An inquiry into the determinants of Vietnamese product export

Export led growth is the model of economic development that Vietnam has been following. While there are a great number of studies on the determinants of aggregate export of Vietnam, there are few that analyze the impacts of different factors on the export of different product groups. This paper aims at filling this gap in research on international trade of Vietnam. The results show that the fast GDP growth of Vietnam, the large population of importing countries, the wide economic gap between Vietnam and the importing countries, the depreciation of domestic currency, the free trade agreements that Vietnam signed and the shared border with the importing countries contribute to the increase of Vietnam’s export of all product groups. In contrast, the GDP of importing countries and population of Vietnam have no clear impacts on the export of any product groups.

Rice husk gasification for electricity generation in Cambodia in December 2014: Field trip report

Rice husks are the indigestible coatings of grains of rice. They are produced in large quantities by the rice milling industry, more than 1 million ton per year in Cambodia. In recent years, Cambodian enterprises have installed gasifiers, which burn rice husks to generate electricity. This is a two stage process: the biomass is first fed into a gasifier which produces syngas and ashes, then the syngas is cleaned and burned into an engine where it saves diesel fuel. Many of these enterprises have been in local communities currently without electricity or in fuel poverty.To learn more about the benefits and drawbacks of using rice-husk gasifiers, and to study about the sustainability challenges for deploying these technologies, the Clean energy and sustainable development lab (CleanED lab) of the University of Science and Technology of Hanoi (USTH), and the SNV Netherlands Development Organisation (SNV) have conducted a visit of several rice mills and rural electricity enterprises from 18 th to 22nd December 2014.Five rice mills and a rural electricity enterprise in Battambang, Siem Reap and Kampong Thom provinces were selected for the field survey. In addition with desk research, semi-structured interviews with gasifier users, with the representatives of Canadia Bank PLC and the Federation of Cambodian Rice Millers Association (FCRMA) during the field surveys were also conducted. This report present and justifies the main conclusions of the visit

Modeling Psychiatric Disorders Using Patient-derived Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells

Schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are characterized by complex genetics, variable symptomatology, and anatomically distributed pathology, all of which have made identifying the etiology of these diseases extremely challenging. In addition, our understanding of the role of risk genes in mental disorders has been severely hindered by the lack of access to human neurons. Human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) derived from patients provide a unique opportunity to investigate the etiology and pathogenesis of these psychiatric disorders. Here, we report the generation and characterization of iPSCs derived from subjects with 15q11.2 copy-number variants (CNVs) and a frameshift mutation in Disrupted in Schizophrenia 1 (DISC1)—both types of mutations are associated with increased risk for schizophrenia and ASD. Mutant iPSCs differentiated toward cortical forebrain lineage revealed dysregulation of neural development and synaptic function. First, iPSC-derived neural progenitors from subjects carrying a 15q11.2 microdeletion exhibit deficits in adherens junctions and apical polarity. This results from haploinsufficiency of CYFIP1, a gene within 15q11.2 that encodes a subunit of the WAVE complex, which regulates cytoskeletal dynamics. Second, using isogenic cell lines with and without a specific 4-basepair deletion in DISC1, we show that iPSC-derived forebrain neurons with the DISC1 mutation exhibit functional abnormalities including synaptic transmission deficits and dysregulated expression of many genes related to synaptic function and implicated in psychiatric disorders. Together these iPSC-based investigations of development and function of human neurons demonstrate the capability of this technology for identifying the biological processes and cellular pathways that are impacted by genetic risk for psychiatric disorders

A Study on a Model of Anchovy Solar

In central and southern coastal areas of Vietnam, annual yield of anchovy is enormous that leads the high demand for anchovy drying. Moreover, seafood in generally and anchovy in particularly brings more benefit for fishermen, especially dried anchovy as an exporting product is one of the main their income. The market requires that anchovy product has to be dried before packaging to export. There are many drying methods to process the anchovy but some problems might need to be solved such as the drying efficiency, the low product quality and sanitation, and the environmental annihilation. In order to using the profuse solar energy, a model for experiment investigation the anchovy dryer has been conducted in ThuDuc district, Hochiminh city with the anchovy caught from Kien giang and Baria-Vung tau province, southern Vietnam. The results indicate that solar energy is one of renewable energy which can be completely used for anchovy drying with high drying efficiency. The dried anchovy has good color, high quality, and especially it passes the requirements of food hygiene and environment protecting

Relative Positional Encoding for Speech Recognition and Direct Translation

Transformer models are powerful sequence-to-sequence architectures that are capable of directly mapping speech inputs to transcriptions or translations. However, the mechanism for modeling positions in this model was tailored for text modeling, and thus is less ideal for acoustic inputs. In this work, we adapt the relative position encoding scheme to the Speech Transformer, where the key addition is relative distance between input states in the self-attention network. As a result, the network can better adapt to the variable distributions present in speech data. Our experiments show that our resulting model achieves the best recognition result on the Switchboard benchmark in the non-augmentation condition, and the best published result in the MuST-C speech translation benchmark. We also show that this model is able to better utilize synthetic data than the Transformer, and adapts better to variable sentence segmentation quality for speech translation.Comment: Submitted to Interspeech 202

A critical look at rice husk gasification in Cambodia: Technology and sustainability

International audienceIn recent years, many Cambodian enterprises have installed rice husk gasifiers to substitute diesel in the electricity production to run rice mills machinery, or to provide electricity for villages. This study provides a critical look at rice husk gasification by assessing the sustainability of deploying this technology in Cambodia, expressed through environmental, economic and social impacts, and evaluates if it can be applied in Vietnam. Results show that gasification technology works in Cambodia and contribute to the development of the rice-milling sector, however environmental issues are severe and should be treated. We observe that increase in rice husk demand also leads to increase in price of rice husk, therefore new investors should consider the effect of new rice husk market for their activities. We conclude that this technology would not be suitable for Vietnam and suggests studying other alternative technologies to convert rice husk into energy, such as steam engine or steam turbine, gasifier stove, briquetting or co-firing

WHO's service availability and readiness assessment of primary health care services of commune health centers in a rural district of Northern Vietnam

The objective of this study was to assess the availability and readiness of the primary health care (PHC) services of commune health centers (CHCs) in Quoc Oai, a rural district of Northern Vietnam based on the World Health Organization's Service Availability and Readiness Assessment (SARA) tool. The study was done in 2 steps. First, the heads of the 21 CHCs of Quoc Oai district were interviewed using SARA, a quantitative survey, and the responses were then validated by direct observations of each facility. The results showed that although the average number of health staffs in each CHC met the national standards (at least 5 staffs per CHC), its allocation within each CHC was not properly met because some CHCs had only 2 health staffs. Several health equipment and facilities were not fully available in many CHCs, and although the majority of the PHC services were available at the CHCs, their readiness remained limited. Several significant correlates between the availability of health care workers and the availability of the facilities and the PHC services were observed, suggesting that they depend upon and affect one another in the health system. Using the SARA-based inventory, the study helps health managers and policy makers to prioritize efforts and allocate resources more appropriately. To be effective, attention should be given to how to make facilities, services, and human resources for health ready for PHC activities—more investment and support from the system (from higher to lower level) and the government. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

A critical look on rice husk gasification in Cambodia: engineering and sustainability

PACITA Conference at Berlin, GermanyInternational audienceRice husks are the indigestible coatings of grains of rice. They are produced in large quantities by the rice milling industry, more than 1 million ton per year in Cambodia. In recent years, Cambodian enterprises have installed gasifiers, which burn rice husks to generate electricity. This is a two stage process: the biomass is first fed into a gasifier which produces syngas and ashes, then the syngas is cleaned and burned into an engine where it saves diesel fuel. Our study describes the sustainability challenges for deploying these technologies: how much does it depends on government intervention and on the state of the electricity market? What are the impacts of the gaseous, liquid and solid wastes? What are benefits for the local companies in term of profits, jobs and technology transfer