MALAY DIALECT VARIANTS IN LANGKAWI: A DIACHRONIC PERSPECTIVE ANALYSIS

Background and Purpose: Dialectical studies scrutinised the closeness, kinship or genealogy of dialects derived from a language. Previous scholars divide Malay dialects in Peninsular Malaysia into four main clusters. The first cluster are the Johor-Melaka-Selangor and Central Perak. The second cluster is a group that spreads from the Patani region covering the Patani-Kelantan-Terengganu dialect. The third is the Negeri Sembilan cluster, and the fourth is the Kedah dialect. Generally, the Kedah dialect is divided into seven groups, covering Kedah (including Langkawi), Perlis, Penang and northern Perak Taiping. This study aims to investigate the Malay dialect variants in Langkawi Island via the Historical Linguistics approach and qualitative comparison research design. Methodology: This study utilised the qualitative research method. A total of 23 native speakers of Langkawi Malay dialect participated in this study. These informants were selected using NORM (an acronym for non-mobile, older, rural and males). Data collection mainly used several techniques such as interviews, recordings, and observations. The data were analysed based on the scope of comparative linguistics. Findings: The findings show that there are five characteristics of separated innovation between the Kuah and Air Hangat variants in one group and the Kedawang variant in other groups. Furthermore, there are nine innovations that separate the Langkawi Malay dialect from the Proto Malayik language. This study indicates that the Kedawang variant is an earlier variant apart from the Kuah and Air Hangat variants. Contributions: In addition to further strengthen the research on the various dialects spoken in Malaysia, this study attempts to highlight the complete description of the Kedah dialect varieties. This study also contributes to the science of Malay language variants and Malay Dialectology studies. Keywords: Historical linguistics, reconstruction, innovation, Langkawi Island, Malay dialect. Cite as: Ab. Hamid, N., Shahidi, A. H., Aman, R., Ramli, N., Zakaria, Z., & Iswary, E. (2022). Malay dialect variants in Langkawi: A diachronic perspective analysis. Journal of Nusantara Studies, 7(1), 142-167. http://dx.doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol7iss1pp142-167

A Comparative Study of Services Placement Algorithms in Future Networks: دراسة مقارنة لخوارزميّات توضيع الخدمات في الشّبكات المستقبليّة

The study aimed to analyze and compare several algorithms in the context of networks services placement, and then proposed a self-organized dynamic heuristic algorithm adaptable to continually changing network conditions in order to achieve the ideal placement of services replicas in future networks. It is known that future networks demand a high degree of self-organization to keep pace with ongoing changes while maintaining performance optimized. One of the important challenges in this context is the services placement problem. Service placement issue refers to the selection of the most appropriate network node for hosting a service. The ideal placement of services replicas reduces the cost of serving customers, improves connectivity between clients and servers as well as the use of available resources. The study summarized the results of qualitative comparison between several placement algorithms and refers to the most important requirements to be taken into account when implementing the placement algorithm. Generally, each service has its own placement technique, and the action taken by a specific service may affect other services decisions and force them to adapt. There is an urgent need to a management service for managing services replicas to make the optimal placement decision. This service should work in a distributed manner and does not require comprehensive knowledge about the network. It is also characterized by its ability to adapt to changing network conditions in terms of load and topology. Other services coordinate with the management service about replicating or migrating actions, thus services will be offered at a minimized cost.

OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES IN THE CONTEXT OF OPEN ACCESS

Objective. This exploratory literature review seeks to identify both emergent consensus areas and research gaps in recent scholarly literature on Open Educational Resources (OERs). Despite the perception of OERs as universally available, these involve persistent barriers. The presence of institutional policies, adequate incentives and support frameworks for the use and sharing of OERs as well as raising awareness about their availability is likely to be critical for their successful deployment. Methods. This study made use of the case study method to arrive at its conclusions. As part of this, secondary data were collected from relevant article searches conducted in Google Scholar and at the Harvard Open Access Tagging Project website. Only papers published in the last five years, e.g., in the years 2016-2021, were taken into consideration. Given that this study has applied the methodology of qualitative comparison and case study construction, this limits the validity of its conclusions to the settings from which the original primary findings were obtained or for which OER recommendations were produced. Results. As part of this research, 16 scholarly articles and research reports were identified as being of relevance for this study. The research questions this study has sought to answer are as follows: How OERs have developed in recent years? What was the impact of the pandemic period on OER use? What are the key barriers for OER deployment? What are the facilitating factors for OER implementation at libraries, colleges and universities? What are the effects of OERs? Conclusions. Recent reports indicate that the pandemic period has both increased the awareness of OERs among education institutions and provided an impetus for capacity building efforts in this domain. Yet, OER effectiveness continues to be under-researched, despite a tentative consensus in scholarly literature concerning the critical role for OER efficacy of institutional support and collaboration frameworks.

Buckling of elastic fibers in a shear flow

Three-dimensional dynamics of flexible fibers in shear flow are studied numerically, with a qualitative comparison to experiments. Initially, the fibers are straight, with different orientations with respect to the flow. By changing the rotation speed of a shear rheometer, we change the ratio A of bending to shear forces. We observe fibers in the flow-vorticity plane, which gives insight into the motion out of the shear plane. The numerical simulations of moderately flexible fibers show that they rotate along effective Jeffery orbits, and therefore the fiber orientation rapidly becomes very close to the flow-vorticity plane, on average close to the flow direction, and the fiber remains in an almost straight configuration for a long time. This ``ordering'' of fibers is temporary since they alternately bend and straighten out while tumbling. We observe numerically and experimentally that if the fibers are initially in the compressional region of the shear flow, they can undergo a compressional buckling, with a pronounced deformation of shape along their whole length during a short time, which is in contrast to the typical local bending that originates over a long time from the fiber ends. We identify differences between local and compressional bending and discuss their competition, which depends on the initial orientation of the fiber and the bending stiffness ratio A. There are two main finding. First, the compressional buckling is limited to a certain small range of the initial orientations, excluding those from the flow-vorticity plane. Second, since fibers straighten out in the flow-vorticity plane while tumbling, the compressional buckling is transient - it does not appear for times longer than 1/4 of the Jeffery period. For larger times, bending of fibers is always driven by their ends.

Alternative Use of Artificial Quarry Lakes as a Source of Thermal Energy for Greenhouses

In northern Italy, most greenhouses rely on gas or oil heaters which are sometimes subject to high operating costs. Several greenhouses are nearby quarry lakes, which are the legacy of the expansion of cities in the last decades, including Turin (NW Italy). About 20 quarry lakes were excavated close to the Po riverbed in the southern part of this urban area, along a belt of more than 30 km in length, with an overall volume exceeding 10 million m3 water. The study addresses these artificial lakes as a low enthalpy thermal energy source, potentially providing heat to surrounding agri-business buildings. Detailed temperature monitoring of a large lake quarry was conducted over two years at different depths, measuring the surrounding groundwater level as well. Two different behaviors of the lake during the winter and summer seasons enabled the definition of a quite low water mixing process between the surrounding aquifers and the lake (in the range of 2–4 °C). An evaluation of the heat extraction potential using the lake as a heat source, depending on water temperature and its volume, and a qualitative comparison with groundwater systems are proposed. This study contributes to increasing knowledge on an overlooked resource for sustainable heating.

Global Trends in Atherosclerosis Research in the Epigenetics Field: Bibliometric and Visualization Studies

Atherosclerosis is a pathological vascular state caused by the interaction of environmental and hereditary factors. Epigenetic modifications may be the bridge connecting environmental factors and genetic factors. A search for publications on the Web of Science database in the field of atherosclerosis related to epigenetics was conducted from the earliest mention to December 31, 2020. Data on total and annual publications, citations, impact factors, Hirsch (H)-index, citation times, most prolific authors, and frequently published journals were collected for quantitative and qualitative comparison. A total of 1848 publications related to epigenetics and atherosclerosis were found. The major contributing countries were the China (522, 28.23%), United States (485, 26.23%), and Germany (119, 6.44%). The greatest number of retrieved publications were published in the journal, “Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology” (62, 3.66%). The publication “Oxidative Stress and Diabetic Complications” was cited 2370 times. The most frequent keywords were “DNA methylation” and “LncRNA”. Publications on epigenetic research in the atherosclerosis field have increased significantly every year, indicating that the study of epigenetic modifications plays an increasingly important role in understanding the pathology of atherosclerosis.

Danish satisfaction and Austrian discontent with their governments’ measures during the Covid-19 crisis: Explanations from a citizenship perspective

The various interventions that governments took in the first wave of the Covid-19 outbreak impacted people severely. Given the low satisfaction with the government performance in Austria compared to Denmark, though both governments set out with a suppression strategy early on and were able to lower infection rates, we analyse the changes in civil, political and social citizenship and the governmental communicative practices during the first Covid response phase from March to August 2020. Employing a case-oriented qualitative comparison, we find that a combination of factors explains the different degree of satisfaction. In Austria, there was a combination of politics of fear, extensive and authoritarian regulations of civil citizenship, political citizenship was challenged and social citizenship undermined. In Denmark, an engaging and caring communicative strategy was employed, political citizenship was maintained and civil citizenship was curtailed less obstructively and was less policed. Social citizenship also was upheld for larger groups.

A Novel Shadow Removal Method Based upon Color Transfer and Color Tuning in UAV Imaging

Through the increasing use of unmanned aerial vehicles as remote sensing tools, shadows become evident in aerial imaging; this fact, alongside the higher spatial resolution obtained by high-resolution mounted cameras, presents a challenging issue when performing different image processing tasks related to urban areas monitoring. Accordingly, the state-of-the-art reported works can correct the shadow regions, but the heterogeneity between the corrected shadow and non-shadow areas is still evident and especially noticeable in concrete and asphalt regions. The present work introduces a local color transfer methodology to shadow removal which is based on the CIE L*a*b (Lightness, a and b) color space that considers chromatic differences in urban regions, and it is followed by a color tuning using the HSV color space. The quantitative comparison was executed by using the shadow standard deviation index (SSDI), where the proposed work provided low values that improve up to 19 units regarding other tested methods. The qualitative comparison was visually realized and proved that the proposed method enhances the color correspondence without losing texture information. Quantitative and qualitative results validate the results of color correction and texture preservation accuracy of the proposed method against other published methodologies.

Competing feedback in an idealized tide-influenced delta network

The morphodynamic evolution of river deltas is intimately tied to flow and sediment partitioning at bifurcations. In this work, we investigate the long-term equilibrium configuration of a simple delta network using an analytical model, which accounts for the effect of small tidal oscillations.Differently from individual bifurcations, where tidal action is always a stabilizing factor, in the case of a tree-like delta with multiple bifurcations a dual response emerges.Specifically, depending on the values of four reference parameters function of tidal amplitude, upstream flow conditions, and on the geometry of the channels, tides can either promote or discourage an unbalanced discharge distribution. This behavior primarily concerns the apex bifurcation, which is affected by the variations of the relative tidal amplitude at the internal nodes. In turn these variations depend on how flow and sediment are diverted upstream. Finally, we discuss the outcomes of the model performing a qualitative comparison with field and experimental tide-influenced deltas. Results highlight the need of including in a unified scheme river-influenced (i.e. depositional) and tide-influenced (i.e. erosional) effects.