Early-Childhood Growth Faltering, Post-Infancy Recovery and Educational Outcomes in Late Childhood: Evidence from Vietnam

We use longitudinal data on over 1,500 children born in 2001 in Vietnam to study the impact of early childhood stunting on height, lagging in schooling progression and cognitive outcomes in late childhood (age 8-10 years). Our preferred estimates utilize 2SLS estimators to control for the endogenous determination of early childhood stunting and also include control for child sex and birth order, mother’s height and BMI, household socioeconomic status, and community characteristics. These estimates indicate that deficits in height-for-age at age 12 months have negative impacts on height in late childhood but not on schooling and cognitive outcomes in late childhood. The children who were stunted or moderately stunted at age 12 months display significant catch-up growth, recovering half of their deficits in height-for-age by age 8 years. Socioeconomic status in infancy has negative effects on both stunting in infancy and poor subsequent educational outcomes in late childhood, which result in significant associations between stunting in infancy and some subsequent educational outcomes in late childhood – but not causal effects once there is control for the endogenous determination of early childhood height deficits

Trade Liberalization and Development in ICT Sector and its impact on household welfare in Viet Nam

The ICT sector in Viet Nam had not been developed until the 1980s. However, over the last decade of rapid growth, it has had a powerful impact on many aspects of life in this country. Although the ICT sector is still at an early stage of development and lags behind many other countries in the region, the government of Viet Nam made strong commitments to upgrade the nation’s ICT capability and implemented significant reforms in terms of trade and investment liberalization in ICT sector over the last decade.Trade Liberalization, ICT, Household welfare, Viet Nam

The mental cost of job loss: assessing the impact on young adults in Vietnam

We exploit the extensive job loss associated with the devastating fourth wave of COVID-19 in Vietnam to examine the impact of unemployment on young people's experiences of anxiety and depression. Using data from a longitudinal study with individual and survey-wave fixed effects, we show that job loss significantly increases levels of anxiety, but not depression. Specifically, job loss leads to a 5.9 percentage point increase in the probability of experiencing symptoms consistent with either mild or severe anxiety, almost doubling the pre-wave baseline. This effect is driven by individuals in the top earnings tercile who no longer live in their natal household - suggesting that the impact of job loss on anxiety is most acute among young people who are under pressure as the primary earners in their household. Perceived financial strain and food insecurity explain up to 22% of the estimated increase in anxiety. Our results support expanding mental health programmes to explicitly target young adults who have lost their job

Optimization of Weld Parameters in Wire and Arc-Based Directed Energy Deposition of High Strength Low Alloy Steels

This paper aims to investigate the fabrication of high strength low alloy (HSLA) steels by wire and arc-based directed energy deposition (WADED). Firstly, the relationship between the process variables (including the travel speed-V, the current-C, and the voltage-U) and the geometrical characteristics of weld beads (including the bead height (BH), bead width (BW), and melting pool length (MPL)) was investigated. Secondly, the optimal process variables were identified using the desirability approach. The results indicate that voltage-U has the highest impact on BW and MPL, meanwhile the travel speed-V is the most impacting factor on BH. The optimal variables for the WADED process of HSAL steels are V = 0.3 m/min, C = 160 A, and U = 19 V. The component fabricated with the optimal variables is fully dense without spatters and defects, confirming the efficiency of the WADED process for HSLA steels

Two decades of studies on learning management system in higher education: A bibliometric analysis with Scopus database 2000-2020

Over the past twenty years, using learning management systems in higher education has attracted increasing interest from researchers around the globe. In this context, the current study aimed to explore the volume, growth trajectory, and geographic distribution of learning management systems in higher education literature, along with identifying impactful authors, sources, and publications, and highlight emerging research issues. The authors conducted bibliometric analysis on 1334 documents, related to the use of learning management systems in the context of higher education, extracted from Scopus database. The findings show a rapidly growing knowledge base on learning management systems in higher education, especially intensely in the years 2015-2020 and primarily from research in developed societies. This flourishing is consistent with the development trend of international education and the strong development of technology. In addition, the core literature was identified based on the volume of publications and citations. The results also reveal the emerging intellectual structure of the field and provide points of reference for scholars studying the discipline. This paper offers a knowledge map for future research assessments of learning management systems in higher education

The Status of Educational Sciences In Vietnam: A Bibliometric Analysis From Clarivate Web Of Science Database Between 1991 And 2018

Since 2013, Vietnam has implemented a plan to reform the whole education sector. However, there is little understanding on the status of educational research in Vietnam, which may lay the foundation for such plan. Thus, this research aims to analyze the whole picture of educational research from Vietnam, as seen from the Clarivate Web of Science (WOS) database: 215 publications were recorded, ranging from 1991 to 2018. These 215 publications were further analyzed from five perspectives: 1) number of publications by year; 2) research fields and levels of education; 3) top institutions with the highest number of publications; 4) international collaboration; and 5) quality. Some of the most notable results are: 1) the educational sciences in Vietnam have been still under-developed until recently; 2) among different research topics research among educational sciences, some (e.g., Vocational Education and Training or Early Childhood Education) seemed to be overlooked whereas others (e.g., Higher Education and Teaching and Learning) seemed to receive more attention from educational scholars; 3) all the most major education – specialized universities did not appear among the top five institutions with highest number of publications; 4) Australia, Thailand, the USA, New Zealand and China were the countries with the highest number of co-publications with Vietnamese researchers; and 5) The majority of publications belonged to low-ranked journals. Implications would be withdrawn for Vietnamese policymakers, education leaders, educational researchers and teachers in order to adjust their policies and/or action plans; thus, enhancing the performance and impacts of educational research in the future

Isolation an agar degradation Bacillus sp. AT6 and preliminary application for seaweed saccharification

Background: Agar is a common polysaccharide found in nature. However, agar is strongly resisted to the degradation processing, leading to limitation of its application in various areas. Thus, finding an effective solution for agar saccharification significantly improves the economically effects of agar based substrates.Methods: Soil samples were collected from TienPhong Forestry Ltd. Company, ThuyXuan District, ThuaThien Hue province, Vietnam. Potential agar degrading bacteria were screened on a mineral salt agar medium. The isolate was identified based on 16S rRNA nucleotide sequence, morphological, physiological, and biochemical characteristics. Agarase production was evaluated by modification culture conditions including incubation time, shaking speed, and initial inoculum size. Molecular mass of extracellular agarase was determined by native SDS-PAGE. The effect of pH, temperature, metal ions, and organic solvents were conducted for enzyme characterization. Application of enzyme was investigated on seaweed saccharification.Result: An agar degrading bacterial strain was isolated from soils and identified as Bacillus sp. AT6. Maximal agarase accumulation obtained in the culture containing an inoculum size of 10% (v/v), shaking speed of 210 rpm, and 96 hours incubation. The agarase revealed a single band on zymogram analysis with an apparent molecular weight of 180 kDa. The optimal temperature and pH were 40°C and pH 8.0, respectively. All tested metal ions and organic solvents partially decreased enzyme activity. Treatment seaweed by agarase resulted in reducing sugars release present in the reaction, indicating the saccharification of seaweed was succeeded.Conclusion: Bacillus sp. AT6 is a new report of agarolytic bacteria that produces extracellular agarase enzymes. The present results promise strain AT6 is a great candidate for agar saccharification for industrial application

Growth Recovery and Faltering through Early Adolescence in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: Determinants and Implications for Cognitive Development

Child chronic undernutrition, as measured by stunting, is prevalent in low- and middle-income countries and is among the major threats to child development. While stunting and its implications for cognitive development have been considered irreversible beyond early childhood, there is a lack of consensus in the literature on this, as there is some evidence of recovery from stunting and that this recovery may be associated with improvements in cognition. Less is known, however, about the drivers of growth recovery and the aspects of recovery linked to cognitive development. In this paper, we investigate the factors associated with growth recovery and faltering through age 12 years and the implications of the incidence, timing, and persistence of post-infancy recovery from stunting for cognitive development using longitudinal data from Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam. We find that the factors most systematically associated with accelerated growth both before and after early childhood and across countries include mother’s height, household living standards and shocks, community wages, food prices, and garbage collection. Our results suggest that post-infancy recovery from stunting is more likely to be systematically associated with higher achievement scores across countries when it is persistent and that associations between growth trajectories and cognitive achievement in middle childhood do not persist through early adolescence across countries. Overall, our findings indicate that growth after early childhood is responsive to changes in the household and community environments and that growth promotion after early childhood may yield improvements in child cognitive development

Gene selection for optimal prediction of cell position in tissues from single-cell transcriptomics data.

Single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNAseq) technologies are rapidly evolving. Although very informative, in standard scRNAseq experiments, the spatial organization of the cells in the tissue of origin is lost. Conversely, spatial RNA-seq technologies designed to maintain cell localization have limited throughput and gene coverage. Mapping scRNAseq to genes with spatial information increases coverage while providing spatial location. However, methods to perform such mapping have not yet been benchmarked. To fill this gap, we organized the DREAM Single-Cell Transcriptomics challenge focused on the spatial reconstruction of cells from the Drosophila embryo from scRNAseq data, leveraging as silver standard, genes with in situ hybridization data from the Berkeley Drosophila Transcription Network Project reference atlas. The 34 participating teams used diverse algorithms for gene selection and location prediction, while being able to correctly localize clusters of cells. Selection of predictor genes was essential for this task. Predictor genes showed a relatively high expression entropy, high spatial clustering and included prominent developmental genes such as gap and pair-rule genes and tissue markers. Application of the top 10 methods to a zebra fish embryo dataset yielded similar performance and statistical properties of the selected genes than in the Drosophila data. This suggests that methods developed in this challenge are able to extract generalizable properties of genes that are useful to accurately reconstruct the spatial arrangement of cells in tissues

Safety and efficacy of fluoxetine on functional outcome after acute stroke (AFFINITY): a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial

Background Trials of fluoxetine for recovery after stroke report conflicting results. The Assessment oF FluoxetINe In sTroke recoverY (AFFINITY) trial aimed to show if daily oral fluoxetine for 6 months after stroke improves functional outcome in an ethnically diverse population. Methods AFFINITY was a randomised, parallel-group, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial done in 43 hospital stroke units in Australia (n=29), New Zealand (four), and Vietnam (ten). Eligible patients were adults (aged ≥18 years) with a clinical diagnosis of acute stroke in the previous 2–15 days, brain imaging consistent with ischaemic or haemorrhagic stroke, and a persisting neurological deficit that produced a modified Rankin Scale (mRS) score of 1 or more. Patients were randomly assigned 1:1 via a web-based system using a minimisation algorithm to once daily, oral fluoxetine 20 mg capsules or matching placebo for 6 months. Patients, carers, investigators, and outcome assessors were masked to the treatment allocation. The primary outcome was functional status, measured by the mRS, at 6 months. The primary analysis was an ordinal logistic regression of the mRS at 6 months, adjusted for minimisation variables. Primary and safety analyses were done according to the patient's treatment allocation. The trial is registered with the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry, ACTRN12611000774921. Findings Between Jan 11, 2013, and June 30, 2019, 1280 patients were recruited in Australia (n=532), New Zealand (n=42), and Vietnam (n=706), of whom 642 were randomly assigned to fluoxetine and 638 were randomly assigned to placebo. Mean duration of trial treatment was 167 days (SD 48·1). At 6 months, mRS data were available in 624 (97%) patients in the fluoxetine group and 632 (99%) in the placebo group. The distribution of mRS categories was similar in the fluoxetine and placebo groups (adjusted common odds ratio 0·94, 95% CI 0·76–1·15; p=0·53). Compared with patients in the placebo group, patients in the fluoxetine group had more falls (20 [3%] vs seven [1%]; p=0·018), bone fractures (19 [3%] vs six [1%]; p=0·014), and epileptic seizures (ten [2%] vs two [<1%]; p=0·038) at 6 months. Interpretation Oral fluoxetine 20 mg daily for 6 months after acute stroke did not improve functional outcome and increased the risk of falls, bone fractures, and epileptic seizures. These results do not support the use of fluoxetine to improve functional outcome after stroke