Search

This study was conducted at the World Heritage Site (WHS) of Morten village, Melaka, Malaysia from the beginning of September 2016 to the end of January 2017. Its aim was to examine the perceived impacts of community-based tourism (CBT) from the perspectives of different stakeholder groups. The thesis has the following three main objectives: 1) to identify the key stakeholders, and their roles and contributions to CBT; 2) to analyse stakeholder perceptions concerning the economic, environmental and socio-cultural impacts of CBT, and 3) to develop a CBT framework that informs both academic literature and the current practice of tourism professionals working in CBT at World Heritage Sites (WHS). CBT was introduced as an alternative form of tourism product, to sit alongside ecotourism, with the aim of attracting visitors who demand an authentic cultural experience. As a part of cultural heritage tourism (CHT), CBT, through the 'homestay' programme, is used to meet demand for 'authentic cultural experiences' at the same time delivering economic benefits to the community. CBT relies heavily on community involvement and support from other stakeholders (e.g. governments, business owners, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and tourists). In short, Morten village is a destination that offers an authentic tourist experience that has been created with the involvement of a range of stakeholders. As such, an understanding of their perceptions of the impacts of CBT is fundamental for the success and sustainability of tourism, as well as to understand the future viability or valorisation of the cultural products (both intangible and tangible). This study obtained a grounded understanding of the daily realities faced by stakeholders within a WHS through its adoption of an ethnographic approach. This approach involved 'semi-structured interviews', 'participant observation', 'field notes', 'photography' and 'using secondary documentation. Analysis of the interviews was based on the methods of thematic analysis and content analysis. Data analysis was undertaken using NVivo 12.0. As alluded to above, a total of five stakeholder groups were chosen for inclusion in the research. These groups comprised government officials, the community, business owners, tourists and representatives from an NGO. The study also included tourism academics for the purpose of providing balance in the findings and to supply a counter justification from an educator's perspective. As a result, a total of thirty-two semi-structured interviews were conducted with individuals comprising fourteen respondents from the community, two government officials, two business owners, two NGO representatives, ten tourists and two academics from the field of tourism. The findings provide deep insights into the way in which the stakeholders perceived the impacts of CBT from economic, environmental and socio-cultural perspectives. The respondents were found to clearly realise the impacts that CBT had produced in respect of the destination. Concerning the economic impacts, with the exception of the tourists, all of the respondents confirmed the positive role played by CBT in producing economic benefits for the village and local area. However, the community members expressed their dissatisfaction with regard to many economic items and were in strong agreement with the view that tourism leads to 'market competition', 'higher living expenses' and 'increases the income gaps between rich and poor. Yet all of them hoped that the village would continue to see further development, as opposed to simply sustaining its current level of tourism activities. The findings also implied that all of the respondents formed a positive perception of the associated environmental impacts but were nevertheless worried about the effects that modernisation was having on the authenticity of the area. With reference to the socio-cultural impact, it can be seen that the members of the community are the group most affected when compared to the other four stakeholder groups. The business owners, government and tourists have only a low awareness of the socio-cultural impacts. Also, owing to the fact that tourists typically stay for only a couple of hours, it is very difficult for them to truly experience the way in which tourism influences the local life, culture and value systems. While, most of the government officials live in other areas of Melaka and merely work in Bandar Hilir; as such, most of them travel to the village only a few times per year. The interactions of business owners also tend to be limited only to their own business interests. When assessing the NGO representatives and academics, it was found that these groups perceived more in the way of socio-cultural impacts in comparison to the government, business owner and tourist respondents. These groups displayed a great degree of concern as they began to sense changes in the attitudes within the community. It is also interesting to note that no social impacts were recorded in this study. The community members, who frequently have contact with the tourists, made no mention of any social or cultural impacts created by them. Yet the community, tourists, NGO representatives and academics were found to be slightly ambivalent concerning the issues of authenticity values and authentic experience. Unlike socio-cultural impacts, these groups debated the potential effects of tourism on the authenticity of the intangible products offered by the destination and the importance of balancing the economic purposes against cultural protection. It is suggested that in order for CBT to be sustainable, the concerns of every stakeholder need to be considered, especially with regard to the cultural and authenticity impacts. The stakeholders should be encouraged to not only enjoy participating in sharing the economic benefits of tourism but also to have the opportunity to preserve the culture and heritage. This study proposes a new academic framework for CBT which delivers a holistic account and insight into the real life of a CBT community within a WHS. The study will also provide an exciting opportunity to advance our understanding and knowledge of CBT in the Malaysian context. Specifically, it will shed new light on various attributes of the community and stakeholders in Malaysia that work to reconcile differences within the society. Moreover, this study will make a significant contribution by identifying the potential threats posed by CHT in terms of the cultural and authenticity impacts that may potentially lead to a loss of cultural and heritage products (both tangible and intangible), which may then have a knock-on impact on both the interest and numbers of tourists in the future. Looking to the future, there is a need to conduct further research in a similar or different context,such as in other WHS destinations, in order to identify any similar or different cultural and authenticity impacts of the tourism activities or products offered by such destinations and based on the perspectives of all stakeholders.

The scope of the current body of work addresses the matter of the paradigm of the empirically derived structure(s) of psychopathology in adults. The discussion addresses how the comorbidity or the co-occurrence of symptoms influences how the nosology of mental ill health is organized and tabulated. The first part of the thesis is a systematic literature review of empirically defined models of psychopathology that have been derived using latent modeling techniques. The narrative of over 40 years' worth of research is discussed in terms of the nosological conceptualization of how patterns of discrete mental health symptoms occur and co-occur. Specifically, efforts were made to look into the over-arching 'multifactorial models' of psychopathology. In the second part of thesis a concept known as the general factor of psychopathology denoted as p, that represents a statistical summary of comorbid patterns of psychological ill health is taken further and explored in a mixed sample of patient and control participants. The hope is that this work will be taken forward in support of the current zeitgeist in the fields of psychiatry and clinical psychology which favour transdiagnsotic concepts in nosology and guide research efforts into the aetiology of mental ill health and applications thereof in the clinic.

The mid-infrared (mid-IR) spectral range between 3 and 8 mm is an area of growing interest for a range of applications, mainly in the fields of aerospace and sensing. This thesis describes the demonstration of a new form of the mid-infrared fibre laser, based on the use of acetylene in high-performance silica hollow core fibre. The first results of this work describe the fabrication and characterization of hollow core fibre that used in our laser system. The hollow-core fibre has the lowest-loss optical fibre in the 3 μm spectral band. The fibre attenuation of 0.025±0.005 dB/m was recorded. This enables us to demonstrate that this type of hollow core fibre can be used to make a novel form of a laser for the mid-infrared. Our laser consists of a hollow core fibre filled with an active gas – in our case, acetylene – and excited using a widely-available diode laser at 1.5 mm wavelength. We have demonstrated lasing on a number of transitions in the spectral band 3.1 – 3.2 mm. It lases either continuous wave or synchronously pumped when pumped by telecoms-wavelength diode lasers. The system is highly stable over long periods, in both CW and synchronously-pumped configurations. Studies of the generated mid-infrared output power, pump power threshold, and slope efficiency as functions of the input pump power and gas pressure have been performed and show an optimisation condition where the maximum laser output power is achieved for a given fibre length. This laser system could be extended to other selected molecular species to generate output in the spectral band up to 5 μm, and it has excellent potential for power scaling.

A rise of 2 oC in the Earth’s temperature is likely to occur when the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere reaches approximately 450 ppm. CO2 emissions are closely related to the continual use of fossil fuels. In order to make fossil fuels sustainable, carbon capture & storage (CCS) is required to reduce CO2 emissions. There are three leading CO2 capture methods, namely post-combustion capture, oxy-fuel combustion and integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) pre-combustion capture. CO2 hydrate (CO2:6H2O) formation has been investigated as a way to capture CO2 in the IGCC conditions. The formation of hydrate in this work was experimentally investigated in an isochoric system (batch mode) inside a vertical fixed bed reactor (FBR), also known as high pressure volumetric analyser (HPVA). Standard silica gel with an average particle size of 200-500 µm, mean pore size of 5.14 nm, a pore volume of 0.64 cm3/g and a surface area of 499 m2/g was used as a porous medium. The presence of hydrate in FBR was justified by using graphic methods. The solubility of CO2 in water using Henry’s Law and the experimental pressure–time (P-t) curve were analysed to determine the formation of hydrate. Hydrate formation was confirmed when the mole fraction of CO2 dissolved in water exceeded the Henry’s Law value as well as a two-stage pressure drop in the experimental P-t curve. Initially, various sample preparation methods (methods 1, 2, 3 and 4) were studied leading to the selection of method 4 (the use of vigorous stirring) which had the highest moisture content (14.8 wt%) and the greatest water conversion to hydrate (40.5 mol%) at 275 K and 36 bar in a pure CO2 gas system. Also, high regeneration and repeatability of the results for all samples prepared by method 4 were expected as less water was occluded inside silica gel pores. Further investigations in pure CO2 gas systems highlighted the effect of type of silicas used, the importance of the type of promoters used, the concentration of promoters, experimental driving force, silica pore size, bed height and the amount of moisture content for formation of hydrate. Standard silica gel was the only silica found to show hydrate formation due to the best distribution of pore size. The high amount of bulk water inside zeolites 13X and spherical MCF-17 (21.3 and 50.8 wt% respectively) was the main reason of no hydrate formation observed. Additionally, the combined-promoters designated type T1-5 (0.01 mol% sodium dodecyl sulphate (SDS) + 5.6 mol% tetrahydrofuran (THF)) and type T3-2 (0.01 mol% SDS + 0.1 mol% tetra-butyl ammonium bromide (TBAB)) were the two best obtaining a CO2 uptake of 5.95 and 5.57 mmol of CO2 per g of H2O respectively. Ethylene glycol mono-ethyl ether (EGME; 0.1 mol%) was a good alternative to THF when combined with SDS (0.01 mol%) with a CO2 uptake of 5.45 mmol of CO2 per g of H2O for this combined-promoter designated type T1A-2. In addition, the CO2 uptake increased as ∆P increased or ∆T decreased. Moreover, mesoporous silica (silica gel) performed better than microporous silica (zeolite 13X) where the formation of hydrate by zeolite 13X was observed with minimal CO2 uptake (0.58 mmol of CO2 per g of H2O) when the bed height was reduced. Additionally, the total amount of CO2 consumed through hydrate formation increased as the amount of water inside mesoporous silica increased which was not the case for microporous silica. Furthermore, the experiments performed in the IGCC conditions (283 K and 70 bar) by employing T1-5 and T3-2 in a fuel gas mixture demonstrated low hydrate formation with a CO2 uptake of 1.5 and 1.1 mmol of CO2 per g of H2O respectively. This was expected due to the slow kinetics since CO2 molecules were competing with H2 molecules which also reduced the selectivity of CO2 molecules during hydrate formation. Hence, in reality, pure CO2 system is the best option for CCS through hydrate formation at the right operating conditions as compared to fuel gas mixture.

At a global level, changes in the higher education environment - such as changing funding mechanisms, regulations and audit processes, increasing customer demands, competition and internationalization, and ongoing reduction in state resources for funding Higher Education has resulted in increased interest by academics and practitioners on leadership in the higher education sector. Recent studies have noted that there has been very limited research conducted on the question of which forms of academic leadership are associated with individual academic performance. Globalisation of higher education environment can bring many benefits to higher education organisations, but it can also expose them to a number of risks and challenges. The purpose of this study was to explore how leaders in the higher education sector are using their leadership abilities and skills to bring about enhanced academic performance from their academic colleagues and subordinates’. Therefore, in this research aims to identify which specific aspects of academic leadership skill-set have the maximum impact on academics’ performance. This research used six measures; namely visionary, adaptable to change, competency, effective leadership, transformational style and charisma, for quantifying academic leadership. Individual academic performance was measured by the construct titled work-related attitude (i.e. work-related attitude was considered to be a proxy for individual academic performance). Work-related attitude was quantified by three measures; namely job satisfaction, career satisfaction and organizational commitment. Both academic leadership landscape and academics’ work-related attitude were modelled as latent constructs. Based on data from fifteen interviews and a survey of faculty members of 261 academic staff from twenty Malaysian public universities, factor analyses was used to explore four groups of academic leadership constructs; namely innovative, effective, executive and adaptive. Similarly, factor analyses were used to establish four groups of work-related attitude constructs; namely organizational commitment, career satisfaction, job satisfaction and job skills. Regression analyses suggest that academic leadership was positively associated with work-related attitude. Further, multiple regression analyses suggests executive and innovative academic leadership behavioural traits were positively associated with organizational commitment, career satisfaction, job satisfaction and job skills of work-related attitude. Unfortunately, behavioural traits titled “effective” and "adaptive" had no association with any work-related attitude (i.e. academic performance). The implications of the results for theory and practice are significant. This research provides empirical evidence for the development of a theoretical model for academic leadership grounded in self-leadership theory. Further, this study also proposes a general definition of academic leadership according to faculty members’ perspectives and a diagnostic instrument for measurement of academic leadership and work-related attitude. The study gives a new perspective on factors that contribute toward academic leadership and work-related attitude. This study revealed which contributing factors of academic leadership and work-related attitude have significant impact on professional leadership in academia. Empirically, the study reveals the underpinning factors that influence the faculty members in understanding and exploring academic leadership and work-related attitudes. This study can assist faculty members of public universities in Malaysia in dealing with the challenges and demands in academia. University administrators (especially the vice chancellors), may urge their human resources departments to encourage their faculty members toward demonstrating executive and innovative behavioural traits in pursuing their academic life. Finally, this study contributes towards testing a model, instrument and research process that is based in the US in an Asian country – Malaysia. Moreover, the proposed model has the potential to be replicated in other countries. The main originality and value of this study is that it has addressed a research gap concerning academic leadership approaches to assessing and enhancing individual academic performance in a global context. The paper has identified which forms of academic leadership are associated with enhanced individual academic performance. In this context, this study proposes a new categorisation for measuring which specific aspects of academic leadership skill-set have the maximum impact on academics’ performance, and offers a characterisation of academic leadership skill-set on academics’ performance.

This present study benchmarked the chloride resistance of concretes mixes at the limit state of BS 8500-1:2006 using the newly published CEN TS12390-11. Of the three allowed methodologies, the immersion test was carried out. At least two water-cement ratios were produced for each mix design to enable normalisation of the results. The performance of concrete was compared on the basis of equal compressive strength, i.e. 40 and 50 N/mm2 and an equal water-cement ratio of 0.45. In addition to the CEN TS 12390-11:2010, rapid test methods NT Build 492 and a steady-state migration test UNE 83987:2009 were also conducted. Selected concretes were also tested for cyclic wetting in artificial sea water and evolution of chloride diffusion over the test period. The ageing factor of concrete mixes, which describes the development of diffusion coefficient (D) from the unsteady to steady-state determined from this research was compared with those reported in The Concrete Society Technical Report 61. Test specimens for highway exposure were also produced for future research work. CEN has just agreed and published (at the time of the writing of this thesis) a test methodology for chloride resistance as a technical standard (CEN, 2010). The test method underpins the equivalent durability performance approach. Therefore, the use of this test was investigated in terms of evolution of the chloride diffusion, and effect of cyclic wetting and drying in artificial seawater exposure. As the test method is slow, (3 months to complete), other rapid test methods were also studied on the same specimens. The results from these tests were compared to look for the possibility of having a faster test methodology for chloride durability. Overall, the results showed that concrete mixes at the limiting value of BS 8500-1:2006 have a wide range of performance between 0.3 × 10-12 m2/s and 20 × 10-12 m2/s regardless of the test methods. Ranking of concrete according to performance shows that this changes with age. This is the same for all test methods although the rate of change is different between different test methods. However, the ranking of concrete at equal compressive strength and equal water-cement ratio follows the general order of (from best to worst) ggbs> fly ash> silica fume> limestone> CEM I. It was also postulated that there is a limit to the benefit of reducing water-cement ratio to improve durability. This is because of at very low water cement ratio, concrete may develop autogenous cracking that is detrimental to the porosity. Using the CEN TS 12390-11:2010 it was found that CEM I, fly ash and silica fume mixes follows the same ageing factor proposed by Concrete Society Technical Report 61 although ggbs shows a different ageing factor. The improvement of ggbs quality was attributed to this change. It was also found that 90 days test duration was optimum as a shorter period risks giving a non stable diffusion rate whilst longer than 90 days shows insignificant change in Dnss values. Exposure of selected concrete specimens to cyclic wetting and drying in artificial seawater elevated to 1 M NaCl equivalent shows reduced chloride diffusion. However, the mechanism controlling this is not clear. The thesis showed that some of the limiting value requirement for BS 8500-1:2006 does not meet the durability requirements for chloride resistance. There are some concrete mixes recommended that performs poorly in testing. The research reported also provides further understanding of the new CEN TS 12390-11:2010 in terms comparative ranking of cements up to the point of comparative performance between other tests methods. Validation of the ageing factor for chloride durability is also provided as well as the need for updates in the age factor values due to changes in the nature of cements.

Despite being acknowledged as one of the most important sectors in a developing economy, the role of the construction industry in developing countries is still being undermined by lack of appropriate attention to the development of the industry and its contractors. These issues having been highlighted during the past twenty years by various international organisations; governments of developing countries are beginning to take this matter seriously. One preferred response is to promote technology transfer. It is expected that a substantial degree of technology would be transferred by foreign international contractors to indigenous contractors by the end of a contract period. However, the extent and quality of transfer varies with the parties involved. The time and methods needed for a sufficient acquisition of technology varies with each construction company, as they possess different internal characteristics. The variability in achieving a desired transformation objective is a major obstacle to the production of capable indigenous contractors. It is important to identify the factors affecting transformation performance; which include in this research, the internal characteristics of the receiving firms, the technology transfer programme, and the type of technology. The Malaysian construction industry was chosen as a context for the study of the variability of transformation performance. Malaysia is one of the fastest growing developing nations in this decade in the world and the author is resident in and familiar with the environment. Its construction activities are very active, with many mega projects involving indigenous contractors and major international players in construction. The respondents for this research were indigenous contractors with some past experience in technology transfer programmes. The findings of the research confirmed that the internal characteristics of firms, technology transfer programme, type of technology and the transformation performance are significantly related.

Malaysian Farmers' Organisations (FOs) strive to achieve both social and economic objectives. However, the achievement of economic objectives are often emphasised in appraising their performance. Thus, many FOs tend to be categorised as poor-performing. To identify factors influencing farmers' behaviour towards FOs, and factors affecting FO financial performance, solvency and self-financing potential, this study utilised data from a survey conducted on 418 farmers, statistical reports of the Farmers' Organisation Authority, and the 1985 and 1986 Auditor's Reports on 149 FOs in Peninsular Malaysia. Two logit models indicated that members' familiarity with FO officials is the most significant variable influencing positively farmers' decisions to join and subsequently to support FOs. One way to attract many non-members who indicated their willingness to join FOs is by easing the procedure for membership. Although total FO assets had increased markedly since 1973, members' paid-up share capital only financed about 11 per cent at the end of 1986. Accumulated profits and statutory reserves had contributed significantly to the growth of FO equity capital. However, the poor collectability of accounts receivable had an adverse effect on FO liquidity positions. A log-linear regression model indicated that stock turnover, assets per share, business diversification, per member administrative expense and the ratio of cash to current liabilities significantly affected FO financial performance. A semilog regression model indicated that FOs solvency positions were positively affected by sales per member, and negatively by the ratio of operating expense to operating income, percentage of bad debts, stock turnover and the ratio of current assets to paid-up shares. The total incomes of most FOs in 1986 were lower than their estimated break-even volume of business, mainly due to low gross margin rates resulting from high rates of operating expense and/or low mark-up. Thus, about 12 per cent of FOs have the potential to become self-financing.