Developing Culinary Tourism Experiences for Inbound Travellers in Vietnam

In recent years, the growing popularity of Vietnamese cuisine has become an attraction of the country that motivates an increasing number of travellers to visit Vietnam to taste the cuisine. Together with food tasting, there is a wide variety of activities related to food that have the potentiality to attract international visitors. The main goal of this thesis was to provide suggestions and directions to develop culinary tourism experiences for foreign visitors in Vietnam by finding out their perspective towards current gastronomic experiences in the destination country and discovering how satisfied they were when engaging in food-involved activities. The paper also discussed inbound travellers’ expectations for culinary experiences prior to the travels in Vietnam together with post-travel feelings and behaviours. The thesis used mixed methods, in which qualitative method was primarily adopted to answer the research issue. An electronic survey was conducted and posted on different social channels. Simultaneously, interviews were carried out with the support of two experienced stakeholders working in the tourism sector. The findings of the research revealed that most of the inbound tourists were satisfied with their food experiences in Vietnam. Generally, those experiences met their expectations, yet they still lacked some elements to go beyond what they expected. The results also showed that the country had various potentialities and advantageous opportunities to develop this emerging niche market. On the other hand, several existent problems present a threat to its growth. Amid those controversies, development solutions were suggested in an attempt to tackle the problems as well as to improve the experiences of future international visitors in the country

A Regularization of the Backward Problem for Nonlinear Parabolic Equation with Time-Dependent Coefficient

We study the backward problem with time-dependent coefficient which is a severely ill-posed problem. We regularize this problem by combining quasi-boundary value method and quasi-reversibility method and then obtain sharp error estimate between the exact solution and the regularized solution. A numerical experiment is given in order to illustrate our results

A Machine Learning-based Approach to Vietnamese Handwritten Medical Record Recognition

Handwritten text recognition has been an active research topic within computer vision division. Existing deep-learning solutions are practical; however, recognizing Vietnamese handwriting has shown to be a challenge with the presence of extra six distinctive tonal symbols and extra vowels. Vietnam is a developing country with a population of approximately 100 million, but has only focused on digitalization transforms in recent years, and so Vietnam has a significant number of physical documents, that need to be digitized. This digitalization transform is urgent when considering the public health sector, in which medical records are mostly still in hand-written form and still are growing rapidly in number. Digitization would not only help current public health management but also allow preparation and management in future public health emergencies. Enabling the digitalization of old physical records will allow efficient and precise care, especially in emergency units. We proposed a solution to Vietnamese text recognition that is combined into an end-to-end document-digitalization system. We do so by performing segmentation to word-level and then leveraging an artificial neural network consisting of both convolutional neural network (CNN) and a long short-term memory recurrent neural network (LSTM) to propagate the sequence information. From the experiment with the records written by 12 doctors, we have obtained encouraging results of 6.47% and 19.14% of CER and WER respectively

Occurrence and dissipation of the antibiotics sulfamethoxazole, sulfadiazine, trimethoprim, and enrofloxacin in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam

The Mekong Delta in Vietnam has seen a rapid development and intensification of aquaculture in the last decades, with a corresponding widespread use of antibiotics. This study provides information on current antibiotic use in freshwater aquaculture, as well as on resulting antibiotic concentrations in the aquatic environment of the Mekong Delta. Two major production steps, fish hatcheries and mature fish cultivation, were surveyed (50 fish farm interviews) for antibiotic use. Different water sources, including surface water, groundwater and piped water (164 water samples) were systematically screened for antibiotic residues. To better understand antibiotic fate under tropical conditions, the dissipation behavior of selected antibiotics in the aquatic environment was investigated for the first time in mesocosm experiments. None of the investigated antibiotics were detected in groundwater and piped water samples. Surface water, which is still often used for drinking and domestic purposes by local populations, contained median concentrations of 21 ng L-1 sulfamethoxazole (SMX), 4 ng L-1 sulfadiazine (SDZ), 17 ng L-1 trimethoprim (TRIM), and 12 ng L-1 enrofloxacin (ENRO). These concentrations were lower than the predicted no effect concentrations (PNECs) and minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs), suggesting limited antibiotic-related risk to aquatic ecosystems in the monitored systems. The dissipation half-lives of the studied antibiotics ranged from <1 to 44 days, depending on the availability of sunlight and sediment. Among the studied antibiotics TRIM was the most persistent in water systems. TRIM was not susceptible to photodegradation, while the dissipation of ENRO and SDZ was influenced by photolysis. The recorded dissipation models gave good predictions of the occurrence and concentrations of TRIM, ENRO and SDZ in surface water. In summary, the currently measured concentrations of the investigated antibiotics are unlikely to cause immediate risks to the aquatic environment, yet the persistence of these antibiotics is of concern and might lead to chronic exposure of aquatic organisms as well as humans

Self-esteem in the Vietnamese adolescent: cross-cultural construction and validation of a tool

International audienceThe purpose of the present study was to develop a measure of self-esteem for adolescents. This research is now being carried out in the framework of a sound cooperation project between the psychology faculties of the Hanoi University of Social Sciences and Humanities (Vietnam), the Hanoi Institute of Psychology (Vietnam), and the Universities of Toulouse II and Nîmes (France). It respects the specific cultural aspects and has now set as its priority goal the development of measurement tools firmly anchored in the particularities of Vietnamese culture, while benefiting from the advances made in the west in this area. The creation and validation of the Vietnamese Self-Esteem Scale (EVES – Echelle Vietnamienne d'Estime de Soi) is one of the fruits of this cooperation. This study proceeded in two-step method : A cross-cultural adaptation of ETES (French scale) and thus created a new scale: EVES (Vietnamese Self-Esteem Scale) A study to validate this new instrument by an analysis of the factorial structure of the scale and of its internal consistency on an initial population of 264 adolescents, and a test-retest on 161 adolescents. Scale : The Toulouse Self-Esteem Scale (ETES-Oubrayrie et al., 1994), is a self-report measure for older children and adolescents. ETES consists of 60 items, each of which is rated on a 5-point Lickert-type scale. Cross-cultural adaptation : The cross-cultural adaptation includes a literal translation in the Vietnamese language as well as a cultural adaptation to the Vietnamese context. 4 phases : translation by qualified bilingual translators, backward translation, expert committee (child psychiatrist, psychologists and educationalist), testing. Sample : 264 adolescents (mean age = 16.57). The target population was aged from 14 to 19 years, was at high school and lived in the Ha Tay district of Hanoi city. Of the 264 adolescents, 77 were boys. Cross-cultural adaptation and construction of the Vietnamese Self-Esteem Scale (EVES) The cross-cultural adaptation includes a literal translation in the Vietnamese language as well as a cultural adaptation to the Vietnamese context. Conclusion : the Vietnamese Self-Esteem Scale (EVES) is short, simple, and easy to understand for the adolescent study group and is suitable for longitudinal use in adolescent clinical and developmental evaluation or in primary health care programs. Is a instrument to offer to the Vietnamese researcher and the Vietnamese clinician the twofold advantages of being both anchored in Vietnamese culture and of being a facilitator of international scientific exchanges. Its psychometric qualities make it a useful instrument because it evaluates a very important core aspect of the dynamics of the Vietnamese self : the three dimensions (family self, physical self, scholastic self) are indeed acknowledged as being highly important and of very great significance concerning adolescence. This Vietnamese instrument incorporates a richness of perspectives capable of giving an impetus to new studies and investigations that will provide an ever-fertile ground for scientific research

Identify aerodynamic derivatives of the airplane attitude channel using a spiking neural network

The paper proposes a method for identifying aerodynamic coefficient derivatives of aircraft attitude channel using spiking neural network (SNN) and Gauss-Newton algorithm based on data obtained from actual flights. Using SNN combination with Gauss-Newton iterative calculation algorithm allows the identification of aerodynamic coefficient derivatives in a nonlinear model for aerodynamic parameters with higher accuracy and faster calculation time. The paper proposes an algorithm to train the SNN multi-layer network by Normalized Spiking Error Back Propagation (NSEBP), in which, in the forward propagation period, the time of output spikes is calculating by solving quadratic equations instead of detection by traditional methods. The phase of propagation of errors backward uses the step-by-step calculation instead of the conventional gradient calculation method. The identification results are compared with the results when using the RBN network to prove the algorithm efficienc