Sex Trafficking: Social Constructions and Stereotypes of Recovery in Viet Nam

The research attempts to reveal how labels of victimization of trafficked returnees can actually harm socialization efforts of reintegration. Although men are trafficked for sexual purposes as well, the study will focus only on the acclimization of women in An Giang province, on the border of Cambodia. The paper discusses the stories of three returnees and analyzes their social reintegration through social events such as cooking and through informal conversations. This is turn, is compared to other populations that may be susceptible to trafficking, but have not yet been. All work and research is based on the participant observation form of ethnographic writing. This work has the ultimate aim of bringing a humanistic emphasis to stories of sex trafficking, ultimately to provide a balance against the sensationalistic journalistic accounts of returnees

Thoroughly examining the influence of managerial accounting on organizational performance with Heckman two-step technique

The implementation of managerial accounting practices in business has been broadly recognized as a determinant of organizational performance. Earlier studies have not taken sample selection bias problem into consideration when examining this relationship. The current work scrutinizes the relation from managerial accounting adoption to organizational performance by employing Heckman two-step technique. The data was collected from 302 publicly listed enetrprises in Vietnam’s main Stock Exchanges. The findings suggest there exists sample selection bias in the causal link from the implementation of managerial accounting practices to organizational performance. The current research is helpful to managerial accounting scholars as well as business executives, in shedding light on the association between managerial accounting practices and organizational performance. The findings could help directors in their business decisions on adopting managerial accounting practices which should correspond to their organizational characteristics and business environment, where they can obtain the best organizational performance

State–Society Interaction in Vietnam : The Everyday Dialogue of Local Irrigation Management in the Mekong Delta

This anthropological research on field drainage and canal dredging in Vietnam aims to understand local arrangements for irrigation practices and how they are shaped and negotiated by stakeholders. As well, a research aim is to redefine the Vietnamese state’s position in the interactions and negotiations concerning these arrangements at the local level. Empirical data are subjected to abductive analysis and conceptualised within the institution process and the three dimensions of state power. In this ethnographic case study observation, semi-structured interviews, and random, purposive sampling are employed, while the data are reduced and analysed by open, axial and selective coding. The Mekong Delta presents a diverse landscape divided into 6 zones which differ from each other and have internally diverse natural conditions, infrastructure and agricultural patterns. Differences also appear among areas in the same zone, contributing to the great diversity of the Delta. A review of hydraulic interventions over different periods demonstrates that the complex history of human migration, colonisation and nation building in the Mekong Delta over 2,000 years has been a work in progress, with new developments built on top of older ones and continuity maintained as past investments and innovations remain fully or partly visible in the landscape. I argue that the transformation of agriculture and rural livelihoods in the Delta has been a process in which practices, rules and norms have been formed, negotiated and adapted through the interactions of interventions, natural conditions (i.e. water, rain, flood), the existing infrastructure (i.e. canal networks, pumps, dredges) and social arrangements (i.e. the open society of the South). Thus, the history of the making of the Delta’s water landscape is an institutional process that connects past and present, old and new, traditional or existing and imported arrangements. In the contemporary Mekong Delta, the local governance of agriculture and irrigation management is the joint work of state agencies, with their de-concentrated and decentralised structure, and other stakeholders, including semi-state agencies, farmer organisations and farmers. Complex interdependence and inter-influence exist amongst the stakeholders and, under natural, physical and socio-economic changes, drive the evolution of state management and the characteristics of other actors over time. While the decentralised state structure combined with local centralisation illustrates the persistent structural barriers to sharing power and benefits, the interaction between the state and various actors creates local dynamics which can both pose difficulties to state control and complement the inconsistent, uncertain state structure, as illustrated in budget management for canal dredging. The involvement of local movers is simply part of the Vietnamese structure and the negotiation and co-adaptation processes through which institutions and arrangements are introduced, evaluated and legitimated. Local involvement does not necessarily indicate weakness in the state’s command-and-control management, nor does it prove local success in leveraging political power through resistance. Empirical accounts of field drainage and canal dredging at the commune and hamlet levels support the following arguments: - Although the Vietnamese hierarchical structure imitates that of a so-called authoritarian regime, the dense structure of agencies from the central level to the hamlet level that employs a top-down system of policy and mandates is not necessarily inflexible. Rather, based on empirical evidences from the cases of field drainage and canal dredging, this research illustrates the full, complex picture of the relations or interaction and negotiation between the government and other actors in the Mekong Delta in which a hierarchical state management structure and the space of local flexibility co-exist. Today, the state, in finding and maintaining a balance between its retreat from certain responsibilities and its need to be present and gain legitimacy, decides the threshold at which it no longer tolerates local deviation. - This research moves beyond the local negotiation of institutions and the bargaining of individual decision-making behaviour to argue that irrigation management at the local level is guided by the co-evolution or mutual learning between state and local actors, including local cadres. From this process of interaction, local governance officially and unofficially refines and decides the current practices of local irrigation management. While exploring the classic state–society theme, I approach the state as part of society. Building on the concept of the of state–in–society and the blurred boundaries between formal and informal in Vietnam, as contended by such scholars as Kerkvliet (2001), Gainsborough (2010), Reis (2010), Heinrich Böll Foundation (2005), and Hicks (2005), this research on the interaction between the state and local actors at the bureaucratic–informal interface reveals the nature of the everyday dialogue from which institutions are negotiated in the process of forming bricolage. The negotiation process is guided by the bargaining of individual behaviour. - Within this dialogue, the state is not the primary driver but is a strong party in bargaining favourable institutional conditions. Considering the present state’s success in penetrating social processes, both consciously and unconsciously, through the application of infrastructure and discursive power (legislation and mobilisation), the local irrigation case of the Mekong Delta demonstrates the nature of local responses, or the so-called local resistances, which are far from either rebellion or silent fence-breaking. In the competitive negotiation to make one’s own regulations and targets accepted by others, the state and other actors have evolved into a learning process, as illustrated in their overlapping interests and agreement on flexibility and deviation in certain places. That process of learning or negotiation has shaped the institutional bricolage from the various rules and norms that are valued and accepted differently by the state, local state cadres, semi-state actors and farmers

Role of a low glycemic index diet in the treatment of acne vulgaris

Objective: To determine if a low glycemic diet can be used as an effective treatment for acne. Methods: PubMed database and Scopus database were both searched using the terms “low glycemic”, “diet”, and “acne” and filtered to include only randomized control trials, cross sectional studies, and meta-analyses. Results: Our search of the literature resulted in the selection of two randomized control trials and one cross sectional study. The cut off for statistical significance was p \u3c 0.05. Smith et al. showed that total acne lesion counts decreased more in the low glycemic load group (p = 0.03)1. Reynolds et al. did not show a significant decrease in acne score with a low glycemic load diet (p=0.244)2. Cerman et al. found acne severity is positively correlated with glycemic load and glycemic index (p=0.022).3 Conclusion: In conclusion two out of the three studies reached significance. Further research must be conducted in order to isolate a low glycemic diet as the reason for improvement of acne versus confounding factors such as weight loss, insulin resistance, and other biochemical parameters

A Deep Learning Model for Splicing Image Detection

With the advancement of digital technology, manipulating images has become relatively easy through many photo editing techniques. One of the techniques is the splicing image method, which crops parts of images and puts them into another image creating a new composite image. The image splicing detection system is soon regarded as an exciting topic for many researchers to solve the problems of forgery images on the Internet, especially in social networks. ResNet-50 and VGG-16 are powerful architectures of convolutional neural networks, but they reveal many weaknesses when operating on low-end computers. The ultimate goal of this research is to create a model for image splicing detection working well in limited memory machines. The study proposes the model, which is the improvement of VGG-16 applying residual network (ResNet). As a result, the proposed model achieves a test accuracy of 92.5% while the ResNet-50 gives an accuracy of 85.6% after 20 epochs of training 9,319 images from the CASIA v2.0 dataset, which are used for forgery classification. The result proves the efficiency of the proposed model for image splicing detection, especially when working on low-end computers

２つの異型ヒストンTH2AとTH2BはヒトiPS細胞の作製を促進する

筑波大学 (University of Tsukuba)201

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

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SERUM IRON AND CHARACTERISTICS SOCIAL POPULATION IN PATIENTS WITH HELICOBACTER PYLORI INFECTION

The objective of the study is to investigate the value of serum iron index in patients infected with Helicobacter pylori and find out the correlation between serum iron index and sociodemographic characteristics in patients infected with Helicobacter pylori at faculty 2 of University Medical Center Ho Chi Minh City. The study used CLO and HP CIM tests to determine the Helicobacter pylori infection status, and also collected the serum/plasma of the patient after the HP CIM test to investigate the serum iron index. The Stata 14.0 software was used to manage and analyse data, the ANOVA test was used to test for 3 means or more, and the Chi-squared test was used to test the difference in proportions between groups. The results showed that the serum iron concentration in the patient group was 59,4±42,1 mg/dL lower than the serum iron value in the control group, which was 86,1±32,0 mg/dL (p < 0,001). The results also indicated that the serum iron value in patients infected with Helicobacter pylori decreased as compared to patients without infection, yet the study also found a relationship between age group and geographical factors. This difference is statistically significant with p < 0,001, p = 0,001, p = 0,04 and p = 0,001