No abstract

The skilful and qualified Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) workforces are expected to be in high demand in the 21st digital economy. In Malaysia public education system, the principal key to STEM education is Additional Mathematics. However, the statistics depicted that the number of upper secondary students enrolled in Additional Mathematics have been severely delineated. Furthermore, the prerequisite to enrol in STEM and Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) courses in tertiary education is achieving a minimum grade C for Additional Mathematics. Therefore, the principal objective of this article is to identify the significant factors that affected the upper secondary students enrolled in Additional Mathematics using Pearson’s chi-square test without Yates continuity correction and unadjusted odds ratio (OR). A validated questionnaire comprised nine potential factors that affected enrolment in additional mathematics was distributed to 389 Form Four students’ cohort 2020 from four selected urban government schools to pursue this objective. Based on the finding of this article, several initiatives might be taken by the policymakers, such as the teachers may enhancing and throughout the broad of STEM and TVET careers in the 21st digital economy era, while the students’ parents can participate in schools in building the communicating and coordinating mechanism. Consequently, the number of upper secondary enrolled in STEM education might be increased to pipeline the future STEM and TVET human capitals in sustaining and stabilising the national economy in the digital era.

Eco-friendly car is expected to be the next driving market force for global transportation and technology due to its paramount importance towards the sustainability of the environment and society. However, the actual sales of eco-friendly car are not that convincing and it is even decreasing because the consumer is still uncertain to consider eco-friendly as one of the criteria for them to buy their cars. This situation is worsen by the lack of information and awareness regarding sustainability transportation initiatives. Due to the uncertainty and vague understanding of the consumer about this problem, this paper attempts to investigate the current preference of consumer to buy their cars, and whether they really need to buy the eco-friendly car by using the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) which implements the Intuitive Vectorial Centroid (IVC). Based on FAHP, the imprecise or fuzzy judgment from the decision maker can be incorporated, to anticipate a better decision for eco-friendly car selection. The outcome of FAHP is compared with crisp Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), and the findings shows that FAHP can provide an accurate and consistent result with AHP, although it deals with fuzzy judgment inputs from multiple decision makers.

Sustainable manufacturing is regarded as the most complex manufacturing paradigm to date as it holds the widest scope of requirements. In addition, its three major pillars of economic, environment and society though distinct, have some overlapping among each of its elements. Even though the concept of sustainability is not new, the development of the performance indicator still needs a lot of improvement due to its multifaceted nature, which requires integrated approach to solve the problem. This paper proposed the best combination of criteria en route a robust sustainable manufacturing performance indicator formation via Analytic Network Process (ANP). The integrated lean, green and sustainable ANP model can be used to comprehend the complex decision system of the sustainability assessment. The finding shows that green manufacturing is more sustainable than lean manufacturing. It also illustrates that procurement practice is the most important criteria in the sustainable manufacturing performance indicator.

As the global community is moving towards the usage of a cleaner technology, automotive industry has designed the car to become more environmentally friendly, or eco-friendly. Malaysia aims to produce 200,000 electric vehicles (EV) by the year 2020 but this effort might be halted due to the fact that electric vehicle’s sales is not promising for the time being. This research attempts to investigate the current preference of Malaysian to buy their car, and whether they really prefer to buy the eco-friendly car. An Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) model for Malaysian eco-friendly car selection is developed by this research which involves aggregated group judgment from 22 respondents. The result indicates that safety is the highest priority for the Malaysian to buy cars, followed by fuel economy, services, performance, affordable price, emission and design. Two of the criteria which are closely related with eco-friendly factor which are fuel economy is ranked at second whereas emission is ranked at sixth. This concludes that Malaysian still consider eco-friendly factor, which also justify the selection of AHP model for the best eco-friendly car to be Nissan Leaf (2016), followed by Hyundai Ionic HEV (2017), Mercedez Benz C350e (2016), Perodua Myvi 1.3 Ezi (2017), and Toyota Prius 1.8 VVT-i Active (TRK) Auto.