Can Vietnam Achieve One of its Millennium Development Goals? An analysis of schooling dropouts of children

The objectives of this study are to identify the underlying determinants of the schooling dropout in Vietnam and to project its trend in the future up to 2015. Our examination is largely based on the three Vietnam’s Living Standard Surveys conducted in 1992/93, 1997/98 and 2001/02 and the conventional framework of educational investment at the household level. The major determinants of the schooling dropout choice by households are found to be variables of child’s characteristics (such as age, working time, primary education, and number of siblings) and household economic situation (such as parental education, household’s per capita expenditure, and cost of schooling). In general, the effects of these determinants on the schooling dropout probability are statistically significant. In particular, the schooling dropout probability has been very sensitive to the changes in the household’s per capita expenditure and the direct costs of schooling, whereas recently the other determinants have had only minor impacts. In terms of schooling, girls have benefited more than boys did from their household's per capita expenditure increase, while they have suffered more than boys did from an increase in the direct cost of schooling. These differences, however, recently have narrowed substantially. The dropout situation is also regional specific and hence, a comprehensive approach is needed to deal with it. Moreover, at present the low quality of education is serious problem. Together with the parents' incorrect perception of and the community’s attitude to education values, this may increase the possibility of children’s schooling dropout. The dropout situation is also very much dependent on the public funding for education, which is still not effective in reducing the household current excessive financial burden and still biased against the poor regions. The projection outcomes of the schooling dropout probability of children in the future up to 2015 is very much depending on the assumptions of the changes in the household’s per capita expenditure and the cost of schooling. When the growth rate of the cost of schooling is much higher (for example, by 1.2 percentage points) than that of the household’s per capita expenditure, the dropout rate would first decrease and increase again after 2010. The tentative assessments suggest that in these cases, there is a chance for Vietnam to achieve the national targets of the primary and lower secondary net enrolment rates in 2010. However, Vietnam could very hardly to achieve the MDG on the universal completion of primary education in 2015 and moreover, the achievements recorded by 2010 would be deteriorated. Regarding the scenarios, where the pace of changes in the cost of schooling is lower than that of the household’s per capita expenditure, the projections seem to provide a rather bright picture in terms of achieving the national education targets in 2010 and the MDG on education in 2015. The projections also show that there is a reason to be more optimistic about the elimination of the gender gap in education by 2010.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40162/3/wp776.pd

Design and fabrication of a moving robotic glove system

This paper presents the research, design, and manufacture of a robotic hand to control movement with a glove. The moving glove-controlled robotic hand is based on two main parts: the hand mechanism and the control circuit. The control glove unit includes an Arduino nRF24l01 microcontroller module and five flex sensors for five fingers. These sensors are used to collect data about the curvature of each finger. Then those data will be received by the Arduino microcontroller and sent by the nRF24l01 module. The hand's microcontroller will process that information and control five servo motors so that the five fingers of the robotic hand are moved. The result of this research is to produce a robotic hand that accurately simulates the curvature of a user's finger and mimics the motion of a glove well. Moreover, the robot hand can grip objects of different sizes (from 0.1 to 1 kg) and shapes, from which this robot helps users easily manipulate objects

Gauging risk with higher moments : handrails in measuring and optimising conditional value at risk

The aim of the paper is to study empirically the influence of higher moments of the return distribution on conditional value at risk (CVaR). To be more exact, we attempt to reveal the extent to which the risk given by CVaR can be estimated when relying on the mean, standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis. Furthermore, it is intended to study how this relationship can be utilised in portfolio optimisation. First, based on a database of 600 individual equity returns from 22 emerging world markets, factor models incorporating the first four moments of the return distribution have been constructed at different confidence levels for CVaR, and the contribution of the identified factors in explaining CVaR was determined. Following this the influence of higher moments was examined in portfolio context, i.e. asset allocation decisions were simulated by creating emerging market portfolios from the viewpoint of US investors. This can be regarded as a normal decisionmaking process of a hedge fund focusing on investments into emerging markets. In our analysis we compared and contrasted two approaches with which one can overcome the shortcomings of the variance as a risk measure. First of all, we solved in the presence of conflicting higher moment preferences a multi-objective portfolio optimisation problem for different sets of preferences. In addition, portfolio optimisation was performed in the mean-CVaR framework characterised by using CVaR as a measure of risk. As a part of the analysis, the pair-wise comparison of the different higher moment metrics of the meanvariance and the mean-CVaR efficient portfolios were also made. Throughout the work special attention was given to implied preferences to the different higher moments in optimising CVaR. We also examined the extent to which model risk, namely the risk of wrongly assuming normally-distributed returns can deteriorate our optimal portfolio choice. JEL Classification: G11, G15, C6

Efficient Finite Difference Method for Computing Sensitivities of Biochemical Reactions

Sensitivity analysis of biochemical reactions aims at quantifying the dependence of the reaction dynamics on the reaction rates. The computation of the parameter sensitivities, however, poses many computational challenges when taking stochastic noise into account. This paper proposes a new finite difference method for efficiently computing sensitivities of biochemical reactions. We employ propensity bounds of reactions to couple the simulation of the nominal and perturbed processes. The exactness of the simulation is reserved by applying the rejection-based mechanism. For each simulation step, the nominal and perturbed processes under our coupling strategy are synchronized and often jump together, increasing their positive correlation and hence reducing the variance of the estimator. The distinctive feature of our approach in comparison with existing coupling approaches is that it only needs to maintain a single data structure storing propensity bounds of reactions during the simulation of the nominal and perturbed processes. Our approach allows to computing sensitivities of many reaction rates simultaneously. Moreover, the data structure does not require to be updated frequently, hence improving the computational cost. This feature is especially useful when applied to large reaction networks. We benchmark our method on biological reaction models to prove its applicability and efficiency.Comment: 29 pages with 6 figures, 2 table

Can Vietnam Achieve One of its Millennium Development Goals? An analysis of schooling dropouts of children

The objectives of this study are to identify the underlying determinants of the schooling dropout in Vietnam and to project its trend in the future up to 2015. Our examination is largely based on the three Vietnam’s Living Standard Surveys conducted in 1992/93, 1997/98 and 2001/02 and the conventional framework of educational investment at the household level. The major determinants of the schooling dropout choice by households are found to be variables of child’s characteristics (such as age, working time, primary education, and number of siblings) and household economic situation (such as parental education, household’s per capita expenditure, and cost of schooling). In general, the effects of these determinants on the schooling dropout probability are statistically significant. In particular, the schooling dropout probability has been very sensitive to the changes in the household’s per capita expenditure and the direct costs of schooling, whereas recently the other determinants have had only minor impacts. In terms of schooling, girls have benefited more than boys did from their household's per capita expenditure increase, while they have suffered more than boys did from an increase in the direct cost of schooling. These differences, however, recently have narrowed substantially. The dropout situation is also regional specific and hence, a comprehensive approach is needed to deal with it. Moreover, at present the low quality of education is serious problem. Together with the parents' incorrect perception of and the community’s attitude to education values, this may increase the possibility of children’s schooling dropout. The dropout situation is also very much dependent on the public funding for education, which is still not effective in reducing the household current excessive financial burden and still biased against the poor regions. The projection outcomes of the schooling dropout probability of children in the future up to 2015 is very much depending on the assumptions of the changes in the household’s per capita expenditure and the cost of schooling. When the growth rate of the cost of schooling is much higher (for example, by 1.2 percentage points) than that of the household’s per capita expenditure, the dropout rate would first decrease and increase again after 2010. The tentative assessments suggest that in these cases, there is a chance for Vietnam to achieve the national targets of the primary and lower secondary net enrolment rates in 2010. However, Vietnam could very hardly to achieve the MDG on the universal completion of primary education in 2015 and moreover, the achievements recorded by 2010 would be deteriorated. Regarding the scenarios, where the pace of changes in the cost of schooling is lower than that of the household’s per capita expenditure, the projections seem to provide a rather bright picture in terms of achieving the national education targets in 2010 and the MDG on education in 2015. The projections also show that there is a reason to be more optimistic about the elimination of the gender gap in education by 2010.Vietnam, education, MDGs