Vietnam's strategic trajectory: from internal development to external engagement

This paper analyses Vietnam’s strategic trajectory over the past two decades, with an emphasis on its relations with China and the US, its policies on the South China Sea dispute, and the implications for regional players. The paper provides an overview of the rationales and mechanisms of Vietnam’s strategic policymaking. It then goes on to examine Vietnam’s relationships with China and the US, and examine the country’s position on the South China Sea dispute, in general as well as in relation to growing Chinese assertiveness. Finally the paper discusses the implications of Vietnam’s strategic policy for the international community in general and Australia in particular

A research on the performance of down-flow hanging sponge (DHS) reactor treating domestic wastewater

The aim of this study was to evaluate the performance of a down-flow hanging sponge (DHS) system in treating domestic wastewater. A pilot-scale of DHS system with a capacity of 60 L was designed and fabricated from polyvinyl chloride (PVC). The dimensions of DHS system are 1.5 m in height and square surface with 0.2 m in width, consists of three identical segments connected vertically in series. Each segment was filled by polyurethane sphere containing sponge. The total area of sponge and polyurethane sphere was 3,300 m2 m-3, density at 150 kg m-3, void ratio at 90%. DHS system was operated at ambient temperature within 82 days and stepwise increased of organic f rate from 0.5 to 1 and 1.5 kg COD m-3 d-1. The results showed that, this system performed well throughout the operational period and achieve the maximum removal of COD, BOD5, NH4+-N, and TN as 80%, 83%, 65% and 60%. The effluent of wastewater from DHS system achieved the requirement for National technical regulation on domestic wastewater of Vietnam type B QCVN 14:2008/BTNMT. In conclusion, the performance of DHS system indicated a high potential for application in removing organic matter and converting nitrogen ammonia to nitrogen nitrate, however it did not perform well for the removal of total nitrogen, it is necessary to study further by providing an anoxic zone in the system to enhance the treatment of nutrient in wastewater

Isothermal models of Chromium (VI) adsorption by using Fe3O4 nanoparticles

The ferromagnetic Fe3O4 nanoparticles with the average particle size of about 10 nm were used to adsorb chromium (VI) in aqueous solution. The equilibrium of Cr(VI) adsorption can be achieved at the pH value of 2.5, in the contact time of 120 minutes. The mechanisms of Cr(VI) adsorption were evaluated by 4 isothermal adsorption models Langmuir, Freundlich, Redlich-Peterson, and Temkin. The results showed that all four models are satisfied; especially, Redlich-Peterson is the most suitable model to describe the adsorption kinetic of Cr(VI) on ferromagnetic Fe3O4 nanoparticles

Building a Large Syntactically-Annotated Corpus of Vietnamese

Held in conjunction with ACL-IJCNLP 2009International audienceTreebank is an important resource for both research and application of natural language processing. For Vietnamese, we still lack such kind of corpora. This paper presents up-to-date results of a project for Vietnamese treebank construction. Since Vietnamese is an isolating language and has no word delimiter, there are many ambiguities in sentence analysis. We systematically applied a lot of linguistic techniques to handle such ambiguities. Annotators are supported by automatic labeling tools and a tree-editor tool. Raw texts are extracted from Tuoi Tre (Youth), an online Vietnamese daily newspaper. The current annotation agreement is around 90 percent

Evaluation of the Luminex xTAG Respiratory Viral Panel FAST v2 assay for detection of multiple respiratory viral pathogens in nasal and throat swabs in Vietnam.

BACKGROUND: Acute respiratory infections (ARI) are among the leading causes of hospitalization in children ≤5 years old. Rapid diagnostics of viral pathogens is essential to avoid unnecessary antibiotic treatment, thereby slowing down antibiotic-resistance. We evaluated the diagnostic performance of the Luminex xTAG Respiratory Viral Panel FAST v2 against viral specific PCR as reference assays for ARI in Vietnam. METHODS: Four hundred and forty two nose and throat swabs were collected in viral transport medium, and were tested with Luminex xTAG Respiratory Viral Panel FAST v2. Multiplex RT-PCR and single RT-PCR were used as references.    Results: Overall, viral pathogens were detected in a total count of 270/294 (91.8%, 95% CI 88.1-94.7) by the Luminex among reference assays, whilst 112/6336 (1.8%, 95% CI, 1.4-2.1) of pathogens were detected by the Luminex, but not by reference assays. Frequency of pathogens detected by Luminex and reference assays was 379 and 292, respectively. The diagnostic yield was 66.7% (295/442, 95%CI 62.1-71.1%) for the Luminex assay and 54.1% (239/442, 95% CI, 49.3-58.8%) for reference assays. The Luminex kit had higher yields for all viruses except influenza B virus, respiratory syncytial virus, and human bocavirus. High agreements between both methods [mean (range): 0.91 (0.83-1.00)] were found for 10/15 viral agents. CONCLUSIONS: The Luminex assay is a high throughput multiplex platform for rapid detection of common viral pathogens causing ARI. Although the current high cost may prevent Luminex assays from being widely used, especially in limited resource settings where ARI are felt most, its introduction in clinical diagnostics may help reduce unnecessary use of antibiotic prescription

31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival

Singapore - Vietnam Strategic Partnership: New Initiatives Needed

The Singapore-Vietnam strategic partnership has strong foundations, but the two countries need to look for bolder and more substantive measures to further deepen their ties. In defence cooperation, anti-piracy joint patrols and bilateral training arrangements are among initiatives to be considered