Arm-hand movement: imitation of human natural gestures with tenodesis effect

Proceedings of: 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS '11), September 25-30, 2011, San Francisco, USAFor an anthropomorphic arm-hand robot, grasping and in-hand manipulating an object can be realized with numerous approach trajectories and grasping configurations. The redundancy at this level of the tasks is due to a large number of degrees-of-freedom (DOFs) of the arm-hand system. This redundancy constitutes a big challenge to the planning and control tasks of the robot. For this kind of tasks, human has his own choices privileging certain configurations over the others. These choices come from a long learning process which implicitly takes into account the mechanical constraints of the system. In this work, we concentrate our effort on deciphering certain mechanical constraints, ”tenodesis” phenomenon in particular, in order to solve the redundancy and imitate the human natural gestures in the tasks of grasping or in-hand manipulation.European Community's Seventh Framework ProgramThe research leading to these results has been supported by the HANDLE project, which has received funding from the European Communitys Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement ICT 231640

Cultural evolution in Vietnam’s early 20th century: a Bayesian networks analysis of Franco-Chinese house designs

The study of cultural evolution has taken on an increasingly interdisciplinary and diverse approach in explicating phenomena of cultural transmission and adoptions. Inspired by this computational movement, this study uses Bayesian networks analysis, combining both the frequentist and the Hamiltonian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach, to investigate the highly representative elements in the cultural evolution of a Vietnamese city’s architecture in the early 20th century. With a focus on the façade design of 68 old houses in Hanoi’s Old Quarter (based on 78 data lines extracted from 248 photos), the study argues that it is plausible to look at the aesthetics, architecture, and designs of the house façade to find traces of cultural evolution in Vietnam, which went through more than six decades of French colonization and centuries of sociocultural influence from China. The in-depth technical analysis, though refuting the presumed model on the probabilistic dependency among the variables, yields several results, the most notable of which is the strong influence of Buddhism over the decorations of the house façade. Particularly, in the top 5 networks with the best Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) scores and p\u3c0.05, the variable for decorations (DC) always has a direct probabilistic dependency on the variable B for Buddhism. The paper then checks the robustness of these models using Hamiltonian MCMC method and find the posterior distributions of the models’ coefficients all satisfy the technical requirement. Finally, this study suggests integrating Bayesian statistics in the social sciences in general and for the study of cultural evolution and architectural transformation in particular

Is landholding a potential barrier to adopting profitable livelihoods in the Mekong Delta region in Vietnam ?

Using secondary data on rural households in the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam, our study is the first to identify (i) what livelihoods are adopted by rural households, (ii) which ones are profitable and which are not, and (iii) whether access to various types of land is an important factor affecting households’ choice of remunerative livelihoods. Considering various income sources, we apply cluster analysis techniques to offer the first classification of five types of livelihood adopted by local households. We then compare livelihood outcomes across livelihood groups using Bonferroni pairwise tests and quantile functions (Pen’s parades). It was found that households engaged in farm work, formal wage-earning work and non-wage work livelihoods obtained higher levels of income than did those with livelihoods depending on informal wage-earning work or non-labor income sources. Using a multinomial logit model, we also examine factors affecting choices of income-earning activities, and find that several types of land are positively associated with the choice of high-return livelihoods, implying that lack of access to land is a potential obstacle to adopting profitable livelihoods. Fortunately, education is found to play a major role in the pursuit of remunerative livelihoods, which suggests that better education would help households move from low- to high-return activities

"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

Exploiting Idioms and Proverbs of Vietnamese Regions in Teaching Mathematics in Primary Schools

Mathematics and idioms, as well as proverbs, all reflect the laws of life. At the same time, primary school children may have heard idioms and proverbs before attending school. Therefore, there are many possibilities to exploit and apply idioms and proverbs in teaching mathematics in primary schools. This study aims to identify appropriate situations and apply idioms and proverbs in different regions of Vietnam to teaching mathematics. The researchers selected 1155 expressions related to mathematics from many typical pieces of research on idioms and proverbs in Vietnam. After surveying 1822 teachers three times in many provinces and cities in all 3 regions of Vietnam: the North, the Central and the South, the researchers have classified the data according to the criteria from closed to open-ended questions. The results show a prominent level of interest (level 4/5) of all teachers participating in the survey, and there is no difference in the effectiveness in the three regions, but there is a clear difference in regions in using idioms and proverbs. Particularly, identifying situations to teach geometric and quantitative knowledge, as well as probability and statistics, allows one to apply idioms and proverbs at a high level. It is concluded that if idioms and proverbs from Vietnamese regions are appropriately selected and applied in teaching mathematics in primary schools, they will contribute to improving students' mathematical ability and preserving the national cultural heritage. Doi: 10.28991/ESJ-2022-SIED-015 Full Text: PD

In vitro bioactivities of Codonopsis javanica root extract from Kon Tum province, Vietnam

Dangshen Codonopsis javanica exhibits invaluable medicinal properties in herbal remedies; however, there has currently not been much specific analysis of the phytochemicals and bioactivities of this plant. The root ethanol extract of C. javanica contains substances such as saponins, phenolic acids, terpenoids, and alkaloids. It displays an antibacterial effect against Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aureus, and Bacillus cereus with the IC50 values of 150, 100, 150, and 90 μg/mL, respectively. The antioxidant capacity of the root extract was also observed with an IC50 value of 46.8 ± 6.8 μg/mL. Furthermore, the extract exhibits activity on human cancer cell lines HepG2 (IC50 = 83.6 ± 2.7 μg/mL) and MCF-7 (IC50 = 95.3 ± 2.3 μg/mL). Hence, this study provides the basic data for further research on the bioactivities of natural compounds of Dangshen C. javanica for the first time

Development of a PCB-based passive capacitive sensor for fluidic flow detection

A passive wireless sensor system integrated with capacitive fluidic flow detection is proposed and developed based on the printed circuit board (PCB) technique. The capacitive sensing structure consists of PCB-based electrodes enclosing an insulating pipe that contains the fluidic flow of interest. The conductivity of the fluidic flow and the appearance of foreign objects within the flow can be determined by analysing the resonant frequency of the detection path in the proposed system. Experimental results demonstrate that the resonant frequency increases according to the increase in electrical conductivity of the fluidic flow. In addition, the sensing performance is also confirmed by the detection of sizes and electrical conductivities of NaCl droplets passing through the detection zone. Furthermore, this work indirectly verifies the effectiveness and feasibility of the integration of passive wireless sensing technique into the fluidic flow detector by using the PCB fabrication technique and demonstrates great potential for use in various applications in biomedical and chemical fields, especially in biomedical applications