Factors Affecting the Banking Service Quality in Vietnam

In the current fierce competition between banks, increasing service quality is considered the foundation of the banks’ competitive strategy to attract and retain customers. Therefore, the research and analysis of the factors of banking service-affecting banking service quality are essential. The article assesses the influence of the aspects of banking service quality. Besides, this study objective tested the reliability of the banking service quality of commercial banks in Vietnam. The study surveyed 1.000 customers related to commercial banks, but 917 samples processed and answered 39 questions. The data collected from July 2020 to December 2020. The authors tested Cronbach’s Alpha, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and structural equation model (SEM) for factors affecting the banking service quality of commercial banks in Vietnam with a significance level of 0.0

3-Dimensional Visualization of Cardiac Plaque Mapping Data

Atrial Fibrillation (AF) of one of the most prevalent cardiac arrythmia in humans, and also the most studied arrythmias due to its high association with cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. Diagnosis of AF, which is highly dependent on the observation of the irregular signal in the atria, is often challenging since AF is often asymptomatic at the onset. There has been a lot of effort in exploring different cardiac mapping techniques to understand the dynamics of AF for better intervention. This study aims at developing a MATLAB interface that assists the development of a cardiac plaque mapping data acquisition system in Dr. Zemlin’s Cardiothoracic Surgery Research Laboratory. The interface would load and process input signals, calculate data of interest and visualize them on 3D atrial geometry for analysis and understanding of electrical conduction behavior in the atria

Mergers, Acquisitions and Market Concentration in the Banking Sector: The Case of Vietnam

Following the global trend, Vietnam also started opening up its economy and domestic reforms in 1986 and implemented a number domestic market reforms including in the banking and finance system. The merger and acquisitions (M&A) of banks have been a main component of the reform process. There have not been serious attempts to evaluate the M&A process and its impacts on the banking industry in a systematic way. The main purpose of this study is to fill that literature gap by providing a historical narrative of the M&A activities in Vietnam’s banking industry and analyzing its impacts on the system and market structure via quantitative and qualitative approaches, particularly using concentration indices

Enriching Biomedical Knowledge for Vietnamese Low-resource Language Through Large-Scale Translation

Biomedical data and benchmarks are highly valuable yet very limited in low-resource languages other than English such as Vietnamese. In this paper, we make use of a state-of-the-art translation model in English-Vietnamese to translate and produce both pretrained as well as supervised data in the biomedical domains. Thanks to such large-scale translation, we introduce ViPubmedT5, a pretrained Encoder-Decoder Transformer model trained on 20 million translated abstracts from the high-quality public PubMed corpus. ViPubMedT5 demonstrates state-of-the-art results on two different biomedical benchmarks in summarization and acronym disambiguation. Further, we release ViMedNLI - a new NLP task in Vietnamese translated from MedNLI using the recently public En-vi translation model and carefully refined by human experts, with evaluations of existing methods against ViPubmedT5

CORE VALUES OF VIETNAM VOCOTRUYEN

In the past every country had a martial arts associated with cultural characters and physical state of its people. Martial arts were not simply the practice of fighting skills, of using arms and legs to settle conflicts or a show of muscular strength. Also, their effects were to enhance health, improve physicality, train will, spirit and good philosophies of life. It is necessary for martial arts practitioners to train both physical and spiritual force, maintain the tradition of teacher deference and moral respect, rituals, orders and disciplines etc.. Vietnamese traditional martial arts (Vocotruyen) are not an exception so it has particularly vital values in life.  Article visualizations

Ciguatoxin-like toxin in mackerel Acanthocybium soladria in Vietnam

Two processed mackerel products were sent to VAST keylab on “Food and Environmental Safety” in Institute of Oceanography for Ciguatoxin criteria as exported seafood requirement. The specimens were caught from offshore region of Vietnam South-Eastern sea in April 2019.  By DNA sequencing of COI gene, both specimens were identified as Acanthocybium solandri, one of high commercial mackerel species which is well-known to be distributed in Central and South-Eastern sea of Vietnam. In mouse bioassay, both extracts from 2 samples exhibited acute toxicity, which killed tested mice within 6 and 15 hours after i.p. injection. In SIM LC/MS-MS analysis, the extracts showed the peak with retention time closed to that in CTX-1B standard in both cases of optimized and non-optimized solid phases. The result suggested that at least there was occurrence of CTX-like toxin in these mackerel specimens. The equivalent toxin levels were estimated as 0.51 ng/g and 0.84 ng/g; 5 and 8 times higher than regulation limit for CTXs in seafood product (0.1 ng CTX-1B/g). Further verification is in progress to confirm toxin in these mackerel samples in Vietnam. However, this data is the first alert on potential poisoning by consumption of mackerel, not only in Vietnam but also in Asia

Caffeine consumption disrupts hippocampal long-term potentiation in freely behaving rats.

Caffeine, one of the most commonly consumed psychoactive substances in the world, has long been known to alter neurological functions, such as alertness, attention, and memory. Despite caffeine\u27s popularity, systematic investigations of its effects on synaptic plasticity in the brain are still lacking. Here we used a freely behaving rodent model of long-term potentiation (LTP), a frequently studied form of synaptic plasticity, to assess the effects of caffeine consumption on hippocampal plasticity. LTP, which is a persistent increase in the strength of synaptic connections between neurons, is a cellular mechanism widely considered to underlie the processes of learning and memory. A group of 10-week-old Sprague-Dawley rats were administered caffeine (1 g/L) in their drinking water 3 weeks prior to collection of electrophysiological data. Another group of age-matched animals received tap water and served as controls. Stimulating and recording electrodes were chronically implanted in the perforant pathway (PP) and dentate gyrus (DG) region of the hippocampus, respectively, to permit stable electrophysiological recordings of synaptic transmission at this synapse. Population spike amplitude (PSA) measures of LTP induction and duration were acquired in vivo while animals were freely behaving using a well-established electrophysiological recording protocol. Results indicate caffeine-treated rats (n = 9) had a significantly (P \u3c 0.05) reduced level of LTP induction compared with controls (n = 10). More studies are needed to identify the exact mechanism through which caffeine alters LTP induction in this freely behaving model of synaptic plasticity

ẢNH HƯỞNG CỦA ASTAXANTHIN BỔ SUNG TRONG THỨC ĂN LÊN TĂNG TRƯỞNG, TỶ LỆ SỐNG VÀ MÀU SẮC DA CÁ KHOANG CỔ NEMO, Amphiprion ocellaris THƯƠNG MẠI

This study examined the influence of astaxanthin added to food on growth, survival rate and pigmentation of commercial false clownfish, Amphiprion ocellaris. Five experiments were performed with synthetic astaxanthin contents: 0; 50; 100; 150 and 200 mg/kg diets. Mean weight and mean length of fish were 1.16 ± 0.22 gand and 33.05 ± 3.29 mm respectively. Fish were fed by 5% of their live weight during the examination of 8 weeks. After 56 days of experiments, the skin pigmentation levels were analysed using Clownfish Exercise pigmentation chart which has a scale from 1 to 10. Color scales of 5 experiments: 0; 50; 100; 150 and 200 mg Astaxanthin/kg diets were 2.12 ± 0.08, 3.79 ± 0.1, 5.31 ± 0.14, 7.78 ± 0.09, 8.04 ± 0.12 respectively. The result showed that the dietary astaxanthin could increase coloration of skin compared with the control group which had the lightest color (P 0.05) but there were no significant effects on growth and survival rate of clownfish (P 0.05).Nghiên cứu này đánh giá ảnh hưởng của Astaxanthin bổ sung trong thức ăn lên tăng trưởng, tỷ lệ sống và màu sắc da của cá khoang cổ Nemo Amphiprion ocellaris thương mại. Năm lô thí nghiệm được thực hiện với hàm lượng astaxanthin tổng hợp (Carophyll Pink 10% CWS) bổ sung vào trong thức ăn là: 0, 50, 100, 150 và 200 mg/kg. Cá thí nghiệm có khối lượng và chiều dài trung bình ban đầu tương ứng là 1,16 ± 0,22 g và 33,05 ± 3,29 mm. Cá được cho ăn với khẩu phần 5% khối lượng thân trong 8 tuần. Sau 56 ngày nuôi màu sắc da của cá được đánh giá bằng phương pháp cho điểm sử dụng thước so màu Clownfish Exercise có thang điểm từ 1 tới 10. Thang điểm màu sắc của 5 lô bổ sung 0, 50, 100, 150 và 200 mg Astaxanthin/kg thức ăn lần lượt là: 2,12 ± 0,08; 3,79 ± 0,1; 5,31 ± 0,14; 7,78 ± 0,09; 8,04 ± 0,12. Kết quả cho thấy những lô thí nghệm có bổ sung Astaxanthin làm tăng màu sắc da của cá so với lô đối chứng (P0,05) nhưng không có sự khác biệt có ý nghĩa về tăng trưởng và tỷ lệ sống giữa các lô thí nghiệm với nhau (P 0,05)

LEARNING IDIOMS FOR ENGLISH MAJORS: VIETNAMESE STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS OF DIFFICULTIES AND LEARNING STRATEGIES

Learning idioms play an influential role in language generally and in English notably. Comprehending idioms assists language learners in integrating culture, enhancing skills, and ameliorating English levels. Numerous studies have analyzed the function of idioms in second language acquisition (Cieślicka, 2015). This study investigates the difficulties and strategies used in learning idioms by English-majored students at a regional public university (PU) in the south of Vietnam. This paper furnishes data showing learners’ perceptions of facing complications and learning methods. The samples consisted of 150 undergraduate EFL students from English-medium instruction programs. The data was analyzed by utilizing descriptive and inferential statistics. The findings reveal that students struggle to understand idiomatic terms without specific, understandable contexts. Furthermore, the results indicate that the most frequently employed strategies are guessing the meaning of idioms, learning idioms through keywords, and learning from a range of sources, particularly via media. The findings also mentioned that low-proficiency and high-proficiency students encounter identical challenges, with no significant differences. The study's results revealed that the majority of students have difficulty acquiring, recognizing, and interpreting idioms. The findings indicated that guessing the implication of idioms is the most used strategy.  Article visualizations