2,145 research outputs found
Breeding plan for silver barb (Puntius gonionotus) in Vietnam: individual (mass) selection to improve growth rate
Selective breeding, Fish culture, Growth, Aquaculture techniques, Genetics, Viet Nam, Puntius gonionotus
Building sustainability through water company and community linkages
The Three Delta Towns Water Supply and Sanitation Project is a joint venture between the governments of Vietnam and
Australia to improve the welfare and living conditions for residents in the Mekong Delta towns of Bac Lieu, Ha Tien and
Sa Dec. The project’s major focus is the development of urban environmental infrastructure, and also includes significant
components of institutional strengthening and community development. A key implementation strategy for building the
long term sustainability of the new infrastructure is to promote and strengthen linkages between the water and sanitation
companies responsible for the infrastructure, and the communities they serve. Major challenges have been a lack of
understanding by the companies as to the value of the community programs, and a significant lack of capacity at the town
and community levels for initiating the various community programs. Now 2½ years into this 6 year project, the strategy
is beginning to show results
UIT-Saviors at MEDVQA-GI 2023: Improving Multimodal Learning with Image Enhancement for Gastrointestinal Visual Question Answering
In recent years, artificial intelligence has played an important role in
medicine and disease diagnosis, with many applications to be mentioned, one of
which is Medical Visual Question Answering (MedVQA). By combining computer
vision and natural language processing, MedVQA systems can assist experts in
extracting relevant information from medical image based on a given question
and providing precise diagnostic answers. The ImageCLEFmed-MEDVQA-GI-2023
challenge carried out visual question answering task in the gastrointestinal
domain, which includes gastroscopy and colonoscopy images. Our team approached
Task 1 of the challenge by proposing a multimodal learning method with image
enhancement to improve the VQA performance on gastrointestinal images. The
multimodal architecture is set up with BERT encoder and different pre-trained
vision models based on convolutional neural network (CNN) and Transformer
architecture for features extraction from question and endoscopy image. The
result of this study highlights the dominance of Transformer-based vision
models over the CNNs and demonstrates the effectiveness of the image
enhancement process, with six out of the eight vision models achieving better
F1-Score. Our best method, which takes advantages of BERT+BEiT fusion and image
enhancement, achieves up to 87.25% accuracy and 91.85% F1-Score on the
development test set, while also producing good result on the private test set
with accuracy of 82.01%.Comment: ImageCLEF2023 published version:
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3497/paper-129.pd
Luxury fashion brands: factors influencing young female consumers' luxury fashion purchasing in Taiwan
Purpose - Against the background of increasing consumption of luxury fashion brands by young female consumers in Asian countries, this paper offers insights into the consumption motives and purchasing behaviour of that market segment in Taiwan.
Design/methodology/approach - Analysis of data collected using face-to-face semi-structured interviews with twenty-three 18-32 year-old fashion-conscious females was completed and new empirical insights are offered.
Findings - The study found a high level of involvement in the world of luxury fashion retailing. Asian consumers devoured media commentary, drew inspiration from female celebrities, and treated information-seeking and discussion of luxury fashion brands with friends as a serious and enjoyable pursuit. The social status conferred by expensive fashion wear motivated them to spend on luxury brands even if their discretionary income was limited. Potential guilt in so doing was assuaged by rationalising that the quality was good and the purchase would be long lasting. Marketers targeting this valuable segment should communicate appeals to an aspirational lifestyle in traditional and social media, effective at reaching young women.
Originality/value - The study reported in this article contributes to the limited published research into the luxury marketing sector in Asia by examining the buying behaviour of female Strawberry Generation consumers in Taiwan. It is the first to research and investigate the meanings attached to luxury by these individuals in the collectivist culture of Taiwan, as well as their motivations, and the factors influencing their purchase of luxury fashions. The study thus contributes with new knowledge to the buying of luxury fashion products by young female Taiwanese consumers, which may be extended to other collectivist cultures in Asia
Experiences from a rural water supply and sanitation programme, Vietnam
Experiences from a rural water supply and sanitation programme, Vietna
Universality in odd-even harmonic generation and application in terahertz waveform sampling
Odd-even harmonics emitted from a laser-target system imprint rich, subtle
information characterizing the system's dynamical asymmetry, which is desirable
to decipher. In this Letter, we discover a simple universal relation between
the odd-even harmonics and the asymmetry of the THz-assisted laser-atomic
system -- atoms in a fundamental mid-IR laser pulse combined with a THz laser.
First, we demonstrate numerically and then analytically formulize the harmonic
even-to-odd ratio as a function of the THz electric field, the source of the
system's asymmetry. Notably, we suggest a scaling that makes the obtained rule
universal, independent of the parameters of both the fundamental pulse and
atomic target. This universality facilitates us to propose a general pump-probe
scheme for THz waveform sampling from the even-to-odd ratio, measurable within
a conventional compact setup
Persistence length of a polyelectrolyte in salty water: a Monte-Carlo study
We address the long standing problem of the dependence of the electrostatic
persistence length of a flexible polyelectrolyte (PE) on the screening
length of the solution within the linear Debye-Huckel theory. The
standard Odijk, Skolnick and Fixman (OSF) theory suggests ,
while some variational theories and computer simulations suggest . In this paper, we use Monte-Carlo simulations to study the conformation
of a simple polyelectrolyte. Using four times longer PEs than in previous
simulations and refined methods for the treatment of the simulation data, we
show that the results are consistent with the OSF dependence . The linear charge density of the PE which enters in the coefficient of
this dependence is properly renormalized to take into account local
fluctuations.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures. Various corrections in text and reference
X-Ray Induced Photodynamic Therapy: A Combination of Radiotherapy and Photodynamic Therapy
Conventional photodynamic therapy (PDT)'s clinical application is limited by depth of penetration by light. To address the issue, we have recently developed X-ray induced photodynamic therapy (X-PDT) which utilizes X-ray as an energy source to activate a PDT process. In addition to breaking the shallow tissue penetration dogma, our studies found more efficient tumor cell killing with X-PDT than with radiotherapy (RT) alone. The mechanisms behind the cytotoxicity, however, have not been elucidated. In the present study, we investigate the mechanisms of action of X-PDT on cancer cells. Our results demonstrate that X-PDT is more than just a PDT derivative but is essentially a PDT and RT combination. The two modalities target different cellular components (cell membrane and DNA, respectively), leading to enhanced therapy effects. As a result, X-PDT not only reduces short-term viability of cancer cells but also their clonogenecity in the long-run. From this perspective, X-PDT can also be viewed as a unique radiosensitizing method, and as such it affords clear advantages over RT in tumor therapy, especially for radioresistant cells. This is demonstrated not only in vitro but also in vivo with H1299 tumors that were either subcutaneously inoculated or implanted into the lung of mice. These findings and advances are of great importance to the developments of X-PDT as a novel treatment modality against cancer
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