Malaysia will be an ageing population by 2030 as the number of those aged 60 years and above has increased drastically from 6.2 percent in 2000 and is expected to reach 13.6 percent by 2030. There are many challenges that will be faced due to the ageing population, one of which is the increasing cost of pensions in the future. In view of that, it is necessary to investigate the effect of actuarial assumptions on pension liabilities under the perspective of ageing. To estimate the pension liabilities, the Projected Unit Credit method is used in the study and commutation functions are employed in the process. Demographic risk and salary risk have been identified as major risks in analyzing pension liabilities in this study. The sensitivity analyses will be conducted in the study to investigate how the pension liabilities will be affected when these major risks changes. This study analyzes nine scenarios under assumptions in the actuarial model, namely age of retirement, rate of mortality and rate of salary growth. The result of this study indicates that the implied mortality experience and salary growth rate assumptions have a significant impact on pension liabilities.
RM Abbas, AA Abdulhameed, AI Salahaldin, International Conference on Geotechnical Engineering, 2010
Non-thermal argon plasma needle at atmospheric pressure was
constructed. The experimental setup was based on a simple and low
cost electric component that generates a sufficiently high electric
field at the electrodes to ionize the argon gas which flow at
atmospheric pressure. A high AC power supply was used with 1.1
kV and 19.57 kHz. Non-thermal Argon plasma used on blood
samples to show the ability of non-thermal plasma to promote blood
coagulation. Three tests have been done to show the ability of plasma
to coagulate both normal and anti-coagulant blood. Each blood
sample has been treated for varying time from 20sec. to 180sec. at
different distances. The results of the current study showed that the
co
This study focused on extracting the outer membrane nanovesicles (OMVs) from Escherichia coli BE2 (EC- OMVs) by ultracentrifugation, and the yield was 2.3mg/ml. This was followed by purification with gel filtration chromatography using Sephadex G-150, which was 2mg/ml. The morphology and size of purified EC-OMVs were confirmed by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) at 40-200 nm. The nature of functional groups in the vesicle vesicle was determined by Fourier transforms infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) analysis. The antitumor activity of EC-OMVs was conducted in vitro by MTT assay in human ovarian (OV33) cancer cell line at 24,48 and 96hrs. The cytotoxicity test showed high susceptibility to the vesicles in ovarian compared to normal
... Show MoreIn recent years, the performance of Spatial Data Infrastructures for governments and companies is a task that has gained ample attention. Different categories of geospatial data such as digital maps, coordinates, web maps, aerial and satellite images, etc., are required to realize the geospatial data components of Spatial Data Infrastructures. In general, there are two distinct types of geospatial data sources exist over the Internet: formal and informal data sources. Despite the growth of informal geospatial data sources, the integration between different free sources is not being achieved effectively. The adoption of this task can be considered the main advantage of this research. This article addresses the research question of ho
... Show MoreThis paper focuses on the optimization of drilling parameters by utilizing “Taguchi method” to obtain the minimum surface roughness. Nine drilling experiments were performed on Al 5050 alloy using high speed steel twist drills. Three drilling parameters (feed rates, cutting speeds, and cutting tools) were used as control factors, and L9 (33) “orthogonal array” was specified for the experimental trials. Signal to Noise (S/N) Ratio and “Analysis of Variance” (ANOVA) were utilized to set the optimum control factors which minimized the surface roughness. The results were tested with the aid of statistical software package MINITAB-17. After the experimental trails, the tool diameter was found as the most important facto
... Show MoreThe results of studying the effects of M. anisopiliae spores on mosquito, C. quinquefasciatus showed a biological effects represented by immature mortality. The mortality increased proportionally with the concentrations of fungal spores, which reached (at high concentration 2×1011 spores / ml), to 86.6, 56.6% in first and late instar larvae, respectively. An important to mention that cumulative death rate was significantly associated with the time, which reached to 56% at 7 day after treatment. In addition, M. anisopiliae had a long period permanence in aquatic habitats; in which the residual effects stay 30 days in aquatic habitats after treatment at laboratory conditions. Interestingly, the long period exposure of fungal spores (30 minut
... Show MoreFace recognition is required in various applications, and major progress has been witnessed in this area. Many face recognition algorithms have been proposed thus far; however, achieving high recognition accuracy and low execution time remains a challenge. In this work, a new scheme for face recognition is presented using hybrid orthogonal polynomials to extract features. The embedded image kernel technique is used to decrease the complexity of feature extraction, then a support vector machine is adopted to classify these features. Moreover, a fast-overlapping block processing algorithm for feature extraction is used to reduce the computation time. Extensive evaluation of the proposed method was carried out on two different face ima
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