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In this paper, experimental data of acoustic treatments effect on the growth of mung beans based on three response variables (length of stem, number of leaves, length of the longest root) are analyzed using multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) followed by descriptive discriminant analysis (DDA). Musical acoustics has been discovered to be significant in stimulating various plant growth. Most related studies assessed multiple response variables of plant growth measurements. Thus, multiple analysis of variance (ANOVA) has been applied extensively in finding the significant effect. However, ANOVA does not consider correlation among the response variables. Therefore, MANOVA is proposed as the alternative of multiple ANOVA since the method considers correlation among response variables. This will control the likelihood of committing Type I error. Then, DDA is performed as multivariate post hoc analysis instead of the usual univariate comparisons. From the analysis, there is a significant effect of acoustic treatments (p<0.05) on the linear combination of response variables. DDA results indicated that length of stem is clearly the most important variables in distinguishing acoustic treatment groups and soprano group is well separated which the treatment helps stimulating length of stem. In conclusion, MANOVA with DDA is a perfect combination of analyses methods in assessing the effect of an independent variable on correlated response variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is focusing on seeing the resilient of precious metals returns in facing the global financial crisis and provides a new guide for the investors before making investment decisions on precious metals. Four types of precious metals returns which are the variables selected in this study. The precious metals are gold, silver, bronze and platinum. All the variables are transferred to natural logarithm (ln). Daily data over the period 2 January 1995 to 30 December 2011 is used. Unit root tests that involve Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) and Kwiatkowski-Phillips-Schmidt-Shin (KPSS) tests have been employed in determining the stationarity of the variables. Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (ARCH) and Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH) methods have been applied in measuring the impact of global financial crisis on precious metals returns. The result shows that investing in platinum is less risky compared to the other precious metals because it is not influence by the crisis period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]