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Writers of research articles are expected to present research information in a structured manner by following a certain rhetorical patterns determined by the discourse community. Failures to keep to the writing standard and rhetorical pattern are likely to lower the acceptance rate. While producing a research article is understandably a complex task, it is even more difficult if one is writing in his or her second or third language. Even if grammatical mistakes can be ironed out by a language editor, researchers are on their own when it comes to rhetorical presentation of their research ideas. The available research writing guidelines constructed in the native speaker context often fall short in addressing rhetorical aspects related to cultural issues that have been known to influence most non native English (NNE) writings. Motivated by the complexity of rhetorical presentation in research articles and the problems on writing research articles by NNE writers, this paper is aimed to explore the rhetorical moves used by the Malaysian writers in the introduction section of Computer Science research articles for journal publication. CARS model (Swales, 2004) is used to analyze the rhetorical moves in the introduction section of Computer Science research articles by the Malaysian writers. The study begins with a corpus compilation of five research articles (RA) by the writers followed by move analysis use in the CARS model (Swales, 2004) was conducted to analyze the articles. The analysis revealed that majority of the writers adopted most of the rhetorical strategies in Swales model (2004). The paper concludes that CARS model is suitable in identifying the rhetorical moves in the RA by Malaysian writers.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to consider the under-representation of women in computing, information technology (IT) and information systems in most Western countries. This under-representation can only be detrimental to society. Design/methodology/approach: The authors discuss recently published studies on the under-representation of women in this field, and the lack of career progression for women, particularly in positions of senior responsibility. The results of a survey conducted in the UK, Greece, Malaysia and China are presented, and similarities as well as differences are identified. Malaysia and China are included as the under-representation is much less in the Asian countries. Findings: The authors identify the main reasons for the under-representation and lack of career progression, and study the effect of national culture on the formation of strategy and of practice in the four countries. Research limitations/implications: The survey respondents are mainly female students studying computing/IT at degree level. In the next phase of the research, the survey will include both male and female students, lecturers and employees within the IT sector. The research will be extended into a longitudinal study, in order to monitor trends. Originality/value: The UK Government is currently undertaking a number of initiatives to improve the representation of women in information and communication technologies. For those initiatives to be successful, the cultural issues identified in the paper need to be considered. (Contains 7 tables.)

Graduate employability has become an issue since there are broad mismatches between the acquired graduate skills from university and the required skills by employers. While previous researches have outlined the salient skills that need to be embedded in graduate education, to date no studies have attempted to methodically identify and synthesize the literature on graduate attributes. In this paper a total of 39 relevant studies on graduate skills and attributes in the subject areas of business and management, accounting, and computer science were extracted from Scopus® (database). This revealed a total of 53 graduate attributes, with some being highly used, such as communication, teamwork, problem solving, technological skills, creativity, interpersonal skills, leadership skills, self-management and flexibility/adaptability. The majority of studies used a quantitative survey method to collect and rank graduate attributes, and Australia emerged as the most active country in researching the domain.

This paper will describe an ESP approach to the design and implementation of computer-mediated communication (CMC) tasks for computer science students at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, and discuss the effectiveness of the chat feature of Windows NetMeeting as a tool for developing specified language skills. CMC tasks were set within a programme of sustained-content language instruction (SCLI), a variation on the content-based instruction approach. Various studies have confirmed the potential of SCLI as a means of familiarising language learners with academic genres and the language skills expected of them in the content classroom. To date, however, there has been little or no research into the use of CMC within SCLI. We found that students who followed a programme of SCLI using CMC ESP tasks made significant improvements in their oral communication skills, and also achieved higher scores than their peers in a computer science project undertaken in the semester following the treatment. (Contains 8 tables and 1 figure.)

This paper reports an investigation on how and why computer science in Malaysia is dominated by women. Inspired by recent critical interventions in gender and technology studies, the paper aims to open up more culturally situated analyses of the gendering of technology or the technology of gendering, with the Malaysian case exemplifying the core of the argument. The paper argues along four different strands of critical thought: (1) a critique of the analytical asymmetry in the process of co-production in gender and technology studies; (2) a critique of a western bias in gender and technology studies, advocating more context sensitivity and focus on the cultural embeddedness of gender and technology relations; (3) a critique that pays more attention to spatial practices and body politics in regard to race, class and gender in relation to technology; and (4) a critique of 'western' positional notions of gender configurations that opens up for more fluid constructions of gender identity, including the many crossovers between relational and positional definitions of femininity and masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the computer science and information technology publication productivity in Malaysia. Channels of research communication used by Malaysian authors; Active authors involved in the published works; Fields of research covered by the publications; Country distribution of channels the authors used to publish.

This paper focuses on matrix multiplication algorithm, particularly square parallel matrix multiplication using Computer Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) programming model with C programming language. Matrix multiplication is under the list of time-consuming problems that require s huge computational resources to improve its speedup. As many studies have shown, it is not easy to achieve high performance speedup in sequential matrix multiplication algorithm using larger input. The emphasis of this study is to propose a parallel algorithm to calculate the product of two square matrices with improved speedup performance compared to the sequential and OpenMP algorithms. In this research, biruni (super machine workstation) in the School of Computer Sciences, USM, Malaysia with General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GP-GU) was used to parallelize the matrix product algorithm. A comparison between parallel OpenMp versions and sequential algorithm with the proposed CUDA based algorithm of this research was carried out to evaluate the speedup performance of the proposed parallel CUDA based algorithm. The overall results show that CUDA based parallel matrix multiplication is approximately 400 times faster than sequential matrix multiplication and 4 times faster than OpenMp matrix multiplication algorithms, respectively. Therefore, the proposed parallel algorithm can help the researchers working with matrix multiplication application problems. It can also help mathematicians to easily calculate the product of any two matrices and obtain the result in a shorter time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim/Purpose Our research goal was to examine the factors that motivate women to enroll in Computer Science (CS) courses in order to better understand the small number of women in the field of CS. Background This work is in line with the growing interest in better understanding the problem of the underrepresentation of women in the field of CS. Methodology We focused on a college that differs in its high numbers of female CS students. The student population there consists mostly of religious Jews; some of them are Haredi, who, because of their unique lifestyle, are expected to be the breadwinners in their family. Following group interviews with 18 students, a questionnaire was administered to all the female students and 449 of them responded. We analyzed it statistically. We compared the responses of the Haredi and non-Haredi students. Contribution The main contribution of this work lies in the idea that studying the factors underlying women's presence in a CS program in unique communities and cultures, where women are equally represented in the field, might shed light on the nature of this phenomenon, especially whether it is universal or confined to the surrounding culture. Findings There were significant differences between the Haredi and non-Haredi women regarding the importance they attributed to different factors. Haredi women resemble, regarding some social and economic variables, women in developing countries, but differ in others. The non-Haredi women are more akin to Western women, yet they did not completely overlap. Both groups value their family and career as the most important factors in their lives. These factors unify women in the West and in developing countries, though with different outcomes. In the West, it deters women from studying CS, whereas in Israel and in Malaysia, other factors can overcome this barrier. Both groups attributed low importance to the masculine image of CS, found important in the West. Hence, our findings support the hypothesis that women's participation in the field of CS is culturally dependent. Recommendations for Practitioners It is important to learn about the culture within which women operate in order to attract more women to CS. Recommendations for Researchers Future work is required to examine other loci where women are underrepresented in CS, as well as how the insights obtained in this study can be utilized to decrease women's underrepresentation in other loci. Impact on Society Women's underrepresentation in CS is an important topic for both economic and social justice reasons. It raises questions regarding fairness and equality. In the CS field the gender pay gaps are smaller than in other professional areas. Thus, resolving the underrepresentation of women in CS will serve as a means to decrease the social gender gap in other areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An e-leaming website is very useful, especially for students and lecturers, as this platform is very efficient for blended learning. Thus, the main objective of this research was to determine the user expectations of e-leaming websites of comprehensive universities through localisation based on user preferences. This research showed how users interact with e-leaming websites and indicated the patterns that can be used as standard guidelines to design the best e-leaming websites. It was found localisation of e-leaming websites was scarce and slow interaction with e-leaming websites has inconvenienced users. Additionally, too many web objects on the user interface of e-leaming websites have a tendency to confuse users. A mixed method approach was used I this study, namely content analysis (qualitative) and localisation (quantitative). Thus, this research contributes to knowledge by guiding users on localising their web objects according to their preferences and hopefully allow for an easy and quick information search for e-leaming websites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]