Malaysian Modern Research Articles

Integrated Knowledge Management Strategy: A Preliminary Literature Review

The significance of retail industry could be shown from its percentage contribution to the Malaysian GDP. A proper deployment of KM had been found to improve financial competitiveness, operational efficiency and increased market share. It is in this context, that this paper is set with a purpose to identify an effective KM strategy for the Malaysian modern retail chains. The paper reveals two types of KM's strategies commonly practiced in organizations namely: codification and personalisation strategies. The IT is proposed as a platform to integrate both strategies.

Imagining Transnational Modernity in Contemporary Malaysia

This paper is concerned with how urban Malay women negotiate and imagine their modernity as mediated through imported television dramas. It is clear that one of the platforms through which to articulate modernity in contemporary Malaysia is the consumption of popular culture. Promoted at first as an appropriate television genre to strengthen the agenda of Malaysian modernity, Asian soap opera has not been without its tensions. Some authorities have expressed anxiety over what they consider to be the negative influences of foreign issues of morality, which they believe might undermine the standards of Malay womanhood and compromise Malay cultural and national boundaries. Against this perception, however, we propose that urban Malay women negotiate their cultural resources to establish specific watching competencies with which to intelligently and adeptly engage foreign lifestyles in Asian soap operas imported to Malaysia. Watching competencies involve an active mobilization of those resources through which Malay women watch these soaps and measure their adherence to tradition. This paper will focus on how selected urban Malay women exercise their cultural resources, particularly those of adat (the traditional Malay custom as practiced by the Malays in Malaysia) and Islam, to form specific watching competencies for engaging with the depictions of complex inappropriate foreign lifestyles portrayed in Asian soap operas.

Potential of Passive Cooling Techniques for Modern Houses in the Tropical Climate of Malaysia – Analysis of the Indoor Thermal Environment for Various Ventilation Strategies

This paper discusses the potential of passive cooling techniques for Malaysian modern houses with the aim of reducing air–conditioning usage. A full–scale field experiment was carried out to reveal the detailed indoor thermal environment for various ventilation strategies. Night ventilation was found to be better than daytime ventilation, full–day ventilation and no ventilation in terms of air temperature reductions during the day and night. Night ventilation improves thermal comfort more than the other ventilation conditions based on operative temperature. However, further measures to lower indoor humidity, such as by dehumidification, or to increase indoor air velocity, such as by the use of a fan, are required to improve the thermal condition in the night ventilated room, especially in the daytime. In fact, the peak standard effective temperature (SET*) in the night ventilated room was decreased by 4.0°C mainly through the use of a ceiling fan. Thus night ventilation, with the use of a ceiling fan, was considered to be the superior option to the other conditions when the evaporative heat loss is taken into account in SET*. Several other potential passive cooling techniques are also proposed for achieving acceptable thermal comfort in modern Malaysian houses.

Malaysian Modernities: Cultural Politics and the Construction of Muslim Technoscientific Identities

Malaysia is in the midst of enormous societal transformations, and Malay identity is a key locus for these transformations. Malaysians are asking themselves two questions—What does it mean to be Malaysian? And what does it mean to be Malay? The Malaysian government has a goal of becoming a fully developed nation by the year 2020. This national plan, known as "Vision 2020," is developing within the context of highly contested local/global debates about Islam, science, and modernity. I argue that these debates are best conceptualized as competing projects for reconstructing Malaysian economy, society, and identity and thus represent alternative constructions of Malaysian modernity.

Airborne Hyperspectral Imagery for Agricultural Businesses in Malaysia

The Forest Geospatial Information & Survey Lab in cooperation with Aeroscan Precision (M) Sdn Bhd at Lebuh Silikon, Universiti Putra Malaysia, spent the last four years developing airborne hyperspectral remote sensing and GIS applications, many of which address agriculture, forestry and the environment. This paper wants to make clear from the outset. Despite the lack of significant commercial success for businesses trying to sell airborne hyperspectral remote sensing data and services to agriculture, the only currently available imaging technology being pioneered and developed in UPM, does work. There is no doubt of its benefits to the agriculture industry especially the oil palm plantation giants in saving money, time, increasing yield, enhancing best practices, protecting the environment, and more. Despite that, the company just not made a “real” business of it perhaps due to the market for airborne hyperspectral remote sensing products and services related to agriculture, is still not known to most state and federal departments and agencies on the other. The consumer, for now, is not really in the picture. The commercial side can be broken down into the growers, who produce the food, Farmers Coops that may include growers but also produce food products and food providers. While some states have huge agricultural bases, few have money to invest in airborne hyperspectral remote sensing, which leaves quite a lot of burden on the federal government. The UPM-Aeroscan Precision (M) Sdn Bhd experience launched in 2004, planned to serve the commercial agricultural market by bringing the benefits of airborne hyperspectral remote sensing, also provide a real-time “GIS-ready” made database, and timely crop yield information to the plantation sector and farmer. The vision was simple: the farmer would build his own real-time airborne remote sensing GIS-ready made database documenting fertilizer, watering and planting details in the software (something typically done in a notebook by future high-tech Malaysian graduated farmers) with the use of a crop model to predict the expected yield. The check was to compare that expected outcome to the reality of the airborne hyperspectral remotely sensing images. For that level of detail, the UPM-APSB’s AISA very high resolution airborne hyperspectral imagery (1 m), and in near real-time could only provide the solution for the Malaysian modern generation farmers in the hope that computer technology will reach them. In this paper, what UPM-APSB’s AISA airborne hyperspectral remote sensing can bring to agriculture is demonstrated. First off, it can be used to monitor yields, early in the season, and then later. Second, airborne hyperspectral remote sensing can delineate soil zones. A third area of benefit is in field delineation where the boundaries of crops, in support of regulatory procedures could be easily found. The final area is precision agriculture, about best practices, giving a crop just the water, fertilizer, herbicide, etc. it needs to grow to its potential, but no more. The authors feel strongly that precision agriculture could have a significant impact on the Malaysian future environment. If the UPM-APSB’s AISA near real-time data can map and provide just enough nitrogen, the impact on the environment is reduced and the plants should still provide their maximum yield. Applying this just enough vision should save the farmer’s money on herbicide, water, fertilizer and other such costs.

Book Review: In Service and Servitude: Foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian Modernity Project

Book Review: In Service and Servitude: Foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian Modernity Project

Book Review: In Service and Servitude: Foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian Modernity Project

Book Review: In Service and Servitude: Foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian Modernity Project

In Service and Servitude: Foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian Modernity Project.

List of Tables Preface Acknowledgments Abbreviations 1. Introduction 2. Arranging and Rearranging the Interior Frontiers of Society 3. Boys, Amahs, and Girls: Domestic Workers of the Past and Present 4. The Malaysian-Philippine-Indonesian Maid Trade 5. Infrapolitics of Domestic Service: Strategies of, and Resistances to, Control 6. Modernity Via Consumption: Domestic Service and the Making of the Modern Malaysian Middle Classes 7. Conclusion Glossary Notes Bibliography Index

Malaysian Modern or Anti-Anti Asian Values

Probably the most influential critique of social theorizing about the non-West in recent years has been one emanating from a `subalternist' perspective, by which I mean a critique mounted if not by, then in the name of, peoples/cultures/modes of thought that have been dominated culturally by `the West'. The rapid rise to prominence - economic, political, strategic and cultural - of an increasingly large number of nation states in the Asia-Pacific region poses a rather different kind of challenge to western perspectives on the project of modernity, a challenge to which social theory has yet to formulate an adequate response. Focusing on Malaysia, this paper examines the claims advanced by certain members of the new Asian political elite and intellectuals that Asian countries have discovered divergent trajectories of modernization, and argues that attempts on the part of contemporary western observers to dismiss these claims have so far been unconvincing. This suggests that social theorists need in future to give more serious consideration to the possibility that the `rise of Asia' represents a new kind of modernization.