Rivers play a significant role in providing water resources for human and ecosystem survival and health. Hence, river water quality is an important parameter that must be preserved and monitored. As the state of Selangor and the city of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, are undergoing tremendous development, the river is subjected to pollution from point and non-point sources. The water quality of the Klang River basin, one of the most densely populated areas within the region, is significantly degraded due to human activities as well as urbanization. Evaluation of the overall river water quality status is normally represented by a water quality index (WQI), which consists of six parameters, namely dissolved oxygen, biochemical oxygen demand, chemical oxygen demand, suspended solids, ammoniacal nitrogen and pH. The objectives of this study are to assess the water quality status for this tropical, urban river and to establish the WQI trend. Using monthly WQI data from 1997 to 2007, time series were plotted and trend analysis was performed by employing the first-order autocorrelated trend model on the moving average values for every station. The initial and final values of either the moving average or the trend model were used as the estimates of the initial and final WQI at the stations. It was found that Klang River water quality has shown some improvement between 1997 and 2007. Water quality remains good in the upper stream area, which provides vital water sources for water treatment plants in the Klang valley. Meanwhile, the water quality has also improved in other stations. Results of the current study suggest that the present policy on managing river quality in the Klang River has produced encouraging results; the policy should, however, be further improved alongside more vigorous monitoring of pollution discharge from various point sources such as industrial wastewater, municipal sewers, wet markets, sand mining and landfills, as well as non-point sources such as agricultural or urban runoff and commercial activity.

Master data refers to the data that represents the core business of the organization, shared among different applications, departments, and organizations and most valued as the important asset to the organization. Despite the outward benefit of master data mainly in decision making and organization performance, the quality of master data is at risk. This is due to the critical challenges in managing master data quality the organization may expose. Hence the primary aim of this study is to identify factors influencing master data quality from the lens of total quality management while adopting the systematic literature review method. The study proposed 19 factors that inhibit the quality of master data namely data governance, information system, data quality policy and standard, data quality assessment, integration, continuous improvement, teamwork, data quality vision and strategy, understanding of the systems and data quality, data architecture management, personnel competency, top management support, business driver, legislation, information security management, training, change management, customer focus, and data supplier management that can be categorized to five components which are organizational, managerial, stakeholder, technological, and external. Another important finding is the identification of the differences for factors influencing master data compared to other data domain which are business driver, organizational structure, organizational culture, performance evaluation and rewards, evaluate cost/benefit tradeoffs, physical environment, risk management, storage management, usage of data, internal control, input control, staff participation, middle management's commitment, the role of data quality and data quality manager, audit, and personnel relation. It is expected that the findings of this study will contribute to a deeper understanding of the factors that will lead to an improved master data quality.

In this article, we propose a new test of discordancy based on spacing theory in circular data. The test should provide a good alternative to existing tests of discordancy for detecting single or well-separated multiple outliers. On top of that, the new method can be generalized to identify a patch of outliers in data. The percentage points are calculated and the performance is examined. We first investigate the performance of the test for detecting a single outlier and show that the new test performs well compared to other known tests. We then show that the generalized test works well in detecting a patch of outliers in the data. As an illustration, a practical example based on an eye dataset obtained from a glaucoma clinic at the University of Malaya Medical Center, Malaysia is presented.