An open database of productivity in Vietnam's social sciences and humanities for public use

This study presents a description of an open database on scientific output of Vietnamese researchers in social sciences and humanities, one that corrects for the shortcomings in current research publication databases such as data duplication, slow update, and a substantial cost of doing science. Here, using scientists’ self-reports, open online sources and cross-checking with Scopus database, we introduce a manual system and its semi-automated version of the database on the profiles of 657 Vietnamese researchers in social sciences and humanities who have published in Scopus-indexed journals from 2008 to 2018. The final system also records 973 foreign co-authors, 1,289 papers, and 789 affiliations. The data collection method, highly applicable for other sources, could be replicated in other developing countries while its content be used in cross-section, multivariate, and network data analyses. The open database is expected to help Vietnam revamp its research capacity and meet the public demand for greater transparency in science management

A Categorical Data Analysis on Financial Failures in Vietnam, 2007-2013

In this paper, we examined 256 cases of financial failure and fraud occuring during the recent Vietnam’s chaotic years from 2007 to 2013, employing methods of categorical data analysis. Reported results suggest that the rent-seeking approach, or resource-based orientation, alone does not help explain the outcome of a business intention while the association between Orientation and Approach is the best-fit predictor. Rampant financial collapse not only increases the cost of funds but also erodes trust in the economy. Entrepreneurship development and creativity capacity building are necessary to improve socio-economic conditions and the environment. This work also introduces intuitive and cognitive factors to predict ex-ante outcome of a financing scheme

"Cultural additivity" and how the values and norms of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism co-exist, interact, and influence Vietnamese society: A Bayesian analysis of long-standing folktales, using R and Stan

Every year, the Vietnamese people reportedly burned about 50,000 tons of joss papers, which took the form of not only bank notes, but iPhones, cars, clothes, even housekeepers, in hope of pleasing the dead. The practice was mistakenly attributed to traditional Buddhist teachings but originated in fact from China, which most Vietnamese were not aware of. In other aspects of life, there were many similar examples of Vietnamese so ready and comfortable with adding new norms, values, and beliefs, even contradictory ones, to their culture. This phenomenon, dubbed "cultural additivity", prompted us to study the co-existence, interaction, and influences among core values and norms of the Three Teachings--Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism--as shown through Vietnamese folktales. By applying Bayesian logistic regression, we evaluated the possibility of whether the key message of a story was dominated by a religion (dependent variables), as affected by the appearance of values and anti-values pertaining to the Three Teachings in the story (independent variables).Comment: 8 figures, 35 page

A novel approach in crude enzyme laccase production and application in emerging contaminant bioremediation

Laccase enzyme from white-rot fungi is a potential biocatalyst for the oxidation of emerging contaminants (ECs), such as pesticides, pharmaceuticals and steroid hormones. This study aims to develop a three-step platform to treat ECs: (i) enzyme production, (ii) enzyme concentration and (iii) enzyme application. In the first step, solid culture and liquid culture were compared. The solid culture produced significantly more laccase than the liquid culture (447 vs. 74 μM/min after eight days), demonstrating that white rot fungi thrived on a solid medium. In the second step, the enzyme was concentrated 6.6 times using an ultrafiltration (UF) process, resulting in laccase activity of 2980 μM/min. No enzymatic loss due to filtration and membrane adsorption was observed, suggesting the feasibility of the UF membrane for enzyme concentration. In the third step, concentrated crude enzyme was applied in an enzymatic membrane reactor (EMR) to remove a diverse set of ECs (31 compounds in six groups). The EMR effectively removed of steroid hormones, phytoestrogen, ultraviolet (UV) filters and industrial chemical (above 90%). However, it had low removal of pesticides and pharmaceuticals

Onsager Loop-Transition and First Order Flux-Line Lattice Melting in High-TcT_c Superconductors

Monte-Carlo simulations in conjunction with finite-size scaling analysis are used to investigate the $(H,T)$-phase diagram in uniaxial anisotropic high- $T_c$ superconductors, both in zero magnetic field and in intermediate magnetic fields for various mass-anisotropies. The model we consider is the uniformly frustrated anisotropic Villain Model. In zero magnetic field, and for all anisotropies considered, we find one single second order phase transition, mediated by an Onsager vortex-loop blowout. This is the superconductor-normal metal transition.A comparison with numerical simulations and a critical scaling analysis of the zero-field loop-transition yields the same exponent of the loop distribution function at the critical point. In the intermediate magnetic field regime, we find two anomalies in the specific heat. The first anomaly at a temperature $T_m$ is associated with the melting transition of the flux-line lattice. The second anomaly at a temperature $T_z$ is one where phase coherence along the field direction is destroyed. We argue that $T_m=T_z$ in the thermodynamic and continuum limit. Hence, there is no regime where the flux line lattice melts into a disentangled flux-line liquid. The loss of phase coherence parallel to the magnetic field in the sample is argued to be due to the proliferation of closed non-field induced vortex loops on the scale of the magnetic length in the problem, resulting in flux-line cutting and recombination. In the flux-line liquid phase, therefore, flux-lines appear no longer to be well defined entities. A finite-size scaling analysis of the delta function peak specific heat anomaly at the melting transition is used to extract the discontinuity of the entropy at the melting transition.This entropy discontinuity is found to increase rapidly with mass-anisotropy.Comment: 22 pages, 11 figures included, to be published in Phys. Rev. B, 57 xxx (1998

#Bieber + #Blast = #BieberBlast: Early Prediction of Popular Hashtag Compounds

Compounding of natural language units is a very common phenomena. In this paper, we show, for the first time, that Twitter hashtags which, could be considered as correlates of such linguistic units, undergo compounding. We identify reasons for this compounding and propose a prediction model that can identify with 77.07% accuracy if a pair of hashtags compounding in the near future (i.e., 2 months after compounding) shall become popular. At longer times T = 6, 10 months the accuracies are 77.52% and 79.13% respectively. This technique has strong implications to trending hashtag recommendation since newly formed hashtag compounds can be recommended early, even before the compounding has taken place. Further, humans can predict compounds with an overall accuracy of only 48.7% (treated as baseline). Notably, while humans can discriminate the relatively easier cases, the automatic framework is successful in classifying the relatively harder cases.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, 9 tables, published in CSCW (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing) 2016. in Proceedings of 19th ACM conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2016

Influenza A H5N1 and HIV co-infection: case report

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The role of adaptive immunity in severe influenza is poorly understood. The occurrence of influenza A/H5N1 in a patient with HIV provided a rare opportunity to investigate this.</p> <p>Case Presentation</p> <p>A 30-year-old male was admitted on day 4 of influenza-like-illness with tachycardia, tachypnea, hypoxemia and bilateral pulmonary infiltrates. Influenza A/H5N1 and HIV tests were positive and the patient was treated with Oseltamivir and broad-spectrum antibiotics. Initially his condition improved coinciding with virus clearance by day 6. He clinically deteriorated as of day 10 with fever recrudescence and increasing neutrophil counts and died on day 16. His admission CD4 count was 100/μl and decreased until virus was cleared. CD8 T cells shifted to a CD27⁺CD28^-phenotype. Plasma chemokine and cytokine levels were similar to those found previously in fatal H5N1.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The course of H5N1 infection was not notably different from other cases. Virus was cleared despite profound CD4 T cell depletion and aberrant CD8 T cell activation but this may have increased susceptibility to a fatal secondary infection.</p

"Cultural additivity" and how the values and norms of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism co-exist, interact, and influence Vietnamese society: A Bayesian analysis of long-standing folktales, using R and Stan

Every year, the Vietnamese people reportedly burned about 50,000 tons of joss papers, which took the form of not only bank notes, but iPhones, cars, clothes, even housekeepers, in hope of pleasing the dead. The practice was mistakenly attributed to traditional Buddhist teachings but originated in fact from China, which most Vietnamese were not aware of. In other aspects of life, there were many similar examples of Vietnamese so ready and comfortable with adding new norms, values, and beliefs, even contradictory ones, to their culture. This phenomenon, dubbed “cultural additivity”, prompted us to study the co-existence, interaction, and influences among core values and norms of the Three Teachings –Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism–as shown through Vietnamese folktales. By applying Bayesian logistic regression, we evaluated the possibility of whether the key message of a story was dominated by a religion (dependent variables), as affected by the appearance of values and anti-values pertaining to the Three Teachings in the story (independent variables). Our main findings included the existence of the cultural additivity of Confucian and Taoist values. More specifically, empirical results showed that the interaction or addition of the values of Taoism and Confucianism in folktales together helped predict whether the key message of a story was about Confucianism, β{VT ⋅ VC} = 0.86. Meanwhile, there was no such statistical tendency for Buddhism. The results lead to a number of important implications. First, this showed the dominance of Confucianism because the fact that Confucian and Taoist values appeared together in a story led to the story’s key message dominated by Confucianism. Thus, it presented the evidence of Confucian dominance and against liberal interpretations of the concept of the Common Roots of Three Religions (“tam giáo đồng nguyên”) as religious unification or unicity. Second, the concept of “cultural additivity” could help explain many interesting socio-cultural phenomena, namely the absence of religious intolerance and extremism in the Vietnamese society, outrageous cases of sophistry in education, the low productivity in creative endeavors like science and technology, the misleading branding strategy in business. We are aware that our results are only preliminary and more studies, both theoretical and empirical, must be carried out to give a full account of the explanatory reach of “cultural additivity”

The pioneer factor PBX1 is a novel driver of metastatic progression in ERalpha-positive breast cancer

Over 30% of ERalpha breast cancer patients develop relapses and progress to metastatic disease despite treatment with endocrine therapies. The pioneer factor PBX1 translates epigenetic cues and mediates estrogen induced ERalpha binding. Here we demonstrate that PBX1 plays a central role in regulating the ERalpha transcriptional response to epidermal growth factor (EGF) signaling. PBX1 regulates a subset of EGF-ERalpha genes highly expressed in aggressive breast tumours. Retrospective stratification of luminal patients using PBX1 protein levels in primary cancer further demonstrates that elevated PBX1 protein levels correlate with earlier metastatic progression. In agreement, PBX1 protein levels are significantly upregulated during metastatic progression in ERalpha-positive breast cancer patients. Finally we reveal that PBX1 upregulation in aggressive tumours is partly mediated by genomic amplification of the PBX1 locus. Correspondingly, ERalpha positive breast cancer patients carrying PBX1 amplification are characterized by poor survival. Notably, we demonstrate that PBX1 amplification can be identified in tumor derived-circulating free DNA of ERalpha positive metastatic patients. Metastatic patients with PBX1 amplification are also characterized by shorter relapse-free survival. Our data identifies PBX1 amplification as a functional hallmark of aggressive ERalpha-positive breast cancers. Mechanistically, PBX1 amplification impinges on several critical pathways associated with aggressive ERalpha positive breast cancer