Government’s and professional associations’ roles in promoting corporate social resposibility – An exploratory in Vietnamese construction firms

With this large number of operating company, the construction industry in Vietnam needs the direction and supports from the government and professional associations not only in policies, business strategies, information about construction but also in leading and providing CSR information and instruction. By employing qualitative approach with in-depth interview as the main method to collect data, this study is to explore actual managers’ perspectives of the current roles of these two stakeholders in CSR and their expectations for the upcoming years. Two worthy notes need to be concerned. The first note is that the roles of government are really important in issuing appropriate policies and treating businesses fairly. Another note relating that of professional associations points out that construction firms do not have any belief in their operations

Factors of the brand image influencing students’ choices in higher education institutions in Ho Chi Minh City

The awareness of brand image increasingly becomes great importance in students’ choices towards higher education institutions. This study aims to investigate factors of brand image which influence the choices of students in terms of postgraduate universities, the case of three universities in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC): International University HCMC, Economics University HCMC, University of Economics and Law HCMC. Focus group and paper-based techniques are applied to build questionnaire forming. The surveys of 450 samples would be collected by email survey technique. The qualitative method of factor analysis and ANOVA are used for this study. The results show the positive significance of human resource quality, program quality, infrastructure, cost and reputation of the universities to students’ choices. Besides, there is an influence between the type of job and students’ choices

Influences of social ties on firms’ performance - A study in Vietnam on corporate social responsibility practices

Social ties and their influences on firm’s performance are still issues of many debates. The reason is that previous studies gave different findings about the effects of social ties on firm’s performance. This study, therefore, focuses on finding what managers in construction firms perceive of social ties in their business and how these ties affect corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices – an aspect of firm’s performance. To address these research objectives, qualitative approach is employed and in-depth interview with managers in construction firms is conducted to collect the data. Furthermore, the study also explores how managers think of CSR changes in the near future. The research findings show that interviewees strongly believe in CSR changes including both internal and external changes. In terms of social ties, the research also identifies government authorities and professional associations; and business partners as political and business ties, respectively. The findings show that managers easily realize business ties and their effects on CSR practices. Meanwhile, only some managers with years of seniority can perceive of political ties and their effects. The research findings also suggest some noteworthy issues for the authorities of the industry to consider including lack of information among managers about firm’s aspects and relationships, and the significance of professional associations (a type of political ties) although these ties currently have no influences on CSR practices of construction businesses

Fuzzy gain scheduling control apply to an RC Hovercraft

The Fuzzy Gain Scheduling (FGS) methodology for tuning the Proportional – Integral – Derivative (PID) traditional controller parameters by scheduling controlled gains in different phases, is a simple and effective application both in industries and real-time complex models while assuring the high achievements over pass decades, is proposed in this article. The Fuzzy logic rules of the triangular membership functions are exploited on-line to verify the Gain Scheduling of the Proportional – Integral – Derivative controller gains in different stages because it can minimize the tracking control error and utilize the Integral of Time Absolute Error (ITAE) minima criterion of the controller design process. For that reason, the controller design could tune the system model in the whole operation time to display the efficiency in tracking error. It is then implemented in a novel Remote Controlled (RC) Hovercraft motion models to demonstrate better control performance in comparison with the PID conventional controller

Reasons for customers reluctance to use electronic payments – A study in Ho Chi Minh City

This study aims to investigate reasons why customers are reluctant to use e-payment and how these reasons explain their impacted values, with the following research objectives: (1) to identify characteristics of electronic payment generating the resistance of customers to this E-payment; (2) to explore the connections between those characteristics and values of individuals through the consequences of these characteristics; (3) to propose suggestions for service providers and financial institutes to develop appropriate strategic plans to motivate e-payment in Vietnam. To address these research objectives, the means-end chain (MEC) theory is employed with hard laddering interviews as data collection methods. Then, the collected data are analyzed by the Association Pattern Technique (APT) and used to build the Hierarchical Value Map (HVM). The HVM indicates five main reasons which bar customers from using e-payment: (1) lack of information about e-payment and its benefits, (2) security vulnerabilities in online payment systems, (3) unavailability of legal laws to protect e-payment users, (4) unpopularity of e-payment, and (5) transaction fees and no discount for e-payment. The Value map also revealed that Safety is the most crucial value explaining why most customers are unwilling to use e-payment. Besides, the respondents also care about the Economy and the Convenience of e-payment. From these findings, the study offers some suggestions for banks and service providers to increase the popularity of e-payments

Effects of perceived corporate social responsibility practices on customers’ satisfaction and perceived value – A study in the food industry in Vietnam

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of perceived Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices on customers’ satisfaction and perceived value. According to the result of the literature review, the studied CSR practices include environmental protection, customer protection, community, HR policies, price, product quality, relationship selling, empathy, and fulfill expectations. To address the research objective, the present study proposed two following research questions: (1) What are factors of CSR practices impacting customers’ satisfaction?; and (2) How do these factors influence customer satisfaction and perceived value? The study approached 236 customers of the food industry to conduct a survey empirically and tested the proposed hypotheses using structural equation modeling. The research findings show that (1), in Vietnamese customers perceptions, Perceived price, Perceived quality and Empathy are three components of CSR practices; (2) these components have positive impacts on Customer satisfaction; and (3) Customer satisfaction has a positive relationship with customers’ perceived value. These findings help to enrich the CSR literature in developing countries like Vietnam, and to confirm the findings of previous studies. Moreover, from the research findings, the present study suggested some managerial implications for firms in the food industry relating to price, product quality and empathy

Z-GMOT: Zero-shot Generic Multiple Object Tracking

Despite the significant progress made in recent years, Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) approaches still suffer from several limitations, including their reliance on prior knowledge of tracking targets, which necessitates the costly annotation of large labeled datasets. As a result, existing MOT methods are limited to a small set of predefined categories, and they struggle with unseen objects in the real world. To address these issues, Generic Multiple Object Tracking (GMOT) has been proposed, which requires less prior information about the targets. However, all existing GMOT approaches follow a one-shot paradigm, relying mainly on the initial bounding box and thus struggling to handle variants e.g., viewpoint, lighting, occlusion, scale, and etc. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to address the limitations of existing MOT and GMOT methods. Specifically, we propose a zero-shot GMOT (Z-GMOT) algorithm that can track never-seen object categories with zero training examples, without the need for predefined categories or an initial bounding box. To achieve this, we propose iGLIP, an improved version of Grounded language-image pretraining (GLIP), which can detect unseen objects while minimizing false positives. We evaluate our Z-GMOT thoroughly on the GMOT-40 dataset, AnimalTrack testset, DanceTrack testset. The results of these evaluations demonstrate a significant improvement over existing methods. For instance, on the GMOT-40 dataset, the Z-GMOT outperforms one-shot GMOT with OC-SORT by 27.79 points HOTA and 44.37 points MOTA. On the AnimalTrack dataset, it surpasses fully-supervised methods with DeepSORT by 12.55 points HOTA and 8.97 points MOTA. To facilitate further research, we will make our code and models publicly available upon acceptance of this paper

The influence of brand equity on consumer responses toward Cho Gao dragon fruits brand

This thesis study wants to implement a model test for better understandings of brand equity and consumer responses toward Cho Gao Dragon Fruit brand. With the rapid growth of agriculture, including domestic consumption and export of the dragon fruits, it is crucial to differentiate the Cho Gao Dragon Fruits to other competitors in both domestic and foreign markets. Using Structural equation modeling (SEM) to analyze the data of 274 questionnaires to investigate the effects of brand equity and its dimensions on consumer responses. The results show that brand equity dimensions such as brand awareness, brand association, perceived quality are interrelated and those dimensions have a direct and significant effect on brand equity, except brand awareness. The results support the assumption that brand equity has a positive relationship with consumer responses. The findings shed light on the current issues of the market for dragon fruits, which enables us to provide some suggestions for the Government to facilitate farmers and traders in building brand names, marketers for doing marketing activities, and students to know about brand equity of agricultural product such as dragon fruits

The global response: How cities and provinces around the globe tackled Covid-19 outbreaks in 2021

Background: Tackling the spread of COVID-19 remains a crucial part of ending the pandemic. Its highly contagious nature and constant evolution coupled with a relative lack of immunity make the virus difficult to control. For this, various strategies have been proposed and adopted including limiting contact, social isolation, vaccination, contact tracing, etc. However, given the heterogeneity in the enforcement of these strategies and constant fluctuations in the strictness levels of these strategies, it becomes challenging to assess the true impact of these strategies in controlling the spread of COVID-19.Methods: In the present study, we evaluated various transmission control measures that were imposed in 10 global urban cities and provinces in 2021 Bangkok, Gauteng, Ho Chi Minh City, Jakarta, London, Manila City, New Delhi, New York City, Singapore, and Tokyo.Findings: Based on our analysis, we herein propose the population-level Swiss cheese model for the failures and pit-falls in various strategies that each of these cities and provinces had. Furthermore, whilst all the evaluated cities and provinces took a different personalized approach to managing the pandemic, what remained common was dynamic enforcement and monitoring of breaches of each barrier of protection. The measures taken to reinforce the barriers were adjusted continuously based on the evolving epidemiological situation.Interpretation: How an individual city or province handled the pandemic profoundly affected and determined how the entire country handled the pandemic since the chain of transmission needs to be broken at the very grassroot level to achieve nationwide control

Safety and efficacy of fluoxetine on functional outcome after acute stroke (AFFINITY): a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial

Background Trials of fluoxetine for recovery after stroke report conflicting results. The Assessment oF FluoxetINe In sTroke recoverY (AFFINITY) trial aimed to show if daily oral fluoxetine for 6 months after stroke improves functional outcome in an ethnically diverse population. Methods AFFINITY was a randomised, parallel-group, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial done in 43 hospital stroke units in Australia (n=29), New Zealand (four), and Vietnam (ten). Eligible patients were adults (aged ≥18 years) with a clinical diagnosis of acute stroke in the previous 2–15 days, brain imaging consistent with ischaemic or haemorrhagic stroke, and a persisting neurological deficit that produced a modified Rankin Scale (mRS) score of 1 or more. Patients were randomly assigned 1:1 via a web-based system using a minimisation algorithm to once daily, oral fluoxetine 20 mg capsules or matching placebo for 6 months. Patients, carers, investigators, and outcome assessors were masked to the treatment allocation. The primary outcome was functional status, measured by the mRS, at 6 months. The primary analysis was an ordinal logistic regression of the mRS at 6 months, adjusted for minimisation variables. Primary and safety analyses were done according to the patient's treatment allocation. The trial is registered with the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry, ACTRN12611000774921. Findings Between Jan 11, 2013, and June 30, 2019, 1280 patients were recruited in Australia (n=532), New Zealand (n=42), and Vietnam (n=706), of whom 642 were randomly assigned to fluoxetine and 638 were randomly assigned to placebo. Mean duration of trial treatment was 167 days (SD 48·1). At 6 months, mRS data were available in 624 (97%) patients in the fluoxetine group and 632 (99%) in the placebo group. The distribution of mRS categories was similar in the fluoxetine and placebo groups (adjusted common odds ratio 0·94, 95% CI 0·76–1·15; p=0·53). Compared with patients in the placebo group, patients in the fluoxetine group had more falls (20 [3%] vs seven [1%]; p=0·018), bone fractures (19 [3%] vs six [1%]; p=0·014), and epileptic seizures (ten [2%] vs two [<1%]; p=0·038) at 6 months. Interpretation Oral fluoxetine 20 mg daily for 6 months after acute stroke did not improve functional outcome and increased the risk of falls, bone fractures, and epileptic seizures. These results do not support the use of fluoxetine to improve functional outcome after stroke