This study investigates the effect of each component of CEO compensation, including cash-based component (salary and bonus), equity-based component (stock grant and stock option), and other perks on disclosure of corporate social responsibility (CSR) information of global firms. The study uses 2SLS IV estimation method and a sample of 580 US-based firms in a seven-year period. The study finds that equity-based remuneration has a significant and positive impact on a firm's CSR disclosure while CEO salary, bonus, and other perquisites have (...) significant detrimental effects on CSR disclosure. The paper indicates that a CEO's motivation for CSR reporting might arise from stock grant and option; meanwhile, salary, bonus and other perks could demotivate the CEO in this regard. Our findings offer insight into designing CEO compensation packages to meet shareholders' interests and stakeholders' expectations for a sustainable business. (shrink)

This research employs the Bayesian network modeling approach, and the Markov chain Monte Carlo technique, to learn about the role of lies and violence in teachings of major religions, using a unique dataset extracted from long-standing Vietnamese folktales. The results indicate that, although lying and violent acts augur negative consequences for those who commit them, their associations with core religious values diverge in the final outcome for the folktale characters. Lying that serves a religious mission of either Confucianism or Taoism (...) (but not Buddhism) brings a positive outcome to a character (βT_and_Lie_O= 2.23; βC_and_Lie_O= 1.47; βT_and_Lie_O= 2.23). A violent act committed to serving Buddhist missions results in a happy ending for the committer (βB_and_Viol_O= 2.55). What is highlighted here is a glaring double standard in the interpretation and practice of the three teachings: the very virtuous outcomes being preached, whether that be compassion and meditation in Buddhism, societal order in Confucianism, or natural harmony in Taoism, appear to accommodate two universal vices—violence in Buddhism and lying in the latter two. These findings contribute to a host of studies aimed at making sense of contradictory human behaviors, adding the role of religious teachings in addition to cognition in belief maintenance and motivated reasoning in discounting counterargument. (shrink)

The relationship between greenwashing and visitors' green behavior remains an under-researched topic in the tourism and hospitality literature, despite evidence of the harmful effect of greenwashing on the reputation and competitive advantage of organizations. This study extends attribution theory into the green context to develop a research framework for investigating the interrelationship between greenwashing, green trust, and green word-of-mouth (WOM), especially the roles of green trust and connectedness to nature. We conducted a survey of 289 visitors staying in four- and (...) five-star hotels in Vietnam. The findings indicated that hotels should avoid greenwashing due to its negative impact on visitors' green trust and green WOM. Moreover, the study found that greenwashing had an indirect and negative influence on green WOM based on visitors' green trust. Importantly, the research revealed the value of connectedness in moderating green attitudes and behaviors among visitors. (shrink)

Objectives: The official implementation of clinical pharmacy in Vietnam has arrived relatively late, resulting in various stressors. This study aims to evaluate job stress level and suggest viable solutions.Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted on clinical pharmacists in 128 hospitals in Ho Chi Minh City. Job stress questions were derived from the Healthcare Profession Stress Inventory.Results: A total of 197 CPs participated, giving a response rate of 82.4%. Participants were found to have moderate job stress with an overall mean stress (...) score of 1.5 and stress rate of 52.8%. The sample size was statistically adequate and the HPSI was valid and reliable. Patient care responsibility was the main stressor, especially in public hospitals, followed by job conflicts. Lack of experience, low income, and inability to participate in clinical ward rounds caused significant stress to CPs regarding job recognition and job uncertainty. More practice-oriented training programs in bachelor curricula and clinical practice should be applied to help CPs gain more experience, self-confidence, and diminish job stress.Conclusion: CPs in HCMC have moderate stress. More practice-oriented training programs should be prioritized to lessen stress for CPs. (shrink)

During the last two decades Confucian heritage culture countries have widely promoted teaching and learning reforms to advance their educational systems. To skip the painfully long research stage, Confucian heritage culture educators have borrowed Western philosophies and practices with the assumption that what has been done successfully in the West will produce similar outcomes in the East. The wide importation of cooperative learning practices to Confucian heritage culture classrooms recently is an example. However, cooperative learning has been documented in many (...) studies not to work effectively in Confucian heritage culture classrooms. The reason is that the educators often impose this instructional method on the students without a careful consideration of its appropriateness in the socio-cultural context of Confucian heritage culture countries. This procedure is not effective and professional because learning does not stand alone. Rather, it is shaped and influenced by other factors including teaching methods, learning tasks, assessment demands, workload and the learning culture of students in the local context. For cooperative learning to work effectively in Confucian heritage culture classrooms, reformers need to consider the importation of this approach in line with a careful examination of all supports and constraints that affect those factors that are associated with learning. The volume provides an applied theoretical framework and culturally appropriate and practical instructions that could assist Confucian heritage culture educators and teachers to address various factors at multiple levels in order to optimize success in importing cooperative learning to their classrooms. Overall, it provides strategies to assist Confucian heritage culture teachers to change their teaching practices, redesign lessons plans, design assessment methods, and organize learning activities in a manner that can influence Confucian heritage culture students to shift from employing teacher-centered learning approaches to cooperative learning. (shrink)

Cet article se présente comme un questionnement sur l'attitude à prendre, de la part d'un pays francophone tel que le Vietnam, « lourd » de son passé colonial, et attentif à « rattraper » le train en marche de l'humanité entière, après tant de péripéties et de retard connus durant et à cause de ses temps de guerre. Attitude à adopter envers soi-même, envers l'Autre et l'autre culture. Pour ce, il s'appuie sur les quelques notions de l'interculturel, analyse la façon (...) dont le Vietnam a su gérer ses rapports à soi et à l'Autre, d'hier à aujourd'hui, et propose une attitude à adopter pour chaque pays, dans l'espace francophone et face à la mondialisation. Ce questionnement se veut d'être une voix parmi d'autres et non la seule voix représentative du VietnamThis article’s aim is to ask questions about the attitude that should be adopted by Vietnam, a French-speaking country bearing its "heavy" colonial past. After so many events and delays caused by the war, the country is now interested in catching up with the train represented by the rest of mankind which is moving forward. The question is thus to define the attitude Vietnam could adopt towards itself, towards the Other and the other culture. Thus, this article has made use of certain notions of interculturality, analyzed the way in which Vietnam has managed relations with itself and with the Other, and proposes an attitude for each country to adopt in the French-speaking Community and in reaction to globalization. The author wishes to be a voice among others and not the only voice representing Vietnam. (shrink)

Folklore has a critical role as a cultural transmitter, all the while being a socially accepted medium for the expressions of culturally contradicting wishes and conducts. In this study of Vietnamese folktales, through the use of Bayesian multilevel modeling and the Markov chain Monte Carlo technique, we offer empirical evidence for how the interplay between religious teachings (Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism) and deviant behaviors (lying and violence) could affect a folktale’s outcome. The findings indicate that characters who lie and/or commit (...) violent acts tend to have bad endings, as intuition would dictate, but when they are associated with any of the above Three Teachings, the final endings may vary. Positive outcomes are seen in cases where characters associated with Confucianism lie and characters associated with Buddhism act violently. The results supplement the worldwide literature on discrepancies between folklore and real-life conduct, as well as on the contradictory human behaviors vis-à-vis religious teachings. Overall, the study highlights the complexity of human decision-making, especially beyond the folklore realm. (shrink)

Purpose This study aims to ascertain the impact of data collecting awareness on perceived information security concerns and information-sharing behavior on social networking sites. Design/methodology/approach Based on communication privacy management theory, the study forecasted the relationship between information-sharing behavior and awareness of data collecting purposes, data collection tactics and perceived security risk using structural equation modeling analysis and one-way ANOVA. The sample size of 521 young social media users in Vietnam, ages 18 to 34, was made up of 26.7% men (...) and 73.3% women. When constructing the questionnaire survey method with lone source respondents, the individual’s unique awareness and experiences with using online social networks (OSNs) were taken into account. Findings The results of the investigation demonstrate a significant relationship between information-sharing and awareness of data collecting, perceptions of information security threats and behavior. Social media users have used OSN privacy settings and paid attention to the sharing restriction because they are concerned about data harvesting. Research limitations/implications This study was conducted among young Vietnamese social media users, reflecting specific characteristics prevalent in the Vietnamese environment, and hence may be invalid in other nations’ circumstances. Practical implications Social media platform providers should improve user connectivity by implementing transparent privacy policies that allow users to choose how their data are used; have clear privacy statements and specific policies governing the use of social media users’ data that respect users’ consent to use their data; and thoroughly communicate how they collect and use user data while promptly detecting any potential vulnerabilities within their systems. Originality/value The authors ascertain that the material presented in this manuscript will not infringe upon any statutory copyright and that the manuscript will not be submitted elsewhere while under Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society review. (shrink)

: Nguyen Trai is a man with a great personality in Vietnam. He has morality, culture, pure soul, and profound wisdom of all times. Nguyen Trai lived in the 15th century in a feudal society with many changes. The paper studied Nguyen Trai’s philosophical thoughts to help develop a prosperous and happy country using the nation’s traditional cultural values. The article uses the methodology of dialectical materialism as a general principle and a specific historical principle to evaluate Nguyen Trai’s benevolence (...) and righteousness in terms of compassion, justice, and management, associated with the interests of the people, the community, and society. The article also uses analytical and synthesis methods to highlight the content of benevolence and righteousness in the cultural tradition of the Vietnamese nation today. The Covid-19 pandemic had affected the world in general and Vietnam in particular. So Nguyen Trai’s thought culture is powerfully and effectively prompt in responding to the Covid-19 pandemic in Vietnam and other countries today. In this article, Nguyen Trai’s benevolence and righteousness fairness clearly define the responsibility of the state and the obligation of citizens to promote the traditional cultural values of the nation. Resumo: Nguyen Trai foi um grande filósofo patriótico vietnamita, uma das maiores personalidades de todos os tempos. Ele viveu no século XV; seus pensamentos se tornaram um grande exemplo de ética, cultura, alma e sabedoria vietnamitas. O artigo estudou os pensamentos filosóficos de Nguyen Trai, para ajudar a desenvolver um país próspero e feliz, usando os valores culturais tradicionais da nação. O texto utiliza a metodologia do materialismo dialético como princípio geral e como princípio histórico específico, a fim de avaliar a benevolência e a retidão de Nguyen Trai, em termos de compaixão, justiça e gestão, associadas aos interesses do povo, da comunidade e da sociedade. O artigo também usa métodos analíticos e de síntese, para destacar o conteúdo de benevolência e retidão, na tradição cultural da nação vietnamita hoje. A pandemia de Covid-19 afetou o mundo, em geral, e o Vietnã, em particular. Portanto, a cultura de pensamento de Nguyen Trai é poderosa e eficaz na resposta à pandemia de Covid19, no Vietnã e em outros países, na atualidade. Neste estudo, a benevolência e a justiça de Nguyen Trai definem claramente a responsabilidade do Estado e a obrigação dos cidadãos de promover os valores culturais tradicionais da nação. (shrink)

In today’s global higher education environment, international students represent not only an important source of external income for universities: the degree of cross-border student mobility also reflects the internationalization of higher education sector. Universities have engaged in efforts to sell themselves to prospective students and promotional videos are among the most widely used marketing tools for this purpose. This study reports the results of a study analyzing the content of 140 higher education promotional videos from 14 countries available on YouTube. (...) The results reveal that while the pattern of use of YouTube for two-waycommunication with viewers, information contents and appeal messages among sampled universities is fairly homogenous, some marked differences emerge when cultural background and global position ranking of the university are taken into account. The implications of these findings are that, although, transnational higher education has been profoundly globalized, culture still plays a significant role in marketing practice for the recruitment of mobile students. In addition, different universities have various student-targeted segments. These findings provide the basis of a series of recommendations for universities looking to optimize their use of YouTube and promotional video design to market to international students. (shrink)

Educational philosophy helps to orient the educational development process of each country and develop the capacity of each individual in society. In the educational history of each country, there is always a process of preserving and transferring social heritages. The educational system prepares the next generation to enter society and imparts ideas, values, and beliefs that will shape young people’s thinking and behavior for the rest of their lives. Therefore, this article wishes to clearly and vividly clarify the importance of (...) studying Pragmatism’s educational philosophy to realize its present influence. At the same time, it is crucial to deeply understand the educational process of Pragmatism to derive meaning and clarify the primary function of educating Vietnamese people in the context of current global integration. The article uses the materialist dialectic method with broad and specific historical principles to evaluate Vietnamese education with opportunities and challenges in the current integration process by studying Pragmatism’s philosophical education. The article found that the theory of education by Pragmatism clarifies the role of social educational institutions – schools in the educational process. In parallel, it is a teacher with educational methods and programs that are the basis for educating learners to become comprehensive citizens in the future. And students are the goal and the product that the educational philosophy needs to implement. Research results, the article clarifies the need to develop an educational philosophy for Vietnamese people to build comprehensively in the socialist orientation in the current globalization context. (shrink)

Motivated by exploitation concerns, we argue for the importance of participant engagement in basic human intracranial electrophysiology research. This research takes advantage of unique neurosurgical opportunities to better understand complex systems of the human brain, but it also exposes participants to additional risks without immediate therapeutic intent. We argue that understanding participant values and incorporating their perspectives into the research process may help determine whether and to what extent research practices and the resulting distributions of risks and benefits constitute exploitation (...) and contribute to building a brain research paradigm that is genuinely responsive to participant values. More broadly, we highlight the importance of paying attention to participant interests in non-therapeutic brain research. (shrink)

A growing amount of media is paid for by its consumers through their very consumption of it. Typically, this new media is web-based and paid for by advertising. It includes the services offered by Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube. We offer an ethical assessment of the attention economy, the market where attention is exchanged for new media. We argue that the assessment has ethical implications for how the attention economy should be regulated. To conduct the assessment, we employ two heuristics (...) for evaluating markets. One is the “harm” criterion, which relates to whether the market tends to engender extremely harmful outcomes for individuals or society as a whole. The other is the “agency” criterion, which relates not to the outcomes of the market, but rather, to whether it somehow reflects or has its source in weakened agency. We argue that the attention economy animates concerns with respect to both criteria and that new media should be subject to the same sort of regulation as other harmful, addictive products. (shrink)

Recent advancements in neuroengineering research have prompted neuroethicists to propose a variety of “ethical guidance” frameworks (e.g., principles, guidelines, framing questions, responsible research innovation frameworks, and ethical priorities) to inform this work. In this chapter, we offer a comparative analysis of five recently proposed ethical guidance frameworks (NIH neuroethics guiding principles, Nuffield Council on Bioethics, Global Neuroethics Summit Delegates, the Center for Neurotechnology’s neuroethical principles and guidelines, and the Neurotechnology Ethics Taskforce’s ethical priorities). We identify some common themes among these (...) frameworks, making explicit significant areas of convergence. We also highlight three areas of ethical consideration that have not received sufficient attention across these frameworks (extended care for research participants, cultural salience, and stakeholder input). Further attention and analysis of these three areas would improve the breadth and scope of ethical considerations for neuroengineering research. (shrink)

This paper examines the roles of indexicals in explicating speakers’ intentions and constructing common ground in the context of a continuum with two extreme endpoints, the intracultural at one end, and the intercultural at the other, within the framework of the socio-cognitive approach proposed and developed by Kecskes and Kecskes and Zhang. Thirteen participants from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds were recruited to represent varying degrees on the intra- and intercultural continuum. They were divided into three groups: American English speakers, (...) speakers from Asian countries, and a group of speakers, each of whom represents linguistically and culturally different countries. Eight extracts were drawn from the data of up to three hours of recordings, including discussions on one topic, and retrospective interviews retrieving the speakers’ intentions for using deixis. The results reveal that the closer the interlocutors were towards the intercultural communicative context endpoint on the continuum, the more they employed four types of indexicals as common ground construction strategies. Those strategies included the explicit manifestation of intentions, clarification, and confirmation of referent identification in actual situational context, elicitation of information, disambiguation and explanation of similar salient specifics in their home culture in an effort to sustain cooperative communication. This study enhances our understanding of different functions of indexicals in interactions on the intra- and intercultural continuum, which resulted from different levels of context interpretation and common ground. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: So far in this book, we have examined algorithmic decision systems from three autonomy-based perspectives: in terms of what we owe autonomous agents (chapters 3 and 4), in terms of the conditions required for people to act autonomously (chapters 5 and 6), and in terms of the responsibilities of agents (chapter 7). -/- In this chapter we turn to the ways in which autonomy underwrites democratic governance. Political authority, which is to say the ability of a government to exercise (...) power, may be justifiable or not. Whether it is justified and how it can come to be justified is a question of political legitimacy. Political legitimacy is another way in which autonomy and responsibility are linked. This relationship is the basis of the current chapter, and it is important in understanding the moral salience of algorithmic systems. We will draw the connection as follows. We begin, in section 8.1, by describing two uses of technology: crime predicting technology used to drive policing practices and social media technology used to influence elections (including by Cambridge Analytica and by the Internet Research Agency). In section 8.2 we consider several views of legitimacy and argue for a hybrid version of normative legitimacy based on one recently offered by Fabienne Peter. In section 8.3 we will explain that the connection between political legitimacy and autonomy is that legitimacy is grounded in legitimating processes, which are in turn based on autonomy. Algorithmic systems—among them PredPol and the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook-Internet Research Agency amalgam—can hinder that legitimation process and conflict with democratic legitimacy, as we argue in section 8.4. We will conclude by returning to several cases that serve as through-lines to the book: Loomis, Wagner, and Houston Schools. -/- The link below is to an open-access copy of the chapter. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

This paper offers some refinements to a particular objection to act consequentialism, the “causal impotence” objection. According to proponents of the objection, when we find circumstances in which severe, unnecessary harms result entirely from voluntary acts, it seems as if we should be able to indict at least one act among those acts, but act consequentialism appears to lack the resources to offer this indictment. Our aim is to show is that the most promising response on behalf of act consequentialism, (...) the threshold argument, cannot offer a fully general prescription about what to do in cases of collective action. (shrink)

Algorithms influence every facet of modern life: criminal justice, education, housing, entertainment, elections, social media, news feeds, work… the list goes on. Delegating important decisions to machines, however, gives rise to deep moral concerns about responsibility, transparency, freedom, fairness, and democracy. Algorithms and Autonomy connects these concerns to the core human value of autonomy in the contexts of algorithmic teacher evaluation, risk assessment in criminal sentencing, predictive policing, background checks, news feeds, ride-sharing platforms, social media, and election interference. Using these (...) case studies, the authors provide a better understanding of machine fairness and algorithmic transparency. They explain why interventions in algorithmic systems are necessary to ensure that algorithms are not used to control citizens' participation in politics and undercut democracy. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. (shrink)

When agents insert technological systems into their decision-making processes, they can obscure moral responsibility for the results. This can give rise to a distinct moral wrong, which we call “agency laundering.” At root, agency laundering involves obfuscating one’s moral responsibility by enlisting a technology or process to take some action and letting it forestall others from demanding an account for bad outcomes that result. We argue that the concept of agency laundering helps in understanding important moral problems in a number (...) of recent cases involving automated, or algorithmic, decision-systems. We apply our conception of agency laundering to a series of examples, including Facebook’s automated advertising suggestions, Uber’s driver interfaces, algorithmic evaluation of K-12 teachers, and risk assessment in criminal sentencing. We distinguish agency laundering from several other critiques of information technology, including the so-called “responsibility gap,” “bias laundering,” and masking. (shrink)

Since 2013, Vietnam has implemented a plan to reform the whole education sector. However, there is little understanding on the status of educational research in Vietnam, which may lay the foundation for such plan. Thus, this research aims to analyze the whole picture of educational research from Vietnam, as seen from the Clarivate Web of Science (WOS) database: 215 publications were recorded, ranging from 1991 to 2018. These 215 publications were further analyzed from five perspectives: 1) number of publications by (...) year; 2) research fields and levels of education; 3) top institutions with the highest number of publications; 4) international collaboration; and 5) quality. Some of the most notable results are: 1) the educational sciences in Vietnam have been still under-developed until recently; 2) among different research topics research among educational sciences, some (e.g., Vocational Education and Training or Early Childhood Education) seemed to be overlooked whereas others (e.g., Higher Education and Teaching and Learning) seemed to receive more attention from educational scholars; 3) all the most major education – specialized universities did not appear among the top five institutions with highest number of publications; 4) Australia, Thailand, the USA, New Zealand and China were the countries with the highest number of co-publications with Vietnamese researchers; and 5) The majority of publications belonged to low-ranked journals. Implications would be withdrawn for Vietnamese policymakers, education leaders, educational researchers and teachers in order to adjust their policies and/or action plans; thus, enhancing the performance and impacts of educational research in the future. (shrink)

Relationships with international students can be beneficial to higher education in terms of financial and human resources. For this reason, establishing and maintaining such relationships are usually pre-eminent concerns. In this study, we extended the application of the disconfirmation expectation model by incorporating components from subjective task value to predict the loyalty of international students toward their host countries. On a sample of 410 Vietnamese students enrolled in establishments of higher education in over 15 countries across the globe, we employed (...) structural equation model to construct the conceptual model. Our empirical findings revealed that while the roles of satisfaction and disconfirmation are still important as direct and indirect antecedents of international student loyalty, its most powerful predictors are the three components of subjective task value: attainment, utility and intrinsic. These insights result in a number of implications for actors on the higher ducation scene, such as heads of institutions and policy makers. (shrink)

Words not only define our reality, they reveal and direct our attitudes toward that reality. This feature of language is especially problematic when it comes to our treatment of animals. In this supple, thoughtful, and closely argued work, Vietnamese-American scholar Hanh Nguyen examines the words we use in English and other languages to justify our abuse of other-than-human world. Reframing our metaphors, categories, and descriptions of animals we love, hate, and eat allows us to break long-standing habits and see (...) our obligations and connections to non-human animals more clearly. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: One important criticism of algorithmic systems is that they lack transparency. Such systems can be opaque because they are complex, protected by patent or trade secret, or deliberately obscure. In the EU, there is a debate about whether the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) contains a “right to explanation,” and if so what such a right entails. Our task in this chapter is to address this informational component of algorithmic systems. We argue that information access is integral for respecting (...) autonomy, and transparency policies should be tailored to advance autonomy. -/- To make this argument we distinguish two facets of agency (i.e., capacity to act). The first is practical agency, or the ability to act effectively according to one’s values. The second is what we call cognitive agency, which is the ability to exercise what Pamela Hieronymi calls “evaluative control” (i.e., the ability to control our affective states, such as beliefs, desires, and attitudes). We argue that respecting autonomy requires providing persons sufficient information to exercise evaluative control and properly interpret the world and one’s place in it. We draw this distinction out by considering algorithmic systems used in background checks, and we apply the view to key cases involving risk assessment in criminal justice decisions and K-12 teacher evaluation. -/- The link below is to an open access version of the chapter. (shrink)

Psychometrics firms such as Cambridge Analytica (CA) and troll factories such as the Internet Research Agency (IRA) have had a significant effect on democratic politics, through narrow targeting of political advertising (CA) and concerted disinformation campaigns on social media (IRA) (U.S. Department of Justice 2019; Select Committee on Intelligence, United States Senate 2019; DiResta et al. 2019). It is natural to think that such activities manipulate individuals and, hence, are wrong. Yet, as some recent cases illustrate, the moral concerns with (...) these activities cannot be reduced simply to the effects they have on individuals. Rather, we will argue, the wrongness of these activities relates to the threats they present to the legitimacy of political orders. This occurs primarily through a mechanism we call “emergent manipulation,” rather than through the sort of manipulation that involves specific individuals. (shrink)

Online book fairs are being held in Vietnam to replace traditional offline events that have been shelved owing to the COVID-19 crisis. This study aims to explore book consumers’ perceptions regarding digital book fairs and their evaluation of the first-ever national online book fair held in Vietnam. In-depth interviews were conducted to obtain insights from people who had attended the online book event. The findings provide acceptance of and support for the organization of digital book fairs during the COVID-19 pandemic. (...) Attendees generally appreciated the convenience of the national online book fair and the promotional programmes offered by various publishers and distributors. Furthermore, some attendees enjoyed the novelty of the event and the feeling of being included in the reading community. Nevertheless, most of the attendees highlighted several limitations, especially the lack of social and face-to-face interaction. These findings have implications for online book fair organizers, publishers, and book distributors alike. (shrink)

Entrepreneurship plays an indispensable role in the economic development and poverty reduction of emerging economies like Vietnam. The rapid development of technologies during the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0) has a significant impact on business in every field, especially in the innovation-focused area of entrepreneurship. However, the topic of entrepreneurial activities with technology applications in Vietnam is under-researched. In addition, the body of literature regarding entrepreneurial finance tends to focus on advanced economies, while mostly neglecting the contextual differences in developing (...) nations. Therefore, this research contributes to these topics by investigating the main characteristics of a high potential market for entrepreneurs in Vietnam, which is the English language training market (ELTM). It also aims at indicating the impacts of technology on the entrepreneurial firms within this market, with an emphasis on financing sources. To answer the research questions, this study employs a qualitative analysis and conducts 12 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with entrepreneurs and researchers in the field. The key findings in our study highlight the main contributing factors to the growth of the market, both universally and context-specific for a developing nation like Vietnam. It also lists the leaders in each market segment and the industry’s potential profit margin. The results also show that most entrepreneurs in the ELTM utilized private sources of finance rather than external ones, such as bank loans. It again confirms the idea from previous works that even with the rapid development of the economic and technological landscape, entrepreneurial activities in general barely benefit from additional sources of funding. However, it also points out the distinct characteristics of the ELTM that may influence these financing issues; for example, English training services usually collect revenues from customers before delivering their classes. This is of advantage for entrepreneurs in this area and helps significantly reduce the financial barriers. These findings, which are among the first attempts to contribute to a better understanding of entrepreneurial opportunities in the Industry 4.0 in Vietnam, provide valuable insights for policymakers and entrepreneurs, as well as investors. (shrink)

A recent project at the University of Denver Libraries used handwritten text recognition (HTR) software to create transcriptions of records from the Jewish Consumptives’ Relief Society (JCRS), a tuberculosis sanatorium located in Denver, Colorado from 1904 to 1954. Among a great many other potential uses, these type- and hand-written records give insight into the human experience of disease and epidemic, its treatment, its effect on cultures, and of Jewish immigration to and early life in the American West. Our intent is (...) to provide these transcripts as data so the text may be computationally analyzed, pursuant to a larger effort in developing capacity in services and infrastructure to support digital humanities as a library, and to contribute to the emerging HTR ecosystem in archival work. Just because we can, however, doesn’t always mean we should: the realities of publishing large datasets online that contain medical and personal histories of potentially vulnerable people and communities introduce serious ethical considerations. This paper both underscores the value of HTR and frames ethical considerations related to protecting data derived from it. It suggests a terms-of-use intervention perhaps valuable to similar projects, one that balances meeting the research needs of digital scholars with the care and respect of persons, their communities and inheritors, who lives produced the very data now valuable to those researchers. (shrink)

Harcourt argues that in clinical contexts, children and young people with mental health illness can experience epistemic, specifically testimonial, injustice when their perspectives are unjustifiably discounted by health service providers.1 Our goal in this commentary was to illustrate how caregivers, a critical component of CYP treatment triad, can also engage in testimonial injustice towards CYP patients. Testimonial injustice occurs when one suffers a credibility deficit and that credibility deficit is based on prejudice.2 Harcourt expands Fricker’s account of testimonial injustice by (...) arguing that for CYPs, the credibility deficits attributed to them by clinicians, for example, may result from epistemic arrogance in that CYPs are viewed as having unreliable knowledge about their condition. Harcourt writes: ‘Being a CYP is treated as a heuristic for epistemic unreliability across a wide range of domains’, including clinical settings. Harcourt’s expansion of Fricker’s account thus includes epistemic arrogance as an alternative necessary condition, in addition to prejudice, to apply the concept of testimonial injustice. We think Harcourt’s argument can also be extended to caregivers, who are central to the CYP treatment triad. We illustrate how this may be the case by drawing from research we conducted to understand the perspectives of clinicians and prospective families, both caregivers and paediatric patients with obsessive–compulsive disorder about the possibility of …. (shrink)

This paper has two aims. The first is to explain a type of wrong that arises when agents obscure responsibility for their actions. Call it “agency laundering.” The second is to use the concept of agency laundering to understand the underlying moral issues in a number of recent cases involving algorithmic decision systems. From the Proceedings of the 14th International Conference, iConference 2019, Washington D.C., March 31-April 3, 2019.

In this paper, I compare the methodology of the Austrian school to two alternative methodologies from the economic mainstream: the ‘orthodox’ and revealed preference methodologies. I argue that Austrian school theorists should stop describing themselves as ‘extreme apriorists’ (or writing suggestively to that effect), and should start giving greater acknowledgement to the importance of empirical work within their research program. The motivation for this dialectical shift is threefold: the approach is more faithful to their actual practices, it better illustrates the (...) underlying similarities between the mainstream and Austrian research paradigms, and it provides a philosophical foundation that is much more plausible in itself. (shrink)

Algorithmic systems and predictive analytics play an increasingly important role in various aspects of modern life. Scholarship on the moral ramifications of such systems is in its early stages, and much of it focuses on bias and harm. This paper argues that in understanding the moral salience of algorithmic systems it is essential to understand the relation between algorithms, autonomy, and agency. We draw on several recent cases in criminal sentencing and K–12 teacher evaluation to outline four key ways in (...) which issues of agency, autonomy, and respect for persons can conflict with algorithmic decision-making. Three of these involve failures to treat individual agents with the respect they deserve. The fourth involves distancing oneself from a morally suspect action by attributing one’s decision to take that action to an algorithm, thereby laundering one’s agency. (shrink)

A one-stop resource on the current developments in word order research, this comprehensive survey provides an up-to-date, critical overview of this widely debated topic, exploring and evaluating research carried out in four major ...

Sweetpotato-pig production is an important system that generates income, utilizes unmarketable crops, and provides manure for soil fertility maintenance. This system is widely practiced from Asia to Africa, with many local variations. Within this system, pigs are generally fed a low nutrient-dense diet, yielding low growth rates and low economic efficiency. Our project in Vietnam went through a process of situation analysis, participatory technology development (PTD), and scaling up over a seven-year period to improve sweetpotato-pig production and to disseminate developed (...) technologies. The situation analysis included a series of pig production assessments in several provinces in northern and southern Vietnam, and pig supply-market chain identification was conducted in 13 provinces. The analysis of these studies informed the project of the following: (1) appropriate locations for our activities; (2) seasonal available feedstuff and farmers’ feeding practices; (3) market fluctuation and requirements; and (4) feeding and management improvement needs based on which the subsequent phase of PTD was designed. The PTD involved a limited number of farmers participating in sweetpotato varietal selection, sweetpotato root and vine silage processing, seasonal feeding combination, and pig feeding with balanced crop-feed diet and silage. Six years of multi-location and multi-season sweetpotato selection resulted in a few promising varieties that yielded up to 75% more dry matter and have since been formally released. The most significant results of silage processing and feeding trials include improved growth, higher feeding efficiency, increased year-round local feedstuff, and considerable labor reduction from eliminated cooking and vine cutting. Once these technologies were developed, a farmer-to-farmer training model was designed for scaling up the adoption and impact. Farmer trainers from seven communes in seven provinces received training in these technologies. In turn, they undertook the responsibility of training other farmers on sweetpotato selection, processing, and feeding. An impact study was also administered to monitor and evaluate (M&E) the dissemination process and to document the impact of the new technologies and farmer-to-farmer training model on pig growth and farmer income generation. The results showed that both participating and non-participating farmers have taken up the technologies, although the former demonstrates higher rates of adoption than the latter. The participants also generated more income and saved more labor from the adoption of the technologies. While the scaling up and M&E activities are on-going, the project has since broadened from a sweetpotato-pig system perspective to a pig-cropfeed system perspective based on farmers’ needs. It has included other crop feeds such as cassava and peanut stems in the research portfolio. New technologies based on on-going PTD will continuously be incorporated into the future training curriculum. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether the impact of PCAOB Rule 3211 on the quality and cost of audit services differs between female and male audit partners. We find that the improvement of audit quality is more pronounced for female audit partners than male partners after Rule 3211 adoption. Female audit partners are also associated with higher increases in fees and report lags than male counterparts after the adoption of Rule 3211. Further, we find that the presence of female CFOs attenuate the (...) audit fees and report lag increases in the post-adoption periods. Overall, our findings confirm the importance of the gender effect on audit outcomes, which needs further consideration by standard setters. Our study also provides empirical evidence of the benefits of gender equality in the workplace. (shrink)

The traditional soft set is a mapping from a parameter set to family of all crisp subsets of a universe. Molodtsov introduced the soft set as a generalized tool for modelling complex systems involving uncertain or not clearly defined objects. In this paper, the notion of neutrosophic soft set is reanalysed. The novel theory is a combination of neutrosophic set theory and soft set theory. The complement, “and”, “or”, intersection and union operations are defined on the neutrosophic soft sets. The (...) neutrosophic soft relations accompanied with their compositions are also defined. The basic properties of the neutrosophic soft sets, neutrosophic soft relations and neutrosophic soft compositions are also discussed. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was twofold: to validate the College Teachers’ Academic Frustration Tolerance Questionnaire and the College Teachers’ Academic Performance Questionnaire and to explore the relationship between frustration tolerance and academic performance among college teachers. A total of 25 experts were recruited to modify and validate both questionnaires, and the results showed that the questionnaires had good content validity. Exploratory factor analysis provided further evidence supporting the reliability of the CTAFT and the CTAP, suggesting that the instruments are (...) reliable and valid. Confirmatory factor analysis showed that frustration tolerance affected academic performance, which could best be modeled in the three dimensions of Affect, Preferred Difficulties, and Action. A total of 450 college teachers from each faculty of both universities were then recruited to explore the significant positive correlation between academic frustration tolerance and academic performance. The results from the structural equation model suggested that AC and PD combined significantly predicted academic performance. To our knowledge, this is the first study to explore the relationship between college teachers’ academic frustration tolerance and academic performance in China. (shrink)

While cosmopolitans are right to think that state sovereignty is derived from individuals, many cosmopolitan accounts can be too demanding in their expectations for illiberal regimes because they do not account for the attitudes of the persons with who will subject to the intervention. These ‘objectivist’ accounts suggest that sovereignty is wholly a matter of a state’s conformity to the objective demands of justice. In contrast, for ‘subjectivist’ accounts, the attitudes of citizens do matter. Subjectivist cosmopolitans do not deny the (...) objective demands of liberal justice, but argue that state sovereignty is at least partly a matter of the subjective attitude of citizens toward their state. This paper will highlight the reasons why such coercive impositions are troubling, and diagnose why objectivist theories characteristically fail to recognize them. It seeks to articulate a moderate kind of subjectivist cosmopolitanism that balances a liberal concern for rights with a worry about the imposition of political institutions or practices on a people that does not accept them. (shrink)

This research proposes an explanation for the conflicting extant evidence about whether family ownership of a business promotes proactive environmental strategy (PES). Based on insights drawn from strategic reference point theory, organizational identity theory, and the socioemotional wealth preservation perspective, we propose that family ownership has a moderated–mediated relationship with PES, with commitment as a moderator and long-term orientation as a mediator. A test using 454 China private firms with different levels of family ownership supports the hypotheses. This shows that (...) PES as a strategy related to business ethics does not happen without commitment and long-term orientation. (shrink)

In ‘Discrimination Against the Dying’, Phillip Reed argues that terminally ill patients are subjected to a distinct form of discrimination called ‘terminalism’. One of Reed’s primary examples of terminalism is right to try laws, which offer terminally ill patients the option to request medications that are not FDA-approved and without IRB involvement. In this analysis, we consider additional contextual factors about right to try, suggesting that it may not neatly count as an exemplar of terminalism. When pursued with appropriate protocols (...) and oversight, right to try has the potential to broaden treatment opportunities for the terminally ill by bypassing FDA and IRB restrictions, functioning as a less stringent alternative to expanded access for patients with limited time and dwindling options. Reed acknowledges that differential treatment of patients is not inherently unjust. For instance, Reed praises expanded access laws that grant patients with severe or life-threatening diseases access to treatment... (shrink)

This study explores entrepreneurship research in Vietnam, a lower-middle-income country in Southeast Asia that has witnessed rapid economic growth since the 1990s but has nonetheless been absent in the relevant Western-centric literature. Using an exclusively developed software, the study presents a structured dataset on entrepreneurship research in Vietnam from 2008 to 2018, highlighting: low research output, low creativity level, inattention to entrepreneurship theories, and instead, a focus on practical business matters. The scholarship remains limited due to the detachment between the (...) academic and entrepreneur communities. More important are the findings that Vietnamese research on entrepreneurship, still in its infancy, diverges significantly from those in developed and emerging economies in terms of their content and methods. These studies are contextualized to a large extent to reflect the concerns of a developing economy still burdened by the high financial and nonfinancial costs. (shrink)

This study examines the hypothesis that the stopping rule-a traditional postnatal sex selection method where couples decide to cease childbearing once they bear a son-plays a role in high sex ratio of last births (SRLB). The study develops a theoretical framework to demonstrate the operation of the stopping rule in a context of son preference. This framework was used to demonstrate the impact of the stopping rule on the SRLB in Vietnam, using data from the Population Change Survey 2006. The (...) SRLB of Vietnam was high at the level of 130 in the period 1970-2006, and particularly in the period 1986-1995, when sex-selective abortion was not available. Women were 21% more likely to stop childbearing after a male birth compared with a female birth. The SRLB was highest at parity 2 (138.7), particularly in rural areas (153.5), and extremely high (181.9) when the previous birth was female. Given the declining fertility, the stopping rule has a potential synergistic effect with sex-selective abortion to accentuate a trend of one-son families in the population. (shrink)

In air traffic control, the airspace is divided into several smaller sectors for better management of air traffic and air traffic controller workload. Such sectors are usually managed by a team of two air traffic controllers: planning controller and executive controller. D-side controller is responsible for processing flight-plan information to plan and organize the flow of traffic entering the sector. R-side controller deals with ensuring safety of flights in their sector. A better understanding and predictability of D-side controller actions, for (...) a given traffic scenario, may help in automating some of its tasks and hence reduce workload. In this paper, we propose a learning model to predict D-side controller actions. The learning problem is modeled as a supervised learning problem, where the target variables are D-side controller actions and the explanatory variables are the aircraft 4D trajectory features. The model is trained on six months of ADS-B data over an en-route sector, and its generalization performance was assessed, using crossvalidation, on the same sector. Results indicate that the model for vertical maneuver actions provides highest prediction accuracy. Besides, the model for speed change and course change action provides predictability accuracy of 80% and 87%, respectively. The model to predict the set of all the actions for each flight achieves an accuracy of 70% implying for 70% of flights; D-side controller’s action can be predicted from trajectory information at sector entry position. In terms of operational validation, the proposed approach is envisioned as ATCO assisting tool, not an autonomous tool. Thus, there is always ATCO discretion element, and as more ATCO actions are collected, the models can be further trained for better accuracy. For future work, we will consider expanding the feature set by including parameters such as weather and wind. Moreover, human in the loop simulation will be performed to measure the effectiveness of the proposed approach. (shrink)

Viet Nam has experienced rapid social change over the last decade, with a remarkable decline in fertility to just below replacement level. The combination of fertility decline, son preference, antenatal sex determination using ultrasound and sex selective abortion are key factors driving increased sex ratios at birth in favour of boys in some Asian countries. Whether or not this is taking place in Viet Nam as well is the subject of heightened debate. In this paper, we analyse the nature and (...) determinants of sex ratio at birth in Viet Nam, including a small family size norm, recent reinforcement by the Government of the "one-to-two child" family policy, traditional son preference, easy access to antenatal ultrasound screening and legal abortion, and an increase in the proportion of one-child families. In order to prevent an increased sex ratio at birth in Viet Nam, we argue for the relaxation of the one-to-two child family policy and a return to the policy of "small family size" as determined by families, in tandem with a comprehensive approach to promoting the value of women and girls in society, countering traditional gender roles, and raising public awareness of the negative social consequences of a high sex ratio at birth. (shrink)

The article focuses on the study of workplace learning for hospital’s staff to become mortuary care agents. It is based on the analysis of verbalizations obtained from self-confrontations interviews made with the mortuary care trainees. These interviews are extracted from video recordings taken while trainees carry out their normal task. The goal is to identify, within the context of the interaction between trainees and tutors, signs of learning progress in the trainees’ verbalizations, which could be linked to existing hospital standards. (...) As demonstrated by the activity clinic methodology, these verbalizations are not just a simple depiction of the work activity as it happened but serve as an experiment to underline the learning benefits for the trainees. Beyond the benefits of better understanding the trainees work tasks, the resulting analyses indeed support the formative aspect of self-confrontation interviews. In this perspective, the article focuses on a methodological aspect, the data analysis to account for signs of learning such as verbalized and recognized by the trainees in their interactions with tutors. On the occasion, we question the formative dimension of this methodological setting in the prospect of designing training devices for these professionals. (shrink)