Tourism promotion Video production : Quality Management and Acceptance Study

This thesis is based on the project of creating promotion movie clips about travel destinations for a tourism company. The idea of the project is to provide a short guideline with brief information and to bring people, who want to visit Vietnam, main images about the country. The purpose of this dissertation was to go through progress of video making and publishing to the Internet with personal experience. As an audio-visual product, the project follows three basic steps: preproduction, production and postproduction. During period of the project, not only professional knowledge that students learn from school is applied, but also communication and discussion skills from the role of a service provider with the client is improved. In the thesis, not only information about working process but also actual experience (difficulties and mistakes) are shared, which might be a helpful material for ammeter videographer. Secondly, the study concentrates on the stages of project and quality management under both theoretical and practical perspectives of a Media Engineering student. Planning production processes and scheduling are indispensable in term of project management, which are covered in the thesis. Besides, it is also a handbook for clients working in media industry to develop, improve and evaluate their own products. The investigation about quality management of products and/or services in two important aspects: quality of service and quality of experience clarify what customer expectations are and how to fulfil their requirements

Membranoproliferative glomerulonephritis in patients with chronic venous catheters: a case report and literature review.

Chronic indwelling catheters have been reported to be associated with membranoproliferative glomerulonephritis (MPGN) via the activation of the classical complement pathway in association with bacterial infections such as coagulase negative staphylococcus. We herein provide supporting evidence for the direct causal relationship between chronic catheter infections and MPGN via a case of recurrent MPGN associated with recurrent catheter infections used for total parenteral nutrition (TPN) in a man with short gut syndrome. We also present a literature review of similar cases and identify common clinical manifestations that may serve to aid clinicians in the early identification of MPGN associated with infected central venous catheterization or vice versa. The importance of routine monitoring of kidney function and urinalysis among patients with chronic central venous catheterization is highlighted as kidney injury may herald or coincide with overtly infected chronic indwelling central venous catheters

Effects of feedback, education, and work experience on self-efficacy

Examines the contextual effects of social persuasion (represented by self, client, peer and supervisor\u27s feedback) and mastery experiences (represented by formal level of education and work experience) on specific self-efficacy outcomes and perceived advancement potential in a sample population of nurses at a Southern California hospital. Results of the study suggest that self, client, peer, and supervisor\u27s feedback consistently predict significant self-efficacy outcomes

NEEDS ANALYSIS: HOTEL RECEPTIONISTS’ USE OF ENGLISH

Needs analysis is critical in the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) development of teaching and learning because it decides learners' goals, needs, or deficiencies in the environmental situation. Learners are often taught and led in educational practices by textbooks authored by native speakers Ministry of Education and Training (MOET, 2008). However, Vietnam received a record of over 18 million of international arrivals in 2019 arrivals (VNAT, 2022). An analysis must evaluate real-life conditions to find difficulties met when working as a hotel receptionist. This research looks at the lives of eighteen hotel receptionists in Can Tho, Vietnam. A quantitative approach is used in this research to find out in what ways hotel receptionists use their positions and the obstacles they experience on the job. The study results show that hotel receptionists employ four skills, but speaking and listening are significantly more critical in this sector. Furthermore, hotel receptionists need help with these abilities when speaking with non-native visitors. The findings imply that, besides textbook resources, educators and curriculum designers could include distinct accents from non-native English speakers into a curriculum for ESP learners. Practical markets, particularly in Asia, now have implications for real-world tourism development practices.  Article visualizations

Political Orientation in Ecocriticism: National Allegory in Vietnamese Ecofiction by Trần Duy Phiên

Since the late 1990s, theories and practices of ecocriticism have tended to be more politically engaged than in its earliest phase, considering that “environmental problems cannot be solved without addressing issues of wealth and poverty, overconsumption, underdevelopment, and the notion of resource scarcity” (Heise 251-2). This paper engages with the political orientation in ecocriticism by examining presentations of humans and nature in three Vietnamese short stories – “Kiến và người” (The Ants and the Man, 1990), “Mối và người” (The Termite and the Man, 1992), and “Nhện và người” (The Spider and the Man, 2012) by Trần Duy Phiên (born 1942). These presentations center around conflicts between human characters and insect characters, in which the former attempt to dominate and exploit the latter and the latter resist and take revenge on the former. This paper delves into the political context of these presentations which is the Vietnamese government\u27s projects of modernizing the nation since the time it came into power in 1945 and particularly since the time of Reform in 1986. These projects include the making of modern citizens, civilizing the highland, and modernizing the national economy, all have aimed at clearing colonial legacies in material and mental aspects of postcolonial Vietnam. The paper argues that national allegory is a characteristic of Vietnamese ecofiction, which forms Vietnamese intellectuals’ engagement with the postcolonial condition of Vietnam. This argument in its turn affirms political engagements in ecocriticism as a historical situation, particularly in former colonial countries

STUDENTS’ EXPERIENCES ON LEARNING LISTENING THROUGH TECHNOLOGY-BASED TOOL

Using technology tools in the classroom can now be facilitated students' engagement and self-directed learning to support a learner-centred environment in educational contexts under varied perspectives. In language learning, evaluating a particular language skill focused on technology is crucial in students' experience. EFL students face several difficulties as noise, accent, vocabulary, and pronunciation while listening. Therefore, employing listening with technology is significantly necessary to enhance students' listening skills. However, rare research has provided the students' reflection under constructivist perspectives after studying with the technology-based listening tool. Thus, the current study narrows this empirical gap. Semi-structured interviews and observation were instruments employed to collect data. Using thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006), the results of this study indicated that five themes were individualised listening, collaborative learning, self-directed learning, consideration of errors, and pronunciation improvement. Students were more engaged when listening to tasks independently, considering their errors for further improvement, and self-directed learning in this study. Additionally, they mostly perceived themselves to improve their listening and pronunciation in the future. Teachers should pay close attention to speakers' voices, accents, and feedback when designing and implementing tasks to maximise learners' listening learning process. This study has implications on using BookWidgets as a potential pedagogical tool for English courses.  Article visualizations

The competitiveness and efficiency of the Vietnamese banking sector in the face of financial liberalisation

This thesis provides empirical evidence of the impact of financial liberalisation on the competitiveness and efficiency of the Vietnamese banking sector by applying a combination of non-parametric frontier estimation methods, stochastic frontier methods and Tobit panel data regression techniques. There have been few studies in Vietnam linking financial liberalisation to banking sector competitiveness and efficiency. In the thesis, these parametric and non-parametric methods are applied in a pilot study to measure the allocative efficiency at branch level of the Vietnam Bank for Agricultural and Rural Development (VBARD) – the largest bank in Vietnam in terms of total assets. The technical efficiency of the Vietnamese banking sector at bank level is then estimated using the same methods. The empirical investigation of the thesis is based on the use of branch-level data and bank-level data for a sample of more than 50 branches of VBARD across the country over the period 2004–2008 and around 40 banks over the period 2002–2012. Using data envelopment analysis (DEA) to measure allocative efficiency at branch level and technical efficiency at bank level and using stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) to estimate cost and profit efficiency at branch level, the thesis suggests that the contributions of financial liberalisation to bank efficiency are generally mixed, depending on the measures of bank efficiency used and the sub-periods taken into account. The thesis presents weak empirical evidence of the positive impacts of financial liberalisation on efficiency improvements of the Vietnamese banking sector at both branch and bank level. Banking efficiency is inconsistently increased over the period of financial liberalisation as the financial market is more liberated and the size of the banking sector substantially increased. Hence, industry rationalisation through reconsolidating and restructuring mergers and acquisitions (M&A) is required. The thesis suggests that both financial liberalisation and greater competition contribute to lower profit efficiency and higher costs for banks. The thesis indicates that the Vietnamese banking system is dominated by large banks and that the state-owned commercial banks (SOCBs) are more efficient than the joint stock commercial banks (JSCBs), mainly because of their competitive advantage in terms of size. Furthermore, Vietnamese banking efficiency at both branch and bank levels is significantly improved by high levels of capitalisation, larger size and a better labour force, while it is hampered by low loan quality. The findings also suggest that the northern banks in Vietnam are more efficient than the southern banks. The empirical evidence of the thesis is also focused on investigating the impact of financial liberalisation on bank technical efficiency and productivity growth, making use of a two-step approach consisting of DEA and Tobit panel data regressions. The analysis conducted across the different location groups (north and south) suggests that the impact on the technical efficiency of banks is more pronounced in the northern areas than in the southern areas. Furthermore, the Tobit estimation takes into account bank-specific differences in terms of total assets, the equity–total assets ratio, the labour–capital ratio and the provision–capital ratio; the evidence suggests that these influences are also mostly significant under financial liberalisation. As a result, the thesis suggests that financial liberalisation reinforces an independent impact on the technical efficiency of banks

Nonlinear analysis of multilayer composite pipes

The use of composite materials has constantly increased in aerospace and offshore applications. One of -typical composite structures for offshore application is multilayer unbonded composite pipe. The composite pipe comprised of several layers such as helically wound steel layers and polymeric layers, among which the helically wound steel wires play essential roles in providing axial and flexural stiffnesses of the pipe. Because of the -geometric nonlinearity of each layer of the composite pipe and the flexibility in motion of individual layers against their adjacent layers, analyses of the composite pipe are highly nonlinear and computationally challenging. In this study, detailed three-dimensional Representative Volume Element models of the multilayer unbonded composite pipe are developed, and nonlinear analyses of the composite pipe are performed. The developed FE models effectively predict nonlinear responses of the pipe including slipping effects of steel layers under application of axial loading, bending, internal and external pressures. Based on the predicted results, a constitutive model of the pipe under various loadings is obtained which can be employed in the large scale analysis of the composite pipe to improve the accurate and computational efficiency of the global analysis