Besieged from all sides: impediments to science journalism in a developing country and their global implications

Despite high expectations of their normative roles in development processes, Vietnamese science journalists interviewed for this research find it extremely hard to enact such roles, facing an uphill battle to establish science as a legitimate news beat. This results from a diverse set of internal impediments (particularly a science-unfriendly news culture and low ethical standards) and external obstacles, including political control and low cooperation of local scientists. Placing these findings in the wider context, we demonstrate that Vietnam illuminates many troublesome characteristics of science journalism in the Global South and make some recommendations for improving the status quo

VBD-MT Chinese-Vietnamese Translation Systems for VLSP 2022

We present our systems participated in the VLSP 2022 machine translation shared task. In the shared task this year, we participated in both translation tasks, i.e., Chinese-Vietnamese and Vietnamese-Chinese translations. We build our systems based on the neural-based Transformer model with the powerful multilingual denoising pre-trained model mBART. The systems are enhanced by a sampling method for backtranslation, which leverage large scale available monolingual data. Additionally, several other methods are applied to improve the translation quality including ensembling and postprocessing. We achieve 38.9 BLEU on ChineseVietnamese and 38.0 BLEU on VietnameseChinese on the public test sets, which outperform several strong baselines

Possibility of reservoir-triggered earthquake occurrence in the Huoi Quang and Ban Chat hydropower dam area

The possibility of reservoir-triggered earthquake occurrence in the Huoi Quang and Ban Chat hydropower dam area has been assessed based on studying and analyzing the relationships between the reservoir-triggered earthquake occurrence and the following factors: (1) the types of rocks underlying the reservoir; (2) the oscillating reservoir loads on faults in the reservoir area; (3) the incremental stress caused by reservoir loads; (4) the slip tendency of faults in the reservoir area; and (5) the Coulomb stress change of faults in the reservoir area. The results show that these factors have interactive effects and simultaneously contribute to the favorable conditions for reservoir-triggered earthquake occurrence. The Huoi Quang and Ban Chat hydropower reservoirs are located in the area of moderate seismicity; however, with the favorable conditions due to these five factors, reservoir-triggered earthquakes can possibly occur. If reservoir-triggered earthquakes occur, they will be concentrated around the Ban Chat hydropower dam area within a radius of 11 - 12 km and at a depth of about 6 ± 1 km

TÀI NGUYÊN VỊ THẾ ĐẢO CỒN CỎ

Being a basaltic volcano, Con Co island is an isometric hill 2.3 km2 wide and 63 m high, located far 24 km from the mainland, and guards the entrance to the Gulf of Tonkin. It is isolated, but unique in location, and relatively closed to mainland. Despite its small size, the characteristics of morphology and spatial structures, geological composition, area, height, ecological landscape, dynamics and stability of the island... create great values of geo-natural position resources and favorable environment for island residents. Regarding geo - economic position resources, the island is a district under the Quang Tri province, a priority location for development of the country’s marine and island economy, and the economic centre at the entrance of the Gulf of Tonkin. This is also a convenient site for the development of marine economic sectors such as fishery, natural conservation, services - tourism and some others. In terms of geo-political position resources, the island has tremendous advantages for the sovereignty, sovereign rights and national interests at sea. As an outpost at the highly sensitive geo-political area, the Con Co island has the great value of defense, as a solid military base in the entrance of the Gulf of Tonkin and the most important link in the line of defense from coastal islands in the North Centre. It possesses many valuable cultural heritages, especially the heroic relics during the war against the US.Đảo Cồn Cỏ nguồn gốc núi lửa bazan, dạng đồi đẳng thước rộng 2,3 km2, cao 63 m, nằm cách xa bờ 24 km. Đảo có vị trí lẻ loi ở cửa vịnh Bắc Bộ và khá gần bờ Việt Nam. Mặc dù diện tích đảo nhỏ, nhưng các đặc điểm về hình thể và cấu trúc không gian, cấu tạo địa chất; diện tích, độ cao và cảnh quan sinh thái; động lực và tính ổn định... đã tạo ra giá trị lớn cho đảo về tài nguyên địa - tự nhiên và môi trường sinh cư thuận lợi cho các loài sinh vật và con người. Về giá trị vị thế địa - kinh tế, Cồn Cỏ thuộc đơn vị hành chính cấp huyện thuộc tỉnh Quảng Trị, là vị trí ưu tiên đối với phát triển kinh tế biển - đảo của đất nước; là vị trí trung tâm của không gian kinh tế khu cửa vịnh Bắc Bộ. Đây là một địa bàn thuận lợi cho phát triển các lĩnh vực kinh tế biển như thủy sản, bảo tồn biển, dịch vụ - du lịch cùng với các loại hình dịch vụ khác. Về giá trị vị thế địa - chính trị, đảo Cồn Cỏ có giá trị to lớn đối với việc bảo vệ các quyền và lợi ích quốc gia của Việt Nam trên biển. Là đảo tiền tiêu nằm trong vùng địa - chính trị nhạy cảm cao, đảo có giá trị lớn về phòng thủ, là một cứ điểm quân sự vững chắc ở vùng cửa vịnh Bắc Bộ và mắt xích quan trọng nhất trong phòng tuyến các đảo ven bờ Bắc Trung Bộ. Cồn Cỏ có các giá trị di sản văn hoá biển đảo, đặc biệt là những chiến tích anh hùng trong thời chiến tranh chống Mỹ

Chemical profiles and antibacterial activity of acetone extract of two Curcuma species from Vietnam

Curcuma thorelii Gagnep. and Curcuma cotuana Luu, Škorni?k. & H.?.Tr?n are the rare species only found in Southeast Asia. The present study was the first to explore the chemical compositions and antibacterial effects of the whole plant acetone extracts of these 2 species. Altogether 41 and 31 compounds have been identified in C. thorelii and C. cotuana extracts by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry. Accordingly, the C. thorelii extract contained (E)-labda-8(17),12-diene-15,16-dial (33.37%), vitamin E (12.33%), phytol (9.83%) as the major compounds while C. cotuana extract contained predominantly (E)-labda-8(17),12-diene-15,16-dial (14.58%), n-hexadecanoic acid (10.96%), 3,7,11,15-tetramethylhexadec-2-en-1-yl acetate (8.13%), ?-sitosterol (7.97%). In addition, results from disc diffusion assay have shown that C. thorelii acetone extract had inhibitory effects on 5 out of 10 pathogenic bacterial strains such as Bacillus cereus (ATCC 11778), Listeria monocytogenes (ATCC 19111), Staphylococcus aureus (ATCC 25923), S. aureus (ATCC 29213) and S. saprophyticus (BAA750) while C. cotuana acetone extract was found to be effective only against B. cereus. The obtained results showed that the acetone extracts of C. thorelii and C. cotuana possessed several valuable bioactive compounds as well as promising antibacterial activity, which place a good foundation for future pharmaceutical product development

Factors Affecting Students’ Intention to Use Massive Open Online Courses

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) attract many researchers because of their massiveness, openness, machine and peer assessment, yet there are still many questions to be answered. This study was conducted at FPT University in Can Tho during the 2020-2021 academic year using the quantitative approach. A purposeful sampling technique was used to select 226 participants who partook at least one MOOC on the Coursera platform. The questionnaire consists of 18 items adapted from Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) developed by Davis (1989), and Learning Strategies, by Marton and Säljö (1976). The findings showed that perceived ease of use (PEOU), and perceived usefulness (PU) have a great impact on students’ intention to use MOOCs in the future, PU, however, has a stronger and more direct correlation to the acceptability of MOOCs. Furthermore, surface learning strategy has a negative effect on the intention to enroll in MOOCs while deep learning strategy was not significantly correlated with intended future use of MOOCs. More importantly, a valuable finding was that surface learning strategy was in inverse proportion to courses variable and it can be lessened. Our findings are expected to offer a multi-dimensional view for students, especially those in the current context as well as MOOCs developers in order to design curricula

Design of a fast cassette autoclaves for medical devices

Ensuring patient safety in healthcare necessitates the sterilization of medical devices. However, traditional autoclaves are impractical for certain medical settings due to their size, bulkiness, and time-consuming nature. To address this, a compact and portable alternative called a cassette autoclave was developed. This paper presents the design and manufacturing process of a high-speed cassette autoclave for medical devices. The autoclave features small dimensions, lightweight construction, and user-friendly operation. It achieves remarkable speed, sterilizing devices in approximately 3.5 minutes. Made of durable stainless steel, it includes a digital control panel for seamless management. Extensive testing and validation ensure compliance with sterilization standards. The results highlight the autoclave's effectiveness and safety, making a significant contribution to medical device sterilization

TextANIMAR: Text-based 3D Animal Fine-Grained Retrieval

3D object retrieval is an important yet challenging task, which has drawn more and more attention in recent years. While existing approaches have made strides in addressing this issue, they are often limited to restricted settings such as image and sketch queries, which are often unfriendly interactions for common users. In order to overcome these limitations, this paper presents a novel SHREC challenge track focusing on text-based fine-grained retrieval of 3D animal models. Unlike previous SHREC challenge tracks, the proposed task is considerably more challenging, requiring participants to develop innovative approaches to tackle the problem of text-based retrieval. Despite the increased difficulty, we believe that this task has the potential to drive useful applications in practice and facilitate more intuitive interactions with 3D objects. Five groups participated in our competition, submitting a total of 114 runs. While the results obtained in our competition are satisfactory, we note that the challenges presented by this task are far from being fully solved. As such, we provide insights into potential areas for future research and improvements. We believe that we can help push the boundaries of 3D object retrieval and facilitate more user-friendly interactions via vision-language technologies.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2304.0573

Mapping for engagement: setting up a community based participatory research project to reach underserved communities at risk for Hepatitis C in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Background: Approximately 1. 07 million people in Vietnam are infected with hepatitis C virus (HCV). To address this epidemic, the South East Asian Research Collaborative in Hepatitis (SEARCH) launched a 600-patient cohort study and two clinical trials, both investigating shortened treatment strategies for chronic HCV infection with direct-acting antiviral drugs. We conducted ethnographic research with a subset of trial participants and found that the majority were aware of HCV infection and its implications and were motivated to seek treatment. However, people who inject drugs (PWID), and other groups at risk for HCV were under-represented, although injecting drug use is associated with high rates of HCV. Material and Methods: We designed a community-based participatory research (CBPR) study to engage in dialogues surrounding HCV and other community-prioritized health issues with underserved groups at risk for HCV in Ho Chi Minh City. The project consists of three phases: situation analysis, CBPR implementation, and dissemination. In this paper, we describe the results of the first phase (i.e., the situation analysis) in which we conducted desk research and organized stakeholder mapping meetings with representatives from local non-government and community-based organizations where we used participatory research methods to identify and analyze key stakeholders working with underserved populations. Results: Twenty six institutions or groups working with the key underserved populations were identified. Insights about the challenges and dynamics of underserved communities were also gathered. Two working groups made up of representatives from the NGO and CBO level were formed. Discussion: Using the information provided by local key stakeholders to shape the project has helped us to build solid relationships, give the groups a sense of ownership from the early stages, and made the project more context specific. These steps are not only important preliminary steps for participatory studies but also for other research that takes place within the communities