Improving the Efficiency of the State Budget Balance in Vietnam

The state budget balance is always an extremely important issue for each government. In 2020, Vietnam has a relatively small-scale economy. Its economic scale and GDP per capita reached 271.2 billion USD and 2,779 USD respectively. Budget revenue is still limited, but the need for recurrent spending and development investment is still very large now and in many years to come. In the past time, budget revenue and expenditure are in a situation of not having the necessary balance, the state budget deficit has been still around 4.5 percent of GDP. The actual state budget revenue and expenditure balance have been revealing several disadvantages. Faced to such a situation, the author would like to present some important issues about the state budget revenue and expenditure and propose key solutions to increase the efficiency of state budget revenue and expenditure in Vietnam

Factors Affecting the Profitability of Cement Manufacturing Enterprises in Tuyen Quang Province

This study focuses on analyzing the factors affecting the production and business efficiency of cement manufacturing enterprises in Tuyen Quang province. Production and business efficiency is measured by profitability ratios including return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE) and return on sales (ROS). Using a quantitative research method through estimating a linear regression model based on data of two cement manufacturing companies in the period 2019-2021, the research results show that the factors affecting business efficiency of cement manufacturing enterprises in Tuyen Quang province include size of enterprise, cost ratio, average collection period, inventory turnover, fixed assets turnover and debt ratio

Federated Few-shot Learning for Cough Classification with Edge Devices

Automatically classifying cough sounds is one of the most critical tasks for the diagnosis and treatment of respiratory diseases. However, collecting a huge amount of labeled cough dataset is challenging mainly due to high laborious expenses, data scarcity, and privacy concerns. In this work, our aim is to develop a framework that can effectively perform cough classification even in situations when enormous cough data is not available, while also addressing privacy concerns. Specifically, we formulate a new problem to tackle these challenges and adopt few-shot learning and federated learning to design a novel framework, termed F2LCough, for solving the newly formulated problem. We illustrate the superiority of our method compared with other approaches on COVID-19 Thermal Face & Cough dataset, in which F2LCough achieves an average F1-Score of 86%. Our results show the feasibility of few-shot learning combined with federated learning to build a classification model of cough sounds. This new methodology is able to classify cough sounds in data-scarce situations and maintain privacy properties. The outcomes of this work can be a fundamental framework for building support systems for the detection and diagnosis of cough-related diseases.Comment: 21 pages, 5 figure

Fear of travelling after COVID-19: The moderation effect of social distancing

COVID-19 has caused unparalleled public dread, which will most certainly impede tourist business recovery once the epidemic is gone. This research investigates the causes of the general public's epidemic travel anxiety, as well as how individuals impose self-protection, coping, and resilience with travel. The study blends theories such as protection motive theory, coping theory, and resilience theory to achieve the research goal. The primary data came from an online poll of 322 Southeast Asian travelers. According to the findings, the magnitude and vulnerability of the danger might induce "travel dread," which leads to protection motivation and precautionary travel behaviors during the pandemic. The findings also demonstrate that social distancing has memory consequences. In other words, individuals who willingly engaged in social separation during the pandemic are more likely to continue doing so in the post-COVID period since their long-term behavior has been influenced.Tomas Bata University in Zlín, TBU; Finance Authority of Maine, FAM

Anti-DreamBooth: Protecting users from personalized text-to-image synthesis

Text-to-image diffusion models are nothing but a revolution, allowing anyone, even without design skills, to create realistic images from simple text inputs. With powerful personalization tools like DreamBooth, they can generate images of a specific person just by learning from his/her few reference images. However, when misused, such a powerful and convenient tool can produce fake news or disturbing content targeting any individual victim, posing a severe negative social impact. In this paper, we explore a defense system called Anti-DreamBooth against such malicious use of DreamBooth. The system aims to add subtle noise perturbation to each user's image before publishing in order to disrupt the generation quality of any DreamBooth model trained on these perturbed images. We investigate a wide range of algorithms for perturbation optimization and extensively evaluate them on two facial datasets over various text-to-image model versions. Despite the complicated formulation of DreamBooth and Diffusion-based text-to-image models, our methods effectively defend users from the malicious use of those models. Their effectiveness withstands even adverse conditions, such as model or prompt/term mismatching between training and testing. Our code will be available at \href{https://github.com/VinAIResearch/Anti-DreamBooth.git}{https://github.com/VinAIResearch/Anti-DreamBooth.git}.Comment: Project page: https://anti-dreambooth.github.io

Pneumococcal infections and homelessness

Objectif. To assess the prevalence of pneumococcal nasopharyngeal carriage, the role of potential risk factors, and vaccination against invasive pneumococcal diseases (IPD) among sheltered homeless persons (HP) in Marseille, France. Methods. In 2015–2018, we enrolled 571 sheltered homeless males and 54 non-homeless controls. Streptococcus pneumoniae was directly searched form nasal/pharyngeal samples using PCR. Results. The HPs were predominantly middle-aged, mostly migrants originating from African countries. Pneumococcal vaccination rate was low (3.1%). The overall pneumococcal carriage rate was 13.0% and was significantly higher in HPs (15.3% in 2018) than in controls (3.7%), with p=0.033. Among HPs, being aged ≥65 years (OR=1.97, p=0.048), living in one specific shelter (OR=1.80, p=0.028), and presenting respiratory symptoms and signs at the time of enrolment (OR=2.55, p<10-4) were independent factors associated with pneumococcal carriage. Conclusion. Pneumococcal vaccination should be systematically considered for sheltered HPs in France, as has been the case in Canada since 2008

Abietane diterpenoids and neolignans from the roots of Pinus kesiya

The phytochemical investigation of the ethyl acetate extract of Pinus kesiya Royle ex Gordon roots led to the isolation of two abietane diterpenes, 7-oxo-15-hydroxy-dehydroabietic acid (1) and dehydroabietic acid (2) as well as two neolignans, cedrusin (3) and cedrusin-4-O-β-D-glucopyranoside (4). Their structures were determined by combination of spectral analysis and comparison with reported data. Among them, compound 1 was isolated from the genus Pinus for the first time. Keywords. Pinus kesiya, abietane diterpenes, neolignans, dehydroabietic acid, cedrusin

Detailed analysis of distorted retinal and its interaction with surrounding residues in the K intermediate of bacteriorhodopsin

The K intermediate of proton pumping bacteriorhodopsin is the first intermediate generated after isomerization of retinal to the 13-cis form. Although various structures have been reported for the K intermediate until now, these differ from each other, especially in terms of the conformation of the retinal chromophore and its interaction with surrounding residues. We report here an accurate X-ray crystallographic analysis of the K structure. The polyene chain of 13-cis retinal is observed to be S-shaped. The side chain of Lys216, which is covalently bound to retinal via the Schiff-base linkage, interacts with residues, Asp85 and Thr89. In addition, the Nζ-H of the protonated Schiff-base linkage interacts with a residue, Asp212 and a water molecule, W402. Based on quantum chemical calculations for this K structure, we examine the stabilizing factors of distorted conformation of retinal and propose a relaxation manner to the next L intermediate