How to Support Poor Vietnamese Consumers to Deal with Food Price Volatility and Food Safety Issues

With 66 per cent of the population living in rural areas, over half depending on farm activities, food security and food safety are now two sides of the government effort to ensure food accessibility for the poor in Vietnam. While people living on low incomes may have to choose cheaper food over safer food, they are now more aware of food safety issues, and need more support to access safe food. After a long time of focusing on increasing food security in terms of quantities, new efforts are now needed to change the practice and awareness of stakeholders to move to quality?oriented production and consumption, including creating reasonable incentives for food producers, socialising of food safety monitoring and improving food safety inspection in Vietnam

New criteria for exponential stability of linear neutral differential systems with distributed delays

summary:We present new explicit criteria for exponential stability of general linear neutral time-varying differential systems. Particularly, our results give extensions of the well-known stability criteria reported in [3,11] to linear neutral time-varying differential systems with distributed delays

Coccidioidomycosis Complement Fixation Titer Trends in the Age of Antifungals.

Coccidioidomycosis is associated with a broad spectrum of illness severity, ranging from asymptomatic or self-limited pulmonary infection to life-threatening manifestations of disseminated disease. Serologic studies before the widespread availability of antifungals established current understanding of serologic kinetics and dynamics. Chart histories and complement fixation (CF) titer trends were analyzed for 434 antifungal-treated coccidioidomycosis patients, who were classified by three infectious disease physicians as having either pulmonary uncomplicated coccidioidomycosis (PUC) (n = 248), pulmonary chronic coccidioidomycosis (PCC) (n = 64), disseminated coccidioidomycosis (DC) not including meningitis (n = 86), or coccidioidal meningitis (CM) (n = 36). The median maximal CF titers were 1:4 for PUC patients, 1:24 for PCC patients, 1:128 for DC patients, and 1:32 for CM patients. Approximately 25.4% of PUC patients, 6.2% of PCC patients, 2.3% of DC patients, and 8.3% of CM patients did not develop detectable titers during the study period. Maximal titers developed a mean of 31 days (95% confidence interval [CI], 13 to 50 days) after initial serologic positivity, with no significant differences between groups. Serologic recurrence occurred in 9% of PUC patients, 36% of PCC patients, 50% of DC patients, and 52% of CM patients. Median titer improvement rates were 91 days/dilution for PUC patients, 112 days/dilution for PCC patients, 136 days/dilution for DC patients, and 146 days/dilution for CM patients. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis revealed that CF testing retains moderate classification value for disseminated infections (area under the curve [AUC], 0.82 [95% CI, 0.78 to 0.87]) and complicated infections (AUC, 0.82 [95% CI, 0.77 to 0.86]). A suitable cutoff value for complicated infections is ≥1:32. Findings update serologic parameters that are relevant for clinical assessment of coccidioidomycosis patients in the triazole era

Attitudes Toward Mobile Advertising: A Study Of Mobile Web Display And Mobile App Display Advertising

The rapid development of smartphones has resulted in the increasing use of mobile devices to deliver advertisements for products and services. Many firms in Vietnam have invested numerous resources in this field, and an in-depth understanding of mobile advertising is necessary to develop a successful mobile advertising strategy. Based on the existing literature regarding attitudes toward mobile advertising, a questionnaire was constructed to illustrate the factors affecting consumer attitudes toward advertisements on the mobile web and mobile applications. A survey of 206 participants was conducted in this study using the convenience sampling method. The findings of this study show that although many users do not have positive feelings toward advertising, they cannot ignore the importance of mobile advertising. If mobile advertisers can present credibility and entertainment in their advertisements, consumers are willing to view the ads and be influenced to buy products and services. Implications and suggestions for further studies are also provided in this study

Hardware Architectures of Visible Light Communication Transmitter and Receiver for Beacon-based Indoor Positioning Systems

High-speed applications of Visible Light Communications have been presented recently in which response times of photodiode-based VLC receivers are critical points. Typical VLC receiver routines, such as soft-decoding of run-length limited (RLL) codes and FEC codes was purely processed on embedded firmware, and potentially cause bottleneck at the receiver. To speed up the performance of receivers, ASIC-based VLC receiver could be the solution. Unfortunately, recent works on soft-decoding of RLL and FEC have shown that they are bulky and time-consuming computations. This causes hardware implementation of VLC receivers becomes heavy and unrealistic. In this paper, we introduce a compact Polar-code-based VLC receivers. in which flicker mitigation of the system can be guaranteed even without RLL codes. In particular, we utilized the centralized bit-probability distribution of a pre-scrambler and a Polar encoder to create a non-RLL flicker mitigation solution. At the receiver, a 3-bit soft-decision filter was implemented to analyze signals received from the VLC channel to extract log-likelihood ratio (LLR) values and feed them to the Polar decoder. Therefore, the proposed receiver could exploit the soft-decoding of the Polar decoder to improve the error-correction performance of the system. Due to the non-RLL characteristic, the receiver has a preeminent code-rate and a reduced complexity compared with RLL-based receivers. We present the proposed VLC receiver along with a novel very-large-scale integration (VLSI) architecture, and a synthesis of our design using FPGA/ASIC synthesis tools

Hydrodynamic Simulations of Circumstellar Envelopes under the Gravitational Influence of a Wide Binary Companion: Comparison Between Circular and Elliptical Orbits

Shapes of circumstellar envelopes around mass losing stars contain information of the very inner region of the envelope where mass loss process takes place. It’s well known that the presence of a binary companion leads to strong influence on the structure of the envelope through orbital motion of the mass losing star and the gravitational interaction of the companion with the stellar wind. To investigate this effect and structures of envelopes, we have performed high resolution hydrodynamic simulations of a wide binary system in a number of orbital configurations. Our simulations clearly show the importance of the equation of state of the gas because in isothermal case the width of the spiral arm is significantly broadened with respect to the ideal gas case, therefore resulting in unrealistic spiral patterns. As the orbital geometry changes from circular to elliptical, our simulation results show that the spiral becomes bifurcated and increasingly asymmetric as indicated in previously published results. In the polar direction, the prominent alternating arcs associated with circular orbital configuration morph into almost continuous circular rings. The physical condition of the gas in the envelope is shown to vary strongly between the spiral arm and inter-arm regions. Our hydrodynamic simulations will be useful to interpret high angular resolution observations of circumstellar envelopes

Carbon nanotube four-terminal devices for pressure sensing applications

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are of high interest for sensing applications,owing to their superior mechanical strength, high Young’s modulus and low density. In this work, we report on a facile approach for the fabrication of carbon nanotube devices using a four terminal configuration. Oriented carbon nanotube films were pulled out from a CNT forest wafer and then twisted into a yarn. Both the CNT film and yarn were arranged on elastomer membranes/diaphragms which were arranged on a laser cut acrylic frame to form pressure sensors. The sensors were calibrated using a precisely controlled pressure system, showing a large change of the output voltage of approximately 50 mV at a constant supply current of 100 μA and under a low applied pressure of 15 mbar. The results indicate the high potential of using CNT films and yarns for pressure sensing applications

Real-time Damper Force Estimation for Automotive Suspension: A Generalized H2/LPV Approach

The real-time knowledge of the damper force is of paramount importance in controlling and diagnosing automotive suspension systems. This study presents a generalized H2/LPV observer for damper force estimation of a semi-active electro-rheological (ER) suspension system. First, an extended quarter-car model augmented with the nonlinear and dynamical model of the semi-active suspension system is written into the quasi-LPV formulation. Then, the damper force estimation method is developed through a generalized H2/LPV observer whose objective is to handle the impact of unknown road disturbances and sensor noise on the estimation errors of the state variables thanks to the H2 norm. The measured sprung and unsprung mass accelerations of the quarter-car system are used as inputs for the observer. The proposed approach is simulated with validated model of the 1/5-scaled real vehicle testbed of GIPSA-lab. Simulation results show the performance of the estimation method against unknown disturbances, emphasizing the effectiveness of the damper force estimation in real time

Tri-axis convective accelerometer with closed-loop heat source

In this paper, we report the details and findings of a study on tri-axis convective accelerometer, which is designed with the closed-loop type heat source and thermal sensing hotwire elements. The closed-loopheat source enhances the convective flow to the central part where a hotwire is placed to measure the vertical component of acceleration. The simulation was conducted using numerical analysis, and the devicewas prototyped by additive manufacturing. The device, functioning as a tilt sensor and an accelerometer,was tested up to acceleration of 20 g. The experiments were successfully conducted and the experimental results agreed reasonably with those obtained by numerical analysis. The results demonstrated that the closed-loop heat source could reduce the cross effect between the acceleration components. The scalefactor and cross-sensitivity had the values of 0.26 micro�V/g and 1.2%, respectively. The cross-sensitivity andthe effects of heating power were also investigated in this study