Mission in Asia as prophetic dialogue

Mission is missio Dei and Christians are called to participate in God’s mission. But how should Christian mission be done in Asia, a continent characterized by extreme poverty, cultural diversity, and religious pluralism? Based on the biblical foundation and the teachings of the Church on mission, the Asian bishops suggest a threefold dialogue with Asia’s poor, its cultures, and its religions in order to deal with these Asian issues. This research paper aims to explore the significance and implications of “prophetic dialogue,” which according to its authors Stephen Bevans and Roger Schroeder, is the most relevant approach for Christian missions today, for the effectiveness and authenticity of practical theology, especially in Asia. Being such, the Church in Asia shall be the Church for and of Asians and Christian missions can be carried out in Asia in order that all people in Asia will live together in peace and harmony

Re-telling a story in a second language: How well do adult learners mine an input text for multiword expressions?

Adult second language (L2) learners have often been found to produce discourse that manifests limited and non-native-like use of multiword expressions. One explanation for this is that adult L2 learners are relatively unsuccessful (in the absence of pedagogic intervention) at transferring multiword expressions from input texts to their own output resources. The present article reports an exploratory study where ESL learners were asked to re-tell a short story which they had read and listened to twice. The learners’ re-tells were subsequently examined for the extent to which they recycled multiword expressions from the original story. To gauge the influence of the input text on these learners’ renderings of the story, a control group was asked to tell the story based exclusively on a series of pictures. The results of the experiment suggest that multiword expressions were recycled from the input text to some extent, but this stayed very marginal in real terms, especially in comparison with the recycling of single words. Moreover, when learners did borrow expressions from the input text, their reproductions were often non-target-like

On the I/O Costs of Some Repair Schemes for Full-Length Reed-Solomon Codes

Network transfer and disk read are the most time consuming operations in the repair process for node failures in erasure-code-based distributed storage systems. Recent developments on Reed-Solomon codes, the most widely used erasure codes in practical storage systems, have shown that efficient repair schemes specifically tailored to these codes can significantly reduce the network bandwidth spent to recover single failures. However, the I/O cost, that is, the number of disk reads performed in these repair schemes remains largely unknown. We take the first step to address this gap in the literature by investigating the I/O costs of some existing repair schemes for full-length Reed-Solomon codes.Comment: Accepted by the ISIT'1

Existing Problems in Improvement of Capital Mobilization in Vietnam Bank for Social Policies

Abstract: In 16 years of Vietnam Bank for Social Policies (VBSP) operation, although mobilized capital has basically met the demand for loans of poor households and other policy beneficiaries, there are still certain limitations. This study is aimed to assess the remaining difficulties in raising capital in VBSP. Research results are surveys of capital mobilization at 8 VBSP’s provinical branches and questionnaire to customers, staff at branches of VBSP across Vietnam. The key problem is mechanism of creating capital source, which has not yet reached stability and long-term; unreasonable capital structure; the gap between capital demand of social security programs assigned by the State to VBSP and actual capital arranged in the annual plan in allocation of capital for socio-economic development plans and state budget estimates

The question of quality

Phuong-Thao T. Trinh, Thu-Hien T. Le, Thu-Trang Vuong, Phuong-Hanh Hoang (2019). Chapter 6. The question of quality. In Quan-Hoang Vuong, Trung Tran (Eds.), The Vietnamese Social Sciences at a Fork in the Road (pp. 121–142). Warsaw, Poland: De Gruyter. DOI:10.2478/9783110686081-011. Online ISBN: 9783110686081 © 2019 Sciendo / De Gruyte

Unveiling the Influence of Empowerment Leadership on Employee Loyalty: the Mediating Role of Employee Trust and Job Satisfaction

This study examines the influence of empowerment leadership on employee loyalty under the mediating roles of employee trust and job satisfaction among medical staff at the private healthcare system. The investigation was conducted by surveying 374 doctors, nurses, and other medical staffs within 19 cities/provinces in the south of Vietnam. The SmartPLS software was used to conduct the partial least squared structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) technique. The findings from the PLS-SEM analysis reveal that empowerment leadership has a direct positive influence on the employee loyalty to the organization of medical staff as well as a positive impact on intermediate variables such as employee trust and employee job satisfaction. On the other hand, the intermediate variables employee trust and employee job satisfaction also have a positive impact on the employee loyalty toward the organization. This research not only contributes to the existing body of knowledge by evaluating the relationship between employee trust, empowerment leadership, job satisfaction, and employee loyalty but also offers valuable recommendations for the management board of private healthcare organizations in southern Vietnam

NĂNG LỰC KINH DOANH CỦA DOANH NHÂN TRÊN ĐỊA BÀN TỈNH THỪA THIÊN HUẾ TRONG TIẾN TRÌNH HỘI NHẬP

Trên cơ sở sử dụng thang đo năng lực kinh doanh của doanh nhân trong nghiên cứu của Man (2001) với một số điều chỉnh nhất định, dựa trên mẫu khảo sát 300 doanh nhân với kỹ thuật phân tích nhân tố khám phá (EFA) và phân tích nhân tố khẳng định (CFA), kết quả cho thấy đội ngũ doanh nhân trên địa bàn nghiên cứu đã đáp ứng tốt một số nhóm năng lực kinh doanh thành phần như: Năng lực nắm bắt cơ hội, năng lực chuyên môn nghiệp vụ, năng lực cam kết, năng lực thiết lập quan hệ, năng lực cá nhân với điểm trung bình đánh giá từ 4,01 trở lên. Trong khi đó, một số nhóm năng lực còn lại như là năng lực học tập, năng lực phân tích - sáng tạo, năng lực định hướng chiến lược, năng lực tổ chức - lãnh đạo có mức độ đáp ứng thấp hơn với điểm trung bình từ 3,47 đến 3,82. Kết quả nghiên cứu này có ý nghĩa quan trọng trong việc gợi mở các định hướng chính sách và giải pháp giúp hoàn thiện hơn năng lực kinh doanh của lực lượng doanh nhân trên địa bàn tỉnh Thừa Thiên Huế trong thời gian tới

On the Effectiveness of Adversarial Samples against Ensemble Learning-based Windows PE Malware Detectors

Recently, there has been a growing focus and interest in applying machine learning (ML) to the field of cybersecurity, particularly in malware detection and prevention. Several research works on malware analysis have been proposed, offering promising results for both academic and practical applications. In these works, the use of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) or Reinforcement Learning (RL) can aid malware creators in crafting metamorphic malware that evades antivirus software. In this study, we propose a mutation system to counteract ensemble learning-based detectors by combining GANs and an RL model, overcoming the limitations of the MalGAN model. Our proposed FeaGAN model is built based on MalGAN by incorporating an RL model called the Deep Q-network anti-malware Engines Attacking Framework (DQEAF). The RL model addresses three key challenges in performing adversarial attacks on Windows Portable Executable malware, including format preservation, executability preservation, and maliciousness preservation. In the FeaGAN model, ensemble learning is utilized to enhance the malware detector's evasion ability, with the generated adversarial patterns. The experimental results demonstrate that 100\% of the selected mutant samples preserve the format of executable files, while certain successes in both executability preservation and maliciousness preservation are achieved, reaching a stable success rate

Technical Efficiency and Total Factor Productivity Changes in Manufacturing Industries: Recent Advancements in Stochastic Frontier Model Approach

This paper aims to evaluate total factor productivity growth (TFPG) of Vietnamese manufacturing industries over the period 2000 – 2019. The stochastic frontier models were applied to decompose the sources of TFPG into technical efficiency changes, technological changes, allocative efficiency, and scale effects. We find that technological changes and the rate of scale component effect have been the major driving force of productivity growth in the 2-digit manufacturing industries as well as total manufacturing industry. In contrast, technical efficiency changes and allocative efficiency had negative effects on TFPG. Furthermore, TFP in the manufacturing sector has declined at an annual rate of -0.062 during the period of 2010 – 2015, then it grows continuously during the period of 2015 - 2019, with a rate of 5.4%. This study suggests that specific guidelines are required to promote productivity in each industrial sectors. For example, Industries with slow technological progress (textile and electrical products) require the introduction of new frontier technology. Government policy should encourage investments that can introduce newly developed production technology. In addition, considering allocative inefficiency, a policy to enhance TFP by improving resource allocation should be pursued, which be done by promoting free markets and lessening government intervention