MANAGING MALAYSIAN BORDER: THE CHALLENGES AND PROSPECTS IN MAINTAINING SECURITY

This paper aims to examine the challenges encountered by Malaysia enforcement border agencies to protect the sovereignty of Malaysia and its prospects of integration among various agencies at the border. With a wide boundary, the Malaysian security is porous to various threats which not only mean a traditional military threat but also include multiple threats. Current threats have been broadening to include transnational criminals such as illegal immigrants, smuggling people or prohibited goods or even non-traditional threats such as terrorism. In order to control such threats, there are several government agencies and legal enforcement which are responsible to protect Malaysian sovereignty such as The Royal Malaysian Police, Royal Malaysian Customs Department, Malaysian Department of Immigration, and Malaysian Border Control Agency and Malaysian Armed Forces as well. These agencies are responsible to manage the Malaysian border at various legal checkpoints such as air, sea and land checkpoints. The Malaysian Armed Forces, on the other hand, has been responsible to manage illegal route along the Malaysian border especially in the jungle. In order to manage a broad scope and complexities of the border, some scholars develop a concept of Coordinated Border Management (CBM) or Integrated Border Management or Collaborative Border Management, or Comprehensive Border Management in order to integrate all different border agencies. There is an urgent need for border agencies to coordinate their actions in order to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of border procedures. All the challenges will discuss further in this article.

Critical curvature localization in graphene. I. Quantum-flexoelectricity effect

Here, we report the discovery of a new, curvature-localizing, subcritical buckling mode that produces shallow-kink corrugation in multi-layer graphene. Our density functional theory (DFT) analysis reveals the mode configuration—an approximately 2 nm wide boundary layer of highly localized curvature that connects two regions of uniformly but oppositely sheared stacks of flat atomic sheets. The kink angle between the two regions is limited to a few degrees, ensuring elastic deformation. By contrast, a purely mechanical model of sandwich structures shows progressive supercritical curvature localization spread over a 50–100 nm wide boundary layer. Our effective-locality model of electromechanics reveals that coupling between atomic-layer curvature and electric-charge polarization, i.e. quantum flexoelectricity, leads to emergence of a boundary layer in which curvature is focused primarily within a 0.86 nm fixed band width. Both DFT and the model analyses show focused distributions of curvature and polarization exhibiting oscillating decay within the approximately 2 nm wide boundary layer. The results show that dipole–dipole interaction lowers the potential energy with such a distribution. Furthermore, this model predicts peak-polarization density approximately 0.12 e - nm −1 for 3° tilt angle. This high polarization concentration can be controlled by macroscopic deformation and is expected to be useful in studies of selective graphene-surface functionalization for various applications.

Sintering of Nanophase TiO2 At 550°C

ABSTRACTSamples of nanophase TiO2 were prepared by the condensation of Ti vapors into clusters, their in situ oxidation to TiO2, and their consolidation into thin disks. Small angle neutron scattering was measured in the as-consolidated condition and after selected isothermal sintering anneals of up to 23 h at 550°C. The maximum entropy analysis method was used to obtain the size distributions of the scattering centers from the scattering curves. The results are interpreted in terms of a microstructural model consisting of nanometer sized grains of TiO2 separated by about 0.5 nm wide boundary regions, which contain voids and TiO2 of ≤60–70% of bulk density.