Social Well-Being in Vietnam : Designing and Preliminary Results from a Sampling Survey

MEXT-Supported Program for the Strategic Research Foundation at Private Universities (2014-2018)Forming a Social Well-being Research Consortium in AsiaThe main intent of this paper is to summarize the process of the 2015 sampling survey on social well-being in Vietnam (SWB survey), which was a part of the Senshu-led Consortium on social well-being research in Asia. The survey was carried out by a research team from the Institute of Sociology of the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, in order to measure the level of happiness and life satisfaction among Vietnamese adults currently living in the country\u27s Northern, Central, and Southern regions. With a sample size of 1,202 men and women aged 20 and over, the survey sample represented the national population structure in terms of age and sex, as well as rural-urban breakdown. Data quality control was ensured through careful training of interviewers, questionnaire design and pre-test, and strict supervision in the field to ensure a high response rate. Preliminary results showed a fairly high level of happiness of the respondents. Although Vietnam is still a developing country characterized by low income and many hardships, the results suggest that cultural norms and values, national tradition, and other non-economic factors have a significant influence on high life satisfaction. The paper concludes with a strong recommendation for undertaking in-depth and comprehensive analyses, utilizing the 2015 SWB data, particularly in comparative perspectives with Japan, South Korea, and other Asian country members of the SWB Consortium

The Influence of Message Framing on Engagement with a Mobile Application for Motivating Exercise

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 21).Mobile phone personal health monitoring software is designed to help people monitor and change their behavior. Exercise applications may measure heart rate, temperature, distance traveled, and movement. Although some of these programs incorporate behavioral theories to motivate engagement and behavior change, it is not yet clear that the devices can maintain engagement long term for individuals who are not strongly inclined to exercise already. If people do not use health apps for long periods of time - weeks, months or years instead of days - there are unlikely to be long-term health benefits. This paper describes a new mobile health application designed to motivate exercise via brisk walking: MyWalk. MyWalk delivers timely, tailored feedback messages intended to persuade additional brisk walking. An experiment was conducted to explore how message framing impacts application usage using participants who downloaded the application from an online app store. Author Keywords: Engagement, Health, Mobile, Phone, Pervasive Technology, Reinforcement, Personal Health Informatics, Design, Human-Computer Interaction. ACM Classification Keywords H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous.by Anh Dang-Viet Nguyen.M.Eng

Zooplankton from Can Giuoc River in Southern Vietnam

In this study, the variables of zooplankton and water quality were investigated in the Can Giuoc River, Southern Vietnam. Zooplankton was monitored in April and September 2015 at 5 sampling sites in the river. Some basic water quality parameters were also tested, including pH, total suspended solid (TSS), dissolved oxygen (DO), biological oxygen demand (BOD5), inorganic nitrogen (NH4+), dissolved phosphorus (PO43-), and coliform. The zooplankton biodiversity indices were applied for the water quality assessment. The results showed that pH ranged from 6.7 to 7.6 during the monitoring. The TSSs were between 34–117 mg/L. The DO and BOD5 were from 0.6 to 3.8 mg/L and from 6.3 to 13.2 mg/L, respectively. The NH4+ and PO43- concentrations ranged from 0.44 to 3.23 and from 0.08 to 1.85 mg/L, respectively. The coliform number was between 9.3x103–9.3x104 MPN/100 mL. The zooplankton analyses showed that there were 31 species of coelenterates, rotatoria, oligochaetes, cladocerans, copepods, ostracods, mysidacea, and 8 larval types. Thereof, the species of copepods were dominant in the species number. The zooplankton density ranged from 9 500 to 23 600 individuals/m3 with the main dominant species of Moina dubia (Cladocera), Thermocyclops hyalinus, Acartia clausi, Oithona similis (Copepoda), and nauplius copepods. The biodiversity index values during the monitoring were from 1.47 to 1.79 characteristic of mesotrophic conditions of the aquatic environment. Besides, the species richness positively correlated with pH, TSS, DO, BOD5, NH4+, PO43-, and coliform, while the zooplankton densities got a positive correlation with DO, BOD5, NH4+, PO43-, and coliform. The results confirmed the advantage of using zooplankton and its indices for water quality assessment

Out of Sight, Out of Mind:The Value of Political Connections in Social Networks

This paper investigates the impact of social-network connections to politicians on firm value. We focus on the networks of university classmates and alumni among directors of U.S. public firms and congressmen. Using the Regression Discontinuity Design based on close elections from 2000 to 2008, we identify that a director’s connection to an elected congressman causes a Weighted Average Treatment Effect on Cumulative Abnormal Returns of -2.65% surrounding the election date. The effect is robust and consistent through various specifications, parametric and nonparametric, with different outcome measures and social network definitions, and across many subsamples. We find evidence to support the hypothesis that firms benefit more when connected politicians remain in state politics than when they move to federal office. Overall, our study identifies the value of political connections through social networks and uncovers its variation across different states and between state and federal political environments.Social network; political connection; close election; regression discontinuity design; firm value.

Textual Manifold-based Defense Against Natural Language Adversarial Examples

Recent studies on adversarial images have shown that they tend to leave the underlying low-dimensional data manifold, making them significantly more challenging for current models to make correct predictions. This so-called off-manifold conjecture has inspired a novel line of defenses against adversarial attacks on images. In this study, we find a similar phenomenon occurs in the contextualized embedding space induced by pretrained language models, in which adversarial texts tend to have their embeddings diverge from the manifold of natural ones. Based on this finding, we propose Textual Manifold-based Defense (TMD), a defense mechanism that projects text embeddings onto an approximated embedding manifold before classification. It reduces the complexity of potential adversarial examples, which ultimately enhances the robustness of the protected model. Through extensive experiments, our method consistently and significantly outperforms previous defenses under various attack settings without trading off clean accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first NLP defense that leverages the manifold structure against adversarial attacks. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/dangne/tmd}

The role of orographic effects on occurrence of the heavy rainfall event over Central Vietnam in November 1999

In this study, the WRF model is used to investigate the role of Central Vietnam terrain on occurrence of the heavy rainfall event in November 1999 over Central Vietnam. Two model experiments with and without terrain were performed to examine the orographic blocking effects during the event. In the terrain experiment, the results from a three-day simulation show that the model reasonably well captures northeast monsoon circulation, tropical cyclones and the occurrence of heavy rainfall in Central Vietnam. The topography causes a high pressure anomaly intensifying northeast monsoon. When the terrain is removed, the three-day accumulated rainfall decreases approximately 75% in comparison with that in the terrain experiment. The terrain blocking and lifting effects in strong wind and moisture laden conditions combined with convergence circulation over open ocean are the main factors for occurrence of the heavy rainfall event

The First Record of Metaphire Birmanica (Rosa, 1888) in Vietnam, with Notes on Several Earthworm Species

The Amynthas and Metaphire species recorded in Vietnam have been rechecked based on original descriptions and preserved specimens. As a result, Metaphire birmanica (Rosa, 1888) is recorded in Vietnam for the first time. The species is recognized by having three pairs of spermathecal pores in 5/6/7/8, male pores in xviii, presence of copulatory pouches, no genial markings, and manicate intestinal caeca. In addition, three species have been rechecked and re-assigned to different genera, namely Amynthas tripidoporophoratus (Thai & Nguyen, 1993) comb. nov., Metaphire dranfocana (Do & Huynh, 1993) comb. nov., Metaphire anhumalatana (Thai & Huynh, 1993) comb. nov

Does hotter temperature increase poverty and inequality? Global evidence from subnational data analysis

Despite a vast literature documenting the harmful effects of climate change on various socioeconomic outcomes, little evidence exists on the global impacts of hotter temperature on poverty and inequality. Analysis of a new global panel dataset of subnational poverty in 134 countries finds that a one-degree Celsius increase in temperature leads to a 9.1 percent increase in poverty, using the US$1.90 daily poverty threshold. A similar increase in temperature causes a 1.4 percent increase in the Gini inequality index. The paper also finds negative effects of colder temperature on poverty and inequality. Yet, while poorer countries—particularly those in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa—are more affected by climate change, household adaptation could have mitigated some adverse effects in the long run. The findings provide relevant and timely inputs for the global fight against climate change as well as the current policy debate on the responsibilities of richer countries versus poorer countries