VIETNAMESE ENGLISH-MAJORED STUDENTS’ USE OF LISTENING STRATEGIES

The crucial role of listening skill in language learning has been well acknowledged, yet attention to this skill remains modest. Numerous studies investigating learners’ listening performance have identified listening strategies as a key factor contributing to the success of effective listeners. This study, using a Likert-scale questionnaire, examined the listening strategies employed by 81 Vietnamese English-majored students, who were divided into two groups - effective and less effective listeners based on an IELTS proficiency test. Findings showed that listening strategies were used at a relatively high level with the metacognitive group employed most frequently compared to cognitive and socio-affective strategies. Lowering anxiety, predicting and planning, resourcing, repetition, and cooperation were found most commonly employed individual strategies. Although no significant differences were found between the groups’ use of the three overarching strategy categories, several discrepancies were identified concerning their use of individual strategies, which provides important implications for listening pedagogical adjustments in this particular context. Article visualizations

An improved stability result for a heat equation backward in time with nonlinear source

We consider a nonlinear backward heat conduction problem in a strip. The problem is ill-posed in the sense that the solution (if it exists) does not depend continuously on the data. We shall use a modified integral equation method to regularize the nonlinear problem. The error estimates of Hölder type of the regularized solutions are obtained

An improved stability result for a heat equation backward in time with nonlinear source

We consider a nonlinear backward heat conduction problem in a strip. The problem is ill-posed in the sense that the solution (if it exists) does not depend continuously on the data. We shall use a modified integral equation method to regularize the nonlinear problem. The error estimates of Hölder type of the regularized solutions are obtained

Experiences of Renal Stone Fragmentation with the Use of the Ultrasound-guided Mini-percutaneous Nephrolithotipsy in 650 Patients

AIM: This study assesses the results of treatment using the mini-percutaneous nephrolithotipsy (PCNL) procedure on renal stone patients in a lateral position under ultrasound guidance, performed at the Ha Noi Hospital of Post and Telecommunications. METHODS: The study was conducted with 650 kidney stone patients who were treated using the ultrasound-guided mini-PCNL procedure in a lateral position, at the Ha Noi Hospital of Post and Telecommunications, over the period from June 2018 to June 2019. RESULTS: For the 650 patients, the mean age was 47.3 ± 7.6 (from 21 to 91 years old); the mean size of stones: 19.4 ± 1.2 mm (from 12 mm to 60 mm); the mean operative time: 49.3 minutes (from 37 to 90 min); the mean period of hospitalization: 3.9 days (from 3 to 12 days); the mean stone-free rate (SFR): 90.6%; the rate of second surgery: 1.07%; hemorrhage complication: 0.8%; urinary tract infections: 7.7%; septicemia: 0.6%; administered open surgery: 0.46%; and administered other methods: 0.76%. CONCLUSION: Renal stone fragmentation using the mini-PCNL procedure, performed on patients placed in lateral position under ultrasound guidance, is a method that is effective, beneficial, and safe for patients with renal stones and upper ureteral stones

Validity contracts for software transactions

Software Transactional Memory is a promising approach to concurrent programming, freeing programmers from error-prone concurrency control decisions that are complicated and not composable. But few such systems address consistencies of transactional objects. In this thesis, I propose a contract-based transactional programming model toward more secure transactional softwares. In this general model, a validity contract specifies both requirements and effects for transactions. Validity contracts bring numerous benefits including reasoning about and verifying transactional programs, detecting and resolving transactional conflicts, automating object revalidation and easing program debugging. I introduce an ownership-based framework, namely AVID, derived from the general model, using object ownership as a mechanism for specifying and reasoning validity contracts. I have specified a formal type system and implemented a prototype type checker to support static checking. I also have built a transactional library framework AVID, based on existing Java DSTM2 framework, for expressing transactions and validity contracts. Experimental results on a multi-core system show that contracts add little overheads to the original STM. I find that contract-aware contention management yields significant speedups in some cases. The results have suggested compiler directed optimisation for tunning contract-based transactional programs. My further work will investigate the applications of transaction contracts on various aspects of TM research such as hardware support and open-nesting

Understanding the interplay of lies, violence, and religious values in folktales

This research employs the Bayesian network modeling approach, and the Markov chain Monte Carlo technique, to learn about the role of lies and violence in teachings of major religions, using a unique dataset extracted from long-standing Vietnamese folktales. The results indicate that, although lying and violent acts augur negative consequences for those who commit them, their associations with core religious values diverge in the outcome for the folktale characters. Lying that serves a religious mission of either Confucianism or Taoism (but not Buddhism) brings a positive outcome to a character. A violent act committed to serving Buddhist mission results in a happy ending for the committer

Improving Machine Translation Quality with Denoising Autoencoder and Pre-Ordering

The problems in machine translation are related to the characteristics of a family of languages, especially syntactic divergences between languages. In the translation task, having both source and target languages in the same language family is a luxury that cannot be relied upon. The trained models for the task must overcome such differences either through manual augmentations or automatically inferred capacity built into the model design. In this work, we investigated the impact of multiple methods of differing word orders during translation and further experimented in assimilating the source languages syntax to the target word order using pre-ordering. We focused on the field of extremely low-resource scenarios. We also conducted experiments on practical data augmentation techniques that support the reordering capacity of the models through varying the target objectives, adding the secondary goal of removing noises or reordering broken input sequences. In particular, we propose methods to improve translat on quality with the denoising autoencoder in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and pre-ordering method in Phrase-based Statistical Machine Translation (PBSMT). The experiments with a number of English-Vietnamese pairs show the improvement in BLEU scores as compared to both the NMT and SMT systems

Healthcare consumers’ sensitivity to costs: a reflection on behavioural economics from an emerging market

Decision-making regarding healthcare expenditure hinges heavily on an individual's health status and the certainty about the future. This study uses data on propensity of general health exam (GHE) spending to show that despite the debate on the necessity of GHE, its objective is clear—to obtain more information and certainty about one’s health so as to minimise future risks. Most studies on this topic, however, focus only on factors associated with GHE uptake and overlook the shifts in behaviours and attitudes regarding different levels of cost. To fill the gap, this study analyses a dataset of 2068 subjects collected from Hanoi (Vietnam) and its vicinities using the baseline-category logit method. We evaluate the sensitivity of Vietnamese healthcare consumers against two groups of factors (demographic and socioeconomic-cognitive) regarding payment for periodic GHE, which is not covered by insurance. Our study shows that uninsured, married and employed individuals are less sensitive to cost than their counterparts because they value the information in reducing future health uncertainty. The empirical results challenge the objections to periodic health screening by highlighting its utility. The relevance of behavioural economics is further highlighted through a look at the bounded rationality of healthcare consumers and private insurance companies in using and providing the service, respectively