Tax relief for Research and Development is a rare example of an innovation policy that actually works

UK business R&D would be 10 percent lower in the absence of tax breaks, write Kieu-Trang Nguyen and John Van Reene

Silvicultural Characteristics Of Dipterocarpus Rensus In Thai Nguyen Province, Vietnam

Dipterocarpus rensus, a long-exploited species in Thai Nguyen Province, Vietnam, is currently documented with only 244 individuals observed across scattered locations within strictly protected natural forests. This study aimed to elucidate the distribution and silvicultural characteristics of D. rensus in Thai Nguyen, providing essential insights for the conservation and sustainable development of its genetic resources. Our findings underscore a sparse population of D. rensus in Thai Nguyen, primarily concentrated within National Parks and Conservation Areas. The species composition formula for the natural distribution of D. rensus encompasses diverse tree species, including Broussonetia papyrifera, Allospondias lakonensis Pierre, Choerospondias axillaris, Fagus sylvatica, Machilus velutina Champ, Canarium album, Engelhardtia chrysolepis, Peltophorum dasyrhachis, Alangium chinense, Vatica odorata, Duabanga grandiflora, Sargentodoxa cuneata, Amesiodendron chinense, and Nephelium chryseum. The regenerative seedling composition is dominated by pioneer, fast-growing species such as Broussonetia papyrifera, Allospondias lakonensis Pierre, Fagus sylvatica, Machilus velutina Champ, Zenia insignis, Engelhardtia chrysolepis, Archidendron clypearia, Pterospermum acerifolium Willd, Bischofia javanica, Vatica odorata, Duabanga grandiflora, Sargentodoxa cuneata, Broussonetia papyrifera, Aesculus assamica, and Amesiodendron chinense. The study highlights the poor regeneration ability of D. rensus, emphasizing the necessity for research on cultivation techniques to effectively conserve and harness the genetic resources of this valuable species

From the City Inside the Red River (Book Review)

Book review by Thomas D. Curran. Nguyen, Dinh-hoa. From the City Inside the Red River: A Cultural Memoir of Mid-Century Vietnam. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 1999. ISBN 0-7864-0498-1

International Pharmacy Student Serves Refugees

ND Nguyen, a second-year pharmacy student from Vietnam, will lead a medical mission trip for Cedarville University Global Outreach to serve the refugee population in Clarkston, Georgia, during spring break 2022

New Voices at the Civic Table: Facilitating Personal and Social Change

· This article describes six pilot initiatives of the Alliance for Children and Families -- New Voices at the Civic Table (New Voices), a philanthropy-funded effort to challenge human service organizations to integrate civic engagement as a permanent part of their infrastructure. · All six New Voices models included common elements: leadership training, civic education, experiential learning, participatory decision-making, networking, and reflective evaluation. · Each also reflected one of four primary variations to civic engagement based on their community needs and demands: self-efficacy, constituent involvement, mobilizing, and organizing. · Results demonstrate that civic engagement in human services not only produces a means for promoting social change but also changes the way participants see themselves in the community

Constraining the Size Growth of the Task Space with Socially Guided Intrinsic Motivation using Demonstrations

This paper presents an algorithm for learning a highly redundant inverse model in continuous and non-preset environments. Our Socially Guided Intrinsic Motivation by Demonstrations (SGIM-D) algorithm combines the advantages of both social learning and intrinsic motivation, to specialise in a wide range of skills, while lessening its dependence on the teacher. SGIM-D is evaluated on a fishing skill learning experiment.Comment: JCAI Workshop on Agents Learning Interactively from Human Teachers (ALIHT), Barcelona : Spain (2011