Policy Response, Social Media and Science Journalism for the Sustainability of the Public Health System Amid the COVID-19 Outbreak: The Vietnam Lessons

Vietnam, with a geographical proximity and a high volume of trade with China, was the first country to record an outbreak of the new Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), caused by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 or SARS-CoV-2. While the country was expected to have a high risk of transmission, as of April 4, 2020—in comparison to attempts to contain the disease around the world—responses from Vietnam are being seen as prompt and effective in protecting the interests of its citizens, with 239 confirmed cases and no fatalities. This study analyzes the situation in terms of Vietnam’s policy response, social media and science journalism. A self-made web crawl engine was used to scan and collect official media news related to COVID-19 between the beginning of January and April 4, yielding a comprehensive dataset of 14,952 news items. The findings shed light on how Vietnam—despite being under-resourced—has demonstrated political readiness to combat the emerging pandemic since the earliest days. Timely communication on any developments of the outbreak from the government and the media, combined with up-to-date research on the new virus by the Vietnamese science community, have altogether provided reliable sources of information. By emphasizing the need for immediate and genuine cooperation between government, civil society and private individuals, the case study offers valuable lessons for other nations concerning not only the concurrent fight against the COVID-19 pandemic but also the overall responses to a public health crisis

How Digital Natives Learn and Thrive in the Digital Age: Evidence from an Emerging Economy

As a generation of ‘digital natives,’ secondary students who were born from 2002 to 2010 have various approaches to acquiring digital knowledge. Digital literacy and resilience are crucial for them to navigate the digital world as much as the real world; however, these remain under-researched subjects, especially in developing countries. In Vietnam, the education system has put considerable effort into teaching students these skills to promote quality education as part of the United Nations-defined Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4). This issue has proven especially salient amid the COVID−19 pandemic lockdowns, which had obliged most schools to switch to online forms of teaching. This study, which utilizes a dataset of 1061 Vietnamese students taken from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)’s “Digital Kids Asia Pacific (DKAP)” project, employs Bayesian statistics to explore the relationship between the students’ background and their digital abilities. Results show that economic status and parents’ level of education are positively correlated with digital literacy. Students from urban schools have only a slightly higher level of digital literacy than their rural counterparts, suggesting that school location may not be a defining explanatory element in the variation of digital literacy and resilience among Vietnamese students. Students’ digital literacy and, especially resilience, also have associations with their gender. Moreover, as students are digitally literate, they are more likely to be digitally resilient. Following SDG4, i.e., Quality Education, it is advisable for schools, and especially parents, to seriously invest in creating a safe, educational environment to enhance digital literacy among students

Neural network based patient recovery estimation of a PAM-based rehabilitation robot

Rehabilitation robots have shown a promise in aiding patient recovery by supporting them in repetitive, systematic training sessions. A critical factor in the success of such training is the patient’s recovery progress, which can guide suitable treatment plans and reduce recovery time. In this study, a neural network-based approach is proposed to estimate the patient’s recovery, which can aid in the development of an assist-as-needed training strategy for the gait training system. Experimental results show that the proposed method can accurately estimate the external torques generated by the patient to determine their recovery. The estimated patient recovery is used for an impedance control of a 2-DOF robotic orthosis powered by pneumatic artificial muscles, which improves the robot joint compliance coefficients and makes the patient more comfortable and confident during rehabilitation exercises

Environments and cultures that nurture serendipity strikes

Based on the properties and mechanism of serendipity presented in former chapters, this chapter discusses how to create an environment for higher serendipity encounters and attainment possibilities. We examine four types of environments with different navigational and useful information concentration combinations. Building a pro-serendipity culture will help create environments that value and supports serendipity across fields. Additionally, we also address the notion that serendipity is a skill. Thus, it can produce either good or bad impacts on a collective level, depending on the ultimate purposes behind it

A new theory of serendipity

This document represents some preliminary and unpublished content of a chapter in the edited book titled A New Theory of Serendipity: Nature, Emergence and Mechanism, which will soon be published and distributed by De Gruyter Poland (Sciendo Imprint; part of Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin, Germany). A proper referencing should be like: Quan-Hoang Vuong, Tam-Tri Le, Quy Khuc, Minh-Hoang Nguyen. (2022). A new theory of serendipity. In: QH Vuong. (Ed.) A New Theory of Serendipity: Nature, Emergence and Mechanism (pp. 91-108). Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter

Prescribed Performance Function Based Sliding Mode Control of Opposing Pneumatic Artificial Muscles to Enhance Safety

The field of rehabilitation robotics has seen a significant increase in the utilization of Pneumatic Artificial Muscle (PAM)-based systems in recent years. These systems have demonstrated great potential in assisting and enhancing human movements and motor functions. However, as with any system that involves human interaction, safety is of the utmost importance. It is essential to ensure that the tracking error is kept within a safe range to prevent harm to people and equipment. This research proposes a control strategy that combines the exponential reaching law with a prescribed performance function to enhance safety in PAM-based rehabilitation robots. The prescribed performance function is designed to regulate the tracking error within predetermined limits during short and long-term operations, thereby mitigating large oscillations that may damage mechanical structures and patients. The experimental results indicate that the proposed controller demonstrated superior tracking accuracy and safety performance compared to traditional control methods. It is hoped that the findings of this study will contribute to developing safe and effective rehabilitation systems for patients in need

Measuring article quality in Wikipedia: Models and evaluation

Wikipedia has grown to be the world largest and busiest free encyclopedia, in which articles are collaboratively written and maintained by volunteers online. Despite its success as a means of knowledge sharing and collaboration, the public has never stopped criticizing the quality of Wikipedia articles edited by non-experts and inexperienced contributors. In this paper, we investigate the problem of assessing the quality of articles in collaborative authoring of Wikipedia. We propose three article quality measurement models that make use of the interaction data between articles and their contributors derived from the article edit history. Our Basic model is designed based on the mutual dependency between article quality and their author authority. The PeerReview model introduces the review behavior into measuring article quality. Finally, our ProbReview models extend PeerReview with partial reviewership of contributors as they edit various portions of the articles. We conduct experiments on a set of well-labeled Wikipedia articles to evaluate the effectiveness of our quality measurement models in resembling human judgement

On Ranking Controversies in Wikipedia: Models and Evaluation

Wikipedia is a very large and successful Web 2.0 example. As the number of Wikipedia articles and contributors grows at a very fast pace, there are also increasing disputes occurring among the contributors. Disputes often happen in articles with controversial content. They also occur frequently among contributors who are “aggressive ” or controversial in their personalities. In this paper, we aim to identify controversial articles in Wikipedia. We propose three models, namely the Basic model and two Controversy Rank (CR) models. These models draw clues from collaboration and edit history instead of interpreting the actual articles or edited content. While the Basic model only considers the amount of disputes within an article, the two Controversy Rank models extend the former by considering the relationships between articles and contributors. We also derived enhanced versions of these models by considering the age of articles. Our experiments on a collection of 19,456 Wikipedia articles shows that the Controversy Rank models can more effectively determine controversial articles compared to the Basic and other baseline models

Assessment of cataract surgical outcomes in settings where follow-up is poor: PRECOG, a multicentre observational study

Background Poor follow-up after cataract surgery in developing countries makes assessment of operative quality uncertain. We aimed to assess two strategies to measure visual outcome: recording the visual acuity of all patients 3 or fewer days postoperatively (early postoperative assessment), and recording that of only those patients who returned for the fi nal follow-up examination after 40 or more days without additional prompting. Methods Each of 40 centres in ten countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America recruited 40–120 consecutive surgical cataract patients. Operative-eye best-corrected visual acuity and uncorrected visual acuity were recorded before surgery, 3 or fewer days postoperatively, and 40 or more days postoperatively. Clinics logged whether each patient had returned for the fi nal follow-up examination without additional prompting, had to be actively encouraged to return, or had to be examined at home. Visual outcome for each centre was defi ned as the proportion of patients with uncorrected visual acuity of 6/18 or better minus the proportion with uncorrected visual acuity of 6/60 or worse, and was calculated for each participating hospital with results from the early assessment of all patients and the late assessment of only those returning unprompted, with results from the fi nal follow-up assessment for all patients used as the standard. Findings Of 3708 participants, 3441 (93%) had fi nal follow-up vision data recorded 40 or more days after surgery, 1831 of whom (51% of the 3581 total participants for whom mode of follow-up was recorded) had returned to the clinic without additional prompting. Visual outcome by hospital from early postoperative and fi nal follow-up assessment for all patients were highly correlated (Spearman’s rs=0·74, p<0·0001). Visual outcome from fi nal followup assessment for all patients and for only those who returned without additional prompting were also highly correlated (rs=0·86, p<0·0001), even for the 17 hospitals with unprompted return rates of less than 50% (rs=0·71, p=0·002). When we divided hospitals into top 25%, middle 50%, and bottom 25% by visual outcome, classifi cation based on fi nal follow-up assessment for all patients was the same as that based on early postoperative assessment for 27 (68%) of 40 centres, and the same as that based on data from patients who returned without additional prompting in 31 (84%) of 37 centres. Use of glasses to optimise vision at the time of the early and late examinations did not further improve the correlations. Interpretation Early vision assessment for all patients and follow-up assessment only for patients who return to the clinic without prompting are valid measures of operative quality in settings where follow-up is poor