained heterogeneity between schools and classes has variances 0.017 and 0.035, respectively. We therefore recommend the multilevel logistic modelling when data are clustered.     

Governance,religious assurance and Islamic banks: Do Shariah boards effectively serve?

This study examines the quality of governance and religious assurance provided by Shariah boards (SBs) when undertaking the crucial compliance review required in fulfilling the expected ethical and social legitimacy of Islamic banks. To better understand the complex behavioural processes, we explore the governance role of SBs and assess issues related to competence, effectiveness and independence in the light of the newly adopted 2011 Malaysian Shariah Governance Framework (SGF). A series of semi-structured interviews were undertaken with key individuals in two well-established fully-fledged Malaysian Islamic banks. Our findings reveal that the newly implemented SGF has generally brought about some of the benefits hoped for by its regulatory architects. We find the quality of religious assurance to have been enhanced due to the emphasis placed on religious audit giving rise to improved credibility. However, we report the compliance review process to be inadequately undertaken with SBs still excessively reliant on internal officers implying possible independence compromise. We highlight concerns relating to (1) the general level of competency of individual SB members; (2) lack of technical banking and finance knowledge; and (3) SB members generally fulfilling a ceremonial role rather than undertaking vigilant monitoring. Our findings lead us to question the full impact of the new 2011 SGF and query the value and effectiveness of SBs. We make the call for the establishment of external religious auditors to render compliance assurance which could provide the much-needed impetus to improve governance and increase market and stakeholder confidence.     

Returnable transport packaging in developing countries: drivers,barriers and business performance

Abstract

This study, drawing on natural resource-based view, identifies drivers, barriers and the potential benefits of returnable transport packaging (RTP) – that is, the repeated use of packaging items – and conceptualises RTP as a technology and resource that supports organisational competitiveness. Specifically, it investigates the impact of RTP adoption on business performance, the effects of drivers, barriers and size of organisations. The data collection took place in Nigeria and South Africa. The findings suggest that RTP has a significant positive impact on business performance. Whilst prior studies seem to suggest that shrinkage and attrition are the major problems identified with the usage of RTP, our findings indicate that there are several other barriers affecting RTP adoption and the resultant performance advantage. The results also show that there is an increasing move towards adoption of RTP but some organisations are faced with financial constraints, especially the small and medium size enterprises. In addition, the results show that RTP is largely a ‘sustainability facing’ initiative with adopters motivated primarily by potential environmental, economic, social and operational benefits of adoption.     

Classification rules for identifying individuals at high risk of developing myocardial infarction based on ApoB,ApoA1 and the ratio were determined using a Bayesian approach

We have developed a new approach to determine the threshold of a biomarker that maximizes the classification accuracy of a disease. We consider a Bayesian estimation procedure for this purpose and illustrate the method using a real data set. In particular, we determine the threshold for Apolipoprotein B (ApoB), Apolipoprotein A1 (ApoA1) and the ratio for the classification of myocardial infarction (MI). We first conduct a literature review and construct prior distributions. We then develop classification rules based on the posterior distribution of the location and scale parameters for these biomarkers. We identify the threshold for ApoB and ApoA1, and the ratio as 0.908 (gram/liter), 1.138 (gram/liter) and 0.808, respectively. We also observe that the threshold for disease classification varies substantially across different age and ethnic groups. Next, we identify the most informative predictor for MI among the three biomarkers. Based on this analysis, ApoA1 appeared to be a stronger predictor than ApoB for MI classification. Given that we have used this data set for illustration only, the results will require further investigation for use in clinical applications. However, the approach developed in this article can be used to determine the threshold of any continuous biomarker for a binary disease classification.