The Role of Social Media in Policy Formulation Improvement in California

How could staff members of California Assembly members use social media to improve policy formulation? The purpose of this study is to assess the role that social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook could play in the formulation and evaluation of policies in the state of California, given the increasing application of big data in decision making in the private sector. This study further evaluated how emerging technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence could be used to determine the attitudes and perceptions of the citizens of California, specifically on policy issues, and analyze how these technologies could be used by California as a means of gaining useful insights, gauging sentiments and collecting data, prior to formulating and evaluating laws and policies

Efficient Human Vision Inspired Action Recognition using Adaptive Spatiotemporal Sampling

Adaptive sampling that exploits the spatiotemporal redundancy in videos is critical for always-on action recognition on wearable devices with limited computing and battery resources. The commonly used fixed sampling strategy is not context-aware and may under-sample the visual content, and thus adversely impacts both computation efficiency and accuracy. Inspired by the concepts of foveal vision and pre-attentive processing from the human visual perception mechanism, we introduce a novel adaptive spatiotemporal sampling scheme for efficient action recognition. Our system pre-scans the global scene context at low-resolution and decides to skip or request high-resolution features at salient regions for further processing. We validate the system on EPIC-KITCHENS and UCF-101 datasets for action recognition, and show that our proposed approach can greatly speed up inference with a tolerable loss of accuracy compared with those from state-of-the-art baselines. Source code is available in https://github.com/knmac/adaptive_spatiotemporal

Modeling of parallel power MOSFETs in steady-state

In high-power applications, multiple power MOSFETs are connected in parallel and treated as a single switch in order to handle much larger total currents. In this paper, a parallel power MOSFETs model from the turnoff state until they reach their steady state is introduced. The model represents the relationship between each power MOSFET's gate voltage and the current distribution among them. The study's key purpose is to use the model for dealing with the asymmetry in sharing current and power loss between these semiconductor devices during the steady state region.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, The 2023 INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON ADVANCED ENGINEERING (ISAE2023

The impact of recentralization reform on corruption: evidence from a quasi-natural experiment

How does government recentralization reform affect corruption? We utilize the pilot recentralization reform that transforms the legislative function, power, and responsibility of the district-level authorities to the higher level of the government organ in Vietnam as a quasi-natural experiment to address the aforementioned question. We find strong evidence that recentralization reform leads to lower corruption. The result illustrates that, among the firms which have the highest probability of making a bribe payment, those incorporated in jurisdictions experiencing the recentralization reform are 4.3% less likely to pay a bribe. In addition, the perception that bribery is a common and necessary practice is also significantly lowered in the post-recentralization period. We further show that the impact of recentralization is stronger for firms which lack a political connection. Overall, these results shed light on the real impact of the government recentralization reform and also the determinants of corruption, thereby providing important policy implications for policymakers to create a more conducive business environment

Impacts of fallow conditions, compost and silicate fertilizer on soil nematode community in salt–affected paddy rice fields in acid sulfate and alluvial soils in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam

© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)Avoidance of intensive rice cultivation (IRC) and soil amendments are potential practices to enhance soil properties. There is only limited information on the effects of reduced IRC and its mixture with compost or silicate fertilizer (Si) on the soil nematode community in salt–affected soils. This study aimed to assess the shifts of soil nematode community by reducing a rice crop from triple rice system (RRR) to a double rice system and mixed with compost or Si in paddy fields in acid sulfate soil (ASS) and alluvial soil (AL) in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. Field experiments were designed with four treatments in four replicates, including RRR and a proposed system of double–rice followed by a fallow (FRR) and with 3 Mg ha–1 crop−1 compost or 100 kg ha–1 crop−1 Si. Soils were collected at harvest after the 2 year experiment, reflecting the fifth and third consecutive rice crop in RRR and FRR system, respectively. Results showed that reduced IRC gave a significant reduction in abundance of plant–parasitic nematodes (PPN), dominated by Hirschmanniella and increased abundance bacterivorous nematodes when mixed to compost and silicate fertilizer in ASS. In addition, reduced IRC increased nematode biodiversity Hill’s indices and reduced herbivorous footprint in ASS. Proposed system having compost or Si had strongly increased in bacterivorous and omnivorous footprints. Particularly, reduced IRC mixture with Si increased abundance of Rhabdolaimus, Mesodorylaimus and Aquatides, metabolic footprints (structure footprint, bacterivorous, omnivorous and predator) and diversity Hill’s N1 index in ASS. Our results highlighted that reduced IRC was a beneficial practice for decreasing abundance of PPN in salt-affected soils and increasing abundance of FLN in ASS. IRC mixture with compost or Si had potential in structuring the nematode communities with increasing biodiversity, trophic structure, and metabolic footprintsPeer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the stressful relationship between parents and children

The stressful relationship between children and parents is the pain both go through when they find themselves unable to cope as a parent or a child. In order to find out the status, causes, and impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and suggest some solutions to reduce stress between parents and children, we surveyed the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on stressful relationships between parents and children at high school age in Da Nang city. The findings of a survey conducted on 550 randomly selected parents and 550 high school students using the Perceived Stress Scale reveal a high rate of tension between parents and their children, particularly up to 51.1% and 38.5%, respectively. In reality, many factors are affecting the stressful relationship between parents and their children at this age, in which psychological fear about health; social distancing policy; closed schools; students staying at home 24 hours a day and learning online; the disruption in children's daily routine; excessive use of electronic devices are major causes of stress in the relationship between parents and their children. From this practice, our research team has proposed such solutions as participating in creative activities and consulting the handbook instructing parents' behaviour rules toward children and vice versa, designing extra-curricular activities, and organizing training courses on life values for both parents and children to increase happiness and reduce stress in the parent-child relationship