India-China strategic competition in the Indian Ocean

The XXI is considered by major countries in the Asia-Pacific region as ‘the century of sea and ocean' and is accompanied by fierce competition among the nations to gain interest in the sea regions. On the basis that previously only considered the competition for military objectives, geostrategic bases and traffic channels through the straits, nowadays, countries worldwide have stepped up the competition for economic interests and marine resources. The development of military power and the competitive activities for resources at sea show clear the tendency to use the sea to contain the continent. In that context, the Indian Ocean, as the world's third largest ocean, has an important geographic location and rich and diverse natural resources; the arterial sea route is gradually becoming the center of new world geopolitics and an important area in the strategic competition between two 'Asian giants' - India and China. The competition between these countries in the Indian Ocean is growing and profoundly impacts the region's stability and security. This article focuses on the position and important role of the Indian Ocean in the policies of India and China, the fierce competition between the two countries in nearly two decades of the XXI century

The impact of corruption on the performance of newly established enterprises : empirical evidence from a transition economy

This paper investigates the effects of corruption on the performance of newly established enterprises. Using longitudinal data from enterprise surveys containing virtually all firms over the period from 2011 to 2015 in Vietnam, we find that corruption deteriorates firm financial performance, and subsequently exposes them to a greater failure probability. We further find that, while corruption imposes more harmful effects on the performance and survival of private domestic firms, it exerts no significant impact on state-owned firms. On the other hand, foreign firms are also able to take advantage of corruption to enhance their performance and survivability. In addition, our results suggest that the more mature firms are better at dealing with corruption and can eventually take advantage of it to enhance their performance. The results are robust after various model specifications as well as alternative classifications of newly established firms.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

The role of orographic effects on occurrence of the heavy rainfall event over Central Vietnam in November 1999

In this study, the WRF model is used to investigate the role of Central Vietnam terrain on occurrence of the heavy rainfall event in November 1999 over Central Vietnam. Two model experiments with and without terrain were performed to examine the orographic blocking effects during the event. In the terrain experiment, the results from a three-day simulation show that the model reasonably well captures northeast monsoon circulation, tropical cyclones and the occurrence of heavy rainfall in Central Vietnam. The topography causes a high pressure anomaly intensifying northeast monsoon. When the terrain is removed, the three-day accumulated rainfall decreases approximately 75% in comparison with that in the terrain experiment. The terrain blocking and lifting effects in strong wind and moisture laden conditions combined with convergence circulation over open ocean are the main factors for occurrence of the heavy rainfall event

An integrated controller for stabilizing an inverted pendulum: LQR and Fuzzy Logic Control with Observer-Based State Estimation

This paper addresses the challenging control problem of stabilizing an inverted pendulum on a cart. The inherent nonlinearity, instability, and under actuation of the system pose significant difficulties in achieving simultaneous pendulum stabilization and cart movement. To overcome these challenges, we propose an integrated approach that combines Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) and fuzzy logic control methods. This integrated control strategy effectively stabilizes the pendulum and controls the cart’s position. Notably, the integrated control outperforms the LQR control in terms of convergence speed. Furthermore, we explore the use of observers for state estimation, specifically the high-order integral-chain differentiator and the extended state observer, to accurately estimate pendulum angular velocity. Simulation results, along with detailed discussions, are presented to validate the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed control methods and observers

Concrete beams using seawater and sea sand reinforced with steel and GFRP rebars exposed to marine environment: An experimental study

Using fresh water and river sand in concrete mix composition makes a lot of negative impacts on resources and the environment while the source of sea sand and sea water is abundant and less harmful to the environment. However, sea sand and seawater in concrete can cause severe corrosion of the reinforcement, reducing the durability and bearing capacity of the structure. This paper illustrates the results of a comparative study on the flexural behavior of six corroded seawater sea-sand concrete (SWSSC) beams. The corrosion process of two concrete beams reinforced with traditional steel bars and four concrete beams reinforced with a combination of glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP) and steel bars was coupled by the effect of seawater exposure and sustained load. It was found that after exposure to a marine environment during the period of 60 months the GFRP bar retains surface integrity, meanwhile, the steel bars were significantly corroded with a cross-sectional area loss of approximately 13.93%. The decrease in bending stiffness, yield load, and ultimate load of the RC beams was found due to the deterioration of SWSSC and corrosion of steel bars.

Concrete beams using seawater and sea sand reinforced with steel and GFRP rebars exposed to marine environment: An experimental study

Using fresh water and river sand in concrete mix composition makes a lot of negative impacts on resources and the environment while the source of sea sand and sea water is abundant and less harmful to the environment. However, sea sand and seawater in concrete can cause severe corrosion of the reinforcement, reducing the durability and bearing capacity of the structure. This paper illustrates the results of a comparative study on the flexural behavior of six corroded seawater sea-sand concrete (SWSSC) beams. The corrosion process of two concrete beams reinforced with traditional steel bars and four concrete beams reinforced with a combination of glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP) and steel bars was coupled by the effect of seawater exposure and sustained load. It was found that after exposure to a marine environment during the period of 60 months the GFRP bar retains surface integrity, meanwhile, the steel bars were significantly corroded with a cross-sectional area loss of approximately 13.93%. The decrease in bending stiffness, yield load, and ultimate load of the RC beams was found due to the deterioration of SWSSC and corrosion of steel bars.

Towards Safer Operations: An Expert-involved Dataset of High-Pressure Gas Incidents for Preventing Future Failures

This paper introduces a new IncidentAI dataset for safety prevention. Different from prior corpora that usually contain a single task, our dataset comprises three tasks: named entity recognition, cause-effect extraction, and information retrieval. The dataset is annotated by domain experts who have at least six years of practical experience as high-pressure gas conservation managers. We validate the contribution of the dataset in the scenario of safety prevention. Preliminary results on the three tasks show that NLP techniques are beneficial for analyzing incident reports to prevent future failures. The dataset facilitates future research in NLP and incident management communities. The access to the dataset is also provided (the IncidentAI dataset is available at: https://github.com/Cinnamon/incident-ai-dataset).Comment: Accepted by EMNLP 2023 (The Industry Track

Survey on Vietnamese teachers’ perspectives and perceived support during COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented damage to the educational system worldwide. Besides the measurable economic impacts in the short-term and long-term, there is intangible destruction within educational institutions. In particular, teachers – the most critical intellectual resources of any schools – have to face various types of financial, physical, and mental struggles due to COVID-19. To capture the current context of more than one million Vietnamese teachers during COVID-19, we distributed an e- survey to more than 2,500 randomly selected teachers from two major teacher communities on Facebook from 6th to 11th April 2020. From over 373 responses, we excluded the observations which violated our cross-check questions and retained 294 observations for further analysis. This dataset includes: (i) Demographics of participants; (ii) Teachers' perspectives regarding the operation of teaching activities during the pandemic; (iii) Teachers' received support from their schools, government bodies, other stakeholders such as teacher unions, and parents' associations; and (iv) teachers' evaluation of school readiness toward digital transformation. Further, the dataset was supplemented with an additional question on the teachers' primary source of professional development activities during the pandemic