Browsing by Author "Rathnayake, K"

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Open Access
Alcohol Consumption and Stroke Mortality: Global Patterns, Risks and Public Health Implications
(Springer Nature 2025, 2025-05-07) Kolonne, T; Mudalige, K; Dissanayaka, G; Rathnayake, K; Jayathilaka, R; Rajamanthri, L; Wickramaarachchi, C
Globally, stroke remains a leading cause of mortality and disability, while alcohol consumption continues to vary widely across regions, prompting concern over its health impacts. This study examines the association between different alcoholic beverages and stroke mortality, using secondary data from 1990 to 2020. Alcohol consumption and stroke death rates across 189 countries were categorized into five levels, from very high to very low, and averaged over two periods (1990–1999 and 2011–2020). Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) was applied to assess relationships among four categorical variables. The findings indicate a significant association between very high alcohol consumption and increased stroke mortality, with eight countries showing elevated death rates. Conversely, moderate beer consumption was linked to reduced stroke mortality, suggesting nuanced effects based on beverage type and quantity. These insights offer a foundation for targeted public health policies and emphasize the need for further investigation into the mechanisms driving alcohol-related stroke risks.
Open Access
Alcohol Consumption and Stroke Mortality: Global Patterns, Risks and Public Health Implications
(Springer, 2025-05-07) Kolonne, T; Mudalige, K; Dissanayaka, G; Rathnayake, K; Jayathilaka, R; Rajamanthri, L; Wickramaarachchi, C
Globally, stroke remains a leading cause of mortality and disability, while alcohol consumption continues to vary widely across regions, prompting concern over its health impacts. This study examines the association between different alcoholic beverages and stroke mortality, using secondary data from 1990 to 2020. Alcohol consumption and stroke death rates across 189 countries were categorized into five levels, from very high to very low, and averaged over two periods (1990–1999 and 2011–2020). Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) was applied to assess relationships among four categorical variables. The findings indicate a significant association between very high alcohol consumption and increased stroke mortality, with eight countries showing elevated death rates. Conversely, moderate beer consumption was linked to reduced stroke mortality, suggesting nuanced effects based on beverage type and quantity. These insights offer a foundation for targeted public health policies and emphasize the need for further investigation into the mechanisms driving alcohol-related stroke risks.
Open Access
Effects of Media Richness and Verbal Interactivity on Consumer Engagement
(Emerald Publishing, 2022-12-01) Wimanthika, K; Wisenthige, K; Rathnayake, K; Edirisooriya, D; Cadir, I; Abeysekara, A
Many brands are interested in their public profiles because they highlight the value of actively engaging in overall social media interactions in establishing their brand within and between consumers. As today's fashion customers have more choice and understanding, this provides a challenge to companies in terms of client loyalty. Fashion and clothing manufacturers are increasingly conscious of the link between brand recognition, fashionrelated conversations, and future purchasing behaviour. The emphasis of this study is on fashion brands' successful customer-engagement marketing techniques through Instagram. This study looks at the most up-to-date consumer engagement that takes place on Instagram with the variables of media richness and verbal interactivity. Basically, the entire research that has been carried out is based on Morgan table 384 and incorporates pages of 14 specific brands with more than 50k followers. The result was generated using multinominal logistic regression to analysis data. The findings show that, among the variables chosen, media richness has a greater influence than verbal interactivity. When examining each variable separately, it becomes clear that the media richness variable has a greater engagement rate for edited photos than for actual photos, carousels, and videos. The main objective of the study is to realise the increase of consumer engagement through the above-mentioned independent variables. Empirical studies were uncovered defining how modern marketing communications connect brands into customer perception, while claiming more investigation. In addition, this research article investigates the usage of Instagram for penetrating consumer interaction in the context of social media platforms.
Open Access
Exploring the Determinants of Medical Insurance Expenses: A Quantile Regression Approach
(Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Faculty of Humanities and Sciences, SLIIT, 2025-10-10) Rathnayake, K; Somasiri, D; Abeygunawardana, T; Nugegoda, K; Fernando, N; Guruge, M. L.; Peiris, T. S. G.
Healthcare insurance costs are influenced by a combination of biological and socioeconomic factors. This study investigates how age, body mass index (BMI), gender, and discount eligibility affect medical insurance expenses in the United States, using data from 1,338 individuals. Due to the right-skewed distribution of expenses, quantile regression was applied at the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles, providing insights across low-, medium-, and high-cost groups. Results show that age and BMI consistently increase insurance expenses, with stronger effects among high-cost patients. Genderdifferences also emerged, with females incurring higher costs than males at certain expenditure levels. Discount eligibility significantly reduced expenses across all quantiles. In contrast, the number of children was not a significant predictor and was excluded from the final model. Compared to ordinary least squares regression, quantile regression provided a more accurate assessment of cost determinants in skewed data. These findings highlight the importance of adopting advanced modeling approachesin insurance pricing and suggest that targeted policies addressing individuals having high BMI and equitable discount programs could improve healthcare affordability and risk management.
Open Access
Investigating the Associations Between Alcohol Consumption and Prevalence of Anxiety Using Multiple Correspondence Analysis
(Springer Nature, 2025-10-13) Kolonne, T; Mudalige, K; Dissanayaka, G; Rathnayake, K; Jayathilaka, R; Rajamanthri, L; Wickramaarachchi, C
The prevalence of a specific link between alcohol consumption and anxiety is the basis of this study. The primary aim is to identify how different types of alcohol link with different levels of anxiety disorder. This study is based on secondary data spanning two decades from 1990 to 1999 and 2010 to 2019. Before the primary analysis, the variables were categorised relative to their maximum and minimum values to identify countries with high anxiety prevalence. The MCA (multiple correspondence analysis) included four different types of alcohol and the prevalence of anxiety as variables. This methodology was utilised to determine the associations across 189 countries. The results reveal that anxiety rates are rising worldwide, with 17 countries identified to have prevalent high levels of anxiety. Most countries that exhibited a high prevalence of anxiety were based in the European region. The study emphasises a bi-directional association between anxiety and alcohol disorders, with diverse associations for various alcohol categories. Lower levels of consumption of alcoholic drinks with a high percentage of alcohol are associated with a greater incidence of anxiety, except beer, where consuming more beer is associated with a higher anxiety incidence. Similarly, a reciprocal relationship can be identified between these variables. The study emphasises that the consumption of alcohol can be detrimental to mental health and advises anxiety-prone individuals to exercise caution and restraint when imbibing.
Embargo
Prosecuting Sexual Bribery in Sri Lanka: A study on Sexual Bribery and ‘Consent’ of the Victim
(Faculty of Humanities and Sciences, SLIIT, 2022-09-15) Rathnayake, K
The ability to prosecute Sexual Bribery (SB) in Sri Lanka (SL) is owed to statutory interpretation. However, SB of only public servants is considered bribery, whereas SB of private sector employees is considered as a sexual offence, thus entirely misrepresenting the gravity of the offence. While it is vital to address this discrepancy, it is equally important to classify SB under bribery and corruption. International review and research suggest the concept of ‘coerced consent’ to tackle the issues of prosecuting SB under laws for sexual offences. This study analyses that until SL amends its laws to expressly criminalise SB, in both public and private sectors, statutory interpretation of ‘coerced consent’ being incorporated into the legal system of SL seems a promising means to resolve this.
Open Access
Sri Lanka, its Laws and its Women: Feminist Jurisprudence Views Law as a Subversive Site for Women
(Faculty of Humanities and Sciences, SLIIT, 2023-11-01) Rathnayake, K
Patriarchal laws of a country subject women to various degrees of oppression owing to socially constructed institutions. Sri Lankan women continue to struggle with socio-economic, political, and cultural issues that marginalise them, as different social structures, classes, castes, customs, religions and societal behaviours influence, control and suppress them. In this background, the Sri Lankan judicial thinking is dominated by the sameness approach to equality that ensures ‘gender neutral’ laws. And feminists argue that this ‘neutrality’, is simply a male-standard. In this explanatory investigation, this paper questions this ‘male-standard’ and ‘asks the woman question’ to provide insight to the question; Does Sri Lankan Law serve as a Subversive Site for Women? Through this inquiry, it deduces that, taking a difference approach to achieve substantive equality by understanding positionalities and intersectionalities of women in patriarchal societies shall inhibit the contribution of a country’s laws to create a subversive site for its women.
Embargo
Super Learner for Malicious URL Detection
(IEEE, 2022-02-23) Hevapathige, A; Rathnayake, K
Malicious Uniform Resource Locator (URL) detection is one of the prominent research areas in Cyber security. Machine learning and statistical models are mainly used for this task due to their ability to adapt complex patterns. This research study mainly focused on implementing a machine learning classifier model using Super Learner ensemble to classify malicious URLs. Static feature set is extracted using only the URL information with less latency and reduced computational complexity to support offline and real-time detection. Proposed binary classifier model is used to separate malicious URLs from benign ones whereas the proposed multi-class classifier model separates URLs into benign and multiple categories of attacks (phishing, malware, spam and defacement). These classifiers are tested on a dataset comprising around 750,000 URLs. The empirical results show that the proposed model works well in malicious URL detection. The binary classifier provides 95.145% accuracy and 96.844% precision whereas the multi-class classifier provides 94.69% accuracy and 96.234% precision. Also, the comparison results show that the proposed model outperforms leading supervised machine learning algorithms in malicious URL detection.