This study was designed to examine the chemical composition and anticholinesterase inhibitory activity of the essential oil of Pseuduvaria macrophylla (Oliv.) Merr. (Annonaceae) from Malaysia. The essential oil was obtained by hydrodistillation and fully analyzed by gas chromatography (GC) and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). The analysis led to the identification of thirty-four chemical components that represented 87.7 ± 0.5% of the total oil. The essential oil was found to be rich in germacrene D (21.1 ± 0.4%), bicyclogermacrene (10.5 ± 0.5%), d-cadinene (5.6 ± 0.2%), a-copaene (5.1 ± 0.3%), and a-cadinol (5.0 ± 0.3%). Anticholinesterase activity was evaluated using Ellman method. The essential oil showed weak inhibitory activity against acetylcholinesterase (I%: 32.5%) and butyrylcholinesterase (I%: 35.4%) assays. Our findings demonstrate that the essential oil could be very useful for the characterization, pharmaceutical and therapeutic applications of the essent.....

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The purpose of this study is to acquire expert reviews regarding a comparison between fine motor skills traditional activities with multi-touch gestures screen design. The multi-touch gestures enables children to perform multiple finger gestures such as free rotate, pinch and spread on touch screen design. The gestures are often selected because it is similar to reallife movements. Furthermore, it can enhance the interaction between users and virtual objects. Free rotate gesture enables children to rotate the objects on screen. Pinch gesture enables children to focus on the objects on screen by moving two fingers toward each other. Spread gesture enables children to make the objects look bigger on screen by moving two fingers away from each other. As these gestures involved small muscle movements, it was believed to be related to fine motor skills development. Therefore, this study aimed to get expert reviews about the pre-school children’s fine motor skills development by comparing .....

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Chemical constituents and lipoxygenase inhibitory activity of the aerial part of Piper stylosum have been studied. Fractionation and purification of the extracts afforded five lignans, identified as yangambin (1), sesamin (2), syringaresinol (3), pinoresinol (4), and medioresinol (5), together with other constituents; 4-allyl resorcinol, β-sitosterol, β-sitostenone, taraxerol, vanilin, and vanilic acid. The structures of these compounds were established by analysis of their spectral data, as compared to that of reported compounds. The lipoxygenase inhibitory activity of the extracts and isolated lignans were also evaluated..

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Kajian ini bertujuan untuk menganalisi keberkesanan Program Outbond yang telah dijalankan oleh Program Bahasa Arab Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris (UPSI) di Pusat Bahasa, Universiti aL Al-Bayt Mafraq Jordan pada tarikh 8 November 2017 sehingga 8 Januari 2018. Program ini merupakan program outbond pertama dianjurkan oleh pihak program Bahasa Arab UPSI dengan melibatkan universiti awam di Jordan. Jumlah peserta yang terlibat pada peringkat awal adalah seramai 80 orang, walau bagaimanapun jumlah ini berkurangan kepada 12 orang sahaja disebabkan oleh faktor kewangan peserta. Dengan jumlah peserta yang kecil, program ini diteruskan dalam usaha untuk meningkatkan peluang pembelajaran dan memberi pendedahan kepada pelajar berkaitan dengan bahasa Arab di negara penutur. Kajian berbentuk kualitatif ini menggunakan instrument temu bual dan soal selidik untuk mendapatkan data. Selain itu, kaedah analisis teks juga dilakukan untuk menyokong data temubual dan data soal selidik yang diperolehi. A.....

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The purpose of this research is to develop a symptomatic behaviour screening tool (SymBest) for early childhood educators to identify children with symptomatic behaviours. The measuring constructs of the screening tool are the child developmental domains with developmental delays as items representing the constructs. Fuzzy Delphi analysis was conducted with 18 participants from diverse backgrounds of clinical and education to gain the expert consensus on the suitability of the constructs and items representing SymBest. The findings showed that the experts have a fair degree of agreement on the constructs and the items suggested to form SymBest. The constructs and items with accepted threshold value, percentage of group consensus and fuzzy score is then organized in sequence priority to form the screening tool.  ..

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It is a very concerning situation we are having today when seeing youngsters showing less involvement and not being helpful toward the ones in need. Having children to be exposed to storybooks is to introduce them with moral values that help in building their characters. Storybooks are developed containing pedagogies adapted from the Quran that convey the value of prosocial behaviour effectively. The pedagogies are narrative, dialogue, repetition and questioning. Typography, illustrations and simplified phrases are additional elements that are also included. This research involved 60 children aged 5 to 6 years old from selected preschools in Malaysia. 30 children are presented with the original version of the storybooks and the rest are presented with modified storybooks. Modified Prosocial Behaviour Questionnaire which consists of 15 items is required to be filled during pre and post-test. There was no significant difference on the pretest (M= 32.07, SD= 3.89) and post-test (M= 32.80,.....

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Introducing a rail transit system into an urban region is expected to increase land values, and subsequently, residential property values. Despite this general belief, little is known about the spatial distributional effects of land value uplift. Thus, the goal of this paper is to provide new insights on how proximity to light rail transit stations may affect residential property values in Greater Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia using geographically weighted regression (GWR). The results provide information on spatial variations in the effects of a light rail transit system on residential property values. This study utilises GWR to account for spatial heterogeneity and spatial dependence. The results suggest that residential property values benefit from the provision of a light rail transit system but with considerable spatial variation over a geographical area. Evidently, proximity to the nearest light rail transit station gives positive premiums of up to 8% for a majority of properties locate.....

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Online teaching and learning technologies become widely advocated and employed in higher education, researcher attempts to understand the suitability of such technologies in student learning. This paper presents a research study conducted in blended learning mode to design interactive online application of learning Music Theory. This discussion focuses on the appropriateness of selected content, instructional design, and technical aspect incorporated into authoring software with an option for interactivity and admirable support for audio video. In an interactive and effective design, a variety of media techniques including text, sound, pictures, video clips and animation were used to present the content of the Music Theory lesson. It included three development phases using the ADDIE instructional design model which can begin interactively to reinforce and test the self-learning of students. This study also involved the procedure of integrating the online interactive application of lear.....

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Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the leading cause of death in Malaysia. This study aims to explore the treatment experiences of patients with recurrent coronary heart disease during hospital admission and after discharge. This research also attempts to understand patients’ adherence to the prescribed treatment. Method: The main sample for this study includes inpatients and outpatients with recurrent CHD who have undergone secondary prevention treatment at certain tertiary hospitals which were purposively sampled. The transcripts of one-to-one semi-structured interviews (N=22) were analyzed using the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Results: Three themes emerged in the analysis of treatment adherence among multi-ethnic patients with CHD: (i) doctor-patient relationships; (ii) information-seeking behaviour; and (iii) psychosocial beliefs. Other factors that influence treatment adherence include patients’ cultural, religious, or spiritual beliefs-based complementary a.....

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Purpose – Up to now a country-specific study on Qatar with respect to underground economy, illegal money and tax evasion has not been undertaken. This paper aims to contribute by separately estimating the magnitude of the underground economy in Qatar from 1980 to 2010 using adjusted currency demand function. Design/methodology/approach – The study uses the Zivot–Andrews unit root test for the stationarity analysis and applies the Gregory and Hansen long run cointegrating technique for estimating the underground economy based on the latest form of the currency demand function model. While the general to specific technique is used to estimate the short run error correction model. Findings – The results show that the average size of the underground economy in Qatar is about 17.03 per cent of the official gross domestic products (GDPs). The average level of tax evasion as a per cent of the total non-oil tax revenues is estimated at around 16.50 per cent and is about 2.12 per cent.....

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