Interactional functions of story-opening in everyday conversations across different languages have been widely examined in Conversation Analysis. However, there is a paucity in research on story-openings in institutional talk. This paper addresses this research gap by examining how story-opening contributes to advice-giving in doctoral research supervision. It draws on a data corpus of 57 storytelling sequences produced by six supervisors during 25 hours of video-recorded supervision meetings at an Australian university. The analysis shows that story-opening supports the on-going advice-giving activity (...) in two ways. First, it invokes the supervisor’s knowledge and experience, which functions to strengthen the advice under way. Second, it works toward building a joint understanding with the student, thereby serving the supervisor’s pursuit of the student’s acceptance of advice. These findings have significant implications for research on storytelling in institutional interaction, advice and supervision practices. (shrink)

On study and teaching of aesthetics in Vietnam.

Unification in description logics has been proposed as a novel inference service that can, for example, be used to detect redundancies in ontologies. The inexpressive description logic EL is of particular interest in this context since, on the one hand, several large biomedical ontologies are defined using EL. On the other hand, unification in EL has been shown to be NP-complete and, thus, of considerably lower complexity than unification in other description logics of similarly restricted expressive power. However, EL allows (...) the use of the top concept, which represents the whole interpretation domain, whereas the large medical ontology SNOMED CT makes no use of this feature. Surprisingly, removing the top concept from EL makes the unification problem considerably harder. More precisely, we will show that unification in EL without the top concept is PSPACE-complete. In addition to the decision problem, we also consider the problem of actually computing EL−⊤-unifiers. (shrink)

Within the research community, it is generally accepted that consent processes for research should be culturally appropriate and tailored to the context, yet researchers continue to grapple with what valid consent means within specific stakeholder groups. In this study, we explored the consent practices and attitudes regarding essential information required for the consent process within hospital-based trial communities from four referral hospitals in Vietnam. We collected surveys from and conducted semi-structured interviews with study physicians, study nurses, ethics committee members, and (...) study participants and family members regarding their experiences of participating in research, their perspectives toward research, and their views about various elements of the consent process. In our findings, we describe three interrelated themes related to the consent process: words and regulation; reimbursement, suspicions, and joining; and responsibilities. In general, stakeholders had highly varied perspectives of nghiên cứu and researchers used varying levels of detail regarding all aspects of the study in the consent process to build trust with and/or promote potential research participants’ choices about taking part in research. Findings additionally highlight how researchers felt that offering financial reimbursements in a hospital setting, where payment for services was routine, would be unfamiliar to participants and could raise suspicions about the research. Participants, however, focused their discussions on reimbursement or alternative reasons for joining the study, such as health related benefits or altruism. Finally, participants often relied on their physician to help them decide about joining a study or not. Further research is needed to understand how researchers and participants make sense of and practice consent, and how that impacts participants’ decision-making about research participation. To promote valid consent within this context, it is important to engage with hospital-based trial communities as a whole. The data from this study will inform future research on consent, guide the revisions of consent related policies within our research sites and point to several larger issues surrounding researcher-participant expectations, communication, and trust. (shrink)

AimHealthcare workers have directly provided care for COVID-19 patients, and have faced many additional sources leading to poor mental health. The study aimed to investigate the mental health problems and related factors among healthcare staff in Vietnam.MethodsA descriptive cross-sectional mixed methods study, combining quantitative and qualitative research methods, was performed among 400 healthcare workers working at the National Hospital for Tropical Diseases and Ninh Binh General Hospital from the first day of treatment for COVID-19 patients to May 01, 2020.ResultsThe (...) results showed that 8.0% of participants had stress, 17.5% of participants had anxiety, and 14.8% of participants had depression. Approximately 50% of participants reported that they had at least one of these symptoms. The findings illustrated that stress, anxiety, and depression were associated with the position in a hospital, health status during the COVID-19 pandemic, family members/relatives infected with COVID-19, physical and mental support from friends, family, and community, department, years of working, and the average work hours per day of healthcare workers exposed to COVID-19.ConclusionDuring the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare workers who worked in the hospital providing treatment and care for COVID-19 patients dealt with mental health problems such as stress, anxiety, and depression. It is necessary to promote mental health among healthcare workers, to contribute to the fight against the COVID-19 outbreak in Vietnam. (shrink)

The latest Omicron variant of the novel coronavirus has itself created a novel situation—bringing attention to the topic of healthcare rationing among hospitalized pediatric patients. This may be the first time that many pediatricians, nurses, parents, and public health officials have been compelled to engage in uncomfortable discussions about the allocation of medical care/resources. Simply put, finite budgets, resources, and a dwindling healthcare workforce do not permit all patients to receive unlimited medical care. Triage and bedside rationing decisions are happening (...) in a range of difficult everyday circumstances both implicitly and explicitly, but in ways not recognized by even the best ethically framed intentions. Clinicians and hospital administrators have largely been left on their own “to flatten the rationing curve” in hopes that resources never have to be explicitly rationed at their facility. Unfortunately, the downstream result is a misinformed and distrustful public (i.e. parents, guardians, and caregivers) filled with people who are already burdened with inflammatory pseudoscience narratives and deficits in health literacy. This paper aims to elevate a more thoughtful conversation about healthcare rationing by analyzing some existing ethical principles/framework developed for rationing decision making during previous emergency responses and drawing from the day-to-day clinical perspectives of a frontline pediatric acute care/hospitalist. (shrink)

Hoarding disorder is a psychiatric condition characterized by difficulty discarding items and accumulation of clutter. Although studies have established the negative impact of HD and compulsive hoarding behavior, fewer have examined the impact on quality of life of hoarding behavior independent of obsessive–compulsive disorder. Moreover, specific aspects of QoL such as success in work/academics or satisfaction with interpersonal relationships have not been well-investigated. In this study, we examined, in a sample of 2100 adult participants obtained from Amazon Mechanical Turk, the (...) relationships between hoarding, OCD, and depression symptomatology and four QoL domains derived from a factor analysis of the Quality of Life Inventory. We performed linear regressions to examine associations between psychiatric symptomatology and QoL domains and then conducted mediation analyses to investigate the role of depressive symptomatology in the identified relationships. We found that while hoarding and obsessive–compulsive symptoms were both negatively associated with QoL, they were associated with different domains [hoarding was significantly associated, and was less strongly associated with success or enrichment. Mediation analyses confirmed the role of depression as a complete mediator of hoarding’s effect on total, environment, and family QoL, and as a partial mediator of hoarding’s effect on success and enrichment QoL. Further examination of the relationship between hoarding symptoms and QoL in those with mild, moderate, and severe depression indicated that in those with more severe depression, hoarding was associated with improved QoL, indicating a possible buffering or compensatory effect. The findings suggest a differential impact of hoarding and obsessive–compulsive symptoms on QoL and emphasize the importance of considering co-morbid depressive symptoms in designing more targeted interventions. Future studies should continue to investigate these complex relationships, given the high co-morbidity of hoarding and depression. (shrink)

This book offers an innovative approach to the analysis of the current crisis in the South China Sea. Moving beyond the spirit of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the mechanisms of which are limited to physical geography, it demonstrates how epistemological insights from the field of critical realist philosophy can reveal the importance of cultural and structural conditioning processes in social interactions, processes which shape the conditions for the emergence of crisis points along a spectrum (...) of conflict and cooperation. The potential for conflict resolution and the emergence of new regions in Pacific Asia much depends on the nature of such interactions at many levels (political-economic, semiotic and cultural) based on perceptions of what constitutes the "common" versus a Sinicised version of "Lebensraum". (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)

Electroencephalogram plays an essential role in analysing and recognizing brain-related diseases. EEG has been increasingly used as a new type of biometrics in person identification and verification systems. These EEG-based systems are important components in applications for both police and civilian works, and both areas process a huge amount of EEG data. Storing and transmitting these huge amounts of data are significant challenges for data compression techniques. Lossy compression is used for EEG data as it provides a higher compression ratio (...) than lossless compression techniques. However, lossy compression can negatively influence the performance of EEG-based person identification and verification systems via the loss of information in the reconstructed data. To address this, we propose introducing performance measures as additional features in evaluating lossy compression techniques for EEG data. Our research explores if a common value of CR exists for different systems using datasets with lossy compression that could provide almost the same system performance with those using datasets without lossy compression. We performed experiments on EEG-based person identification and verification systems using two large EEG datasets, CHB MIT Scalp and Alcoholism, to investigate the relationship between standard lossy compression measures and our proposed system performance measures with the two lossy compression techniques, discrete wavelet transform—adaptive arithmetic coding and discrete wavelet transform—set partitioning in hierarchical trees. Our experimental results showed a common value of CR exists for different systems, specifically, 70 for person identification systems and 50 for person verification systems. (shrink)

Interpretation at the argumentative level, like action selection in response to environmental change, requires decision-making based on context construction. By boosting the efficiency of this process, discourse markers keep variations in the interlocutor's processing context within a certain range.

Resumo: A revolução tecnológica 4.0 e a cooperação internacional têm feito várias mudanças na sociedade. As pessoas passam a desejar uma vida feliza e pacífica ao perceberem que a felicidade é um alvo ou uma meta necessária na vida. O artigo usa o método dialético materialista do pensamento filosófico de Aristóteles de maneira compreensiva, especificando princípios históricos acerca de seu conceito de felicidade comparado ao que temos hoje para mostrar que o valor da felicidade é o valor da beleza. Além (...) disso, o artigo também usa métodos analíticos e sintéticos para esclarecer a visão de Aristóteles de que a felicidade estaria relacionada à coisas materiais, crenças e valores nobres os quais as pessoas esperam conquistar. Este artigo descreve a visão do povo do Vietnã de que a Felicidade é a solidariedade e o apoio mútuo para que vivam juntos em paz, tranquilidade e abundância material. A Felicidade nas vidas dos vietnamitas é necessária para garantir que a vida pessoal de cada um e a vida social sejam civilizadas e modernas e que as pessoas tenham energia pacífica, total e livre. A Felicidade dos Vietnamitas almeja a importância da verdade, da bondade e da beleza. (shrink)

The study of context can benefit greatly from re-examining some of the concepts arising from Anscombre and Ducrot’s argumentation theory from an adaptive perspective. By focusing on discourse dynamism, AT provides fresh angles from which to view key issues, such as the nature of context triggers; whether context construction is necessarily a background activity; in what way utterances set themselves up as contexts for the upcoming discourse; and the nature of the inferences whereby background knowledge and information are accessed. The (...) need for an adaptive perspective arises in connection with AT’s construal of context construction, which raises but cannot answer certain questions that are crucial to our understanding of context: these questions concern the source of the background knowledge required to understand the argumentative meanings under consideration. An adaptive perspective can offer a non-ad-hoc account of the source of the background knowledge involved, in terms of what pre-existing systems require to support their processing needs, and the information and knowledge they produce. Such an account builds on the assumptions that language can avail itself of processing strategies, skills, forms of know-how utilised by pre-existing systems, and has access to knowledge generated by systems such as perception and action production. (shrink)

Coercive Care asks probing and challenging questions regarding the use of coercion in health care and the social services. The book combines philosophical analysis with comparative studies of social policy and law in a large number of industrialized countries.

Human contact is a key issue in social interactions for autonomous systems since robots are increasingly appearing everywhere, which has led to a higher risk of conflict. Particularly in the real world, collisions between humans and machines may result in catastrophic accidents or damaged goods. In this paper, a novel stop strategy related to autonomous systems is proposed. This control method can eliminate the vibrations produced by a system’s movement by analysing the poles and zeros in the model of autonomous (...) vehicles and goods. Using the pole placement technique, the motion of a system is guaranteed to be more stable, more flexible and smoother. Moreover, several control profiles are employed in the switching mechanism to choose the proper vibration-free effect. The main contributions of this paper are the recommendation of an active stopping planner using different smooth generators from a modelling study, the validation of their physical characteristics and the launching of a switching algorithm based on the socially aware navigation framework of a robot. This theoretical work is based on the virtual environment of MATLAB, and the experiment is implemented in the practical platform of an automated guided vehicle. From these results, it can be seen that the proposed approach is robust, effective and feasible for applications in storehouse management, public transportation or factory manufacturing. (shrink)

Despite its importance, abnormal interactions between the proximal and distal upper extremity muscles of stroke survivors and their impact on functional task performance has not been well described, due in part to the complexity of upper extremity tasks. In this pilot study, we elucidated proximal–distal interactions and their functional impact on stroke survivors by quantitatively delineating how hand and arm movements affect each other across different phases of functional task performance, and how these interactions are influenced by stroke. Fourteen subjects, (...) including nine chronic stroke survivors and five neurologically-intact subjects participated in an experiment involving transport and release of cylindrical objects between locations requiring distinct proximal kinematics. Distal kinematics of stroke survivors, particularly hand opening, were significantly affected by the proximal kinematics, as the hand aperture decreased and the duration of hand opening increased at the locations that requires shoulder abduction and elbow extension. Cocontraction of the extrinsic hand muscles of stroke survivors significantly increased at these locations, where an increase in the intermuscular coherence between distal and proximal muscles was observed. Proximal kinematics of stroke survivors was also affected by the finger extension, but the cocontraction of their proximal muscles did not significantly increase, suggesting the changes in the proximal kinematics were made voluntarily. Our results showed significant proximal-to-distal interactions between finger extension and elbow extension/shoulder abduction of stroke survivors exist during their functional movements. Increased cocontraction of the hand muscles due to increased neural couplings between the distal and proximal muscles appears to be the underlying mechanism. (shrink)

Network reconfiguration is one of the most effective methods to reduce line power loss in the distribution system, which causes higher losses than the other parts of the power system. This paper proposes a modified symbiotic organisms search algorithm to solve the NR problem. For the purpose of enhancing the effectiveness of MSOS, the mutualism and parasitism strategies of the original symbiotic organisms search have been modified to create better new solutions. In the mutualism strategy, the so-far best solution is (...) updated immediately as soon as new solutions are created. In the parasitism strategy, the update is only implemented for the first half of control variables, whereas another half still remains unchanged. The comparison results between MSOS and SOS on twenty-five benchmark functions and different scales of test distribution systems with 14, 33, 69, and 119 nodes show that the improvement level of MSOS over SOS is significant with higher success rates and better quality of gained solutions. Similarly, MSOS also reaches better results than other methods in the literature. Consequently, MSOS can be a favorable method for determining the most appropriate configurations for the distribution systems. (shrink)

The book "An Encouragement of Learning" by Fukuzawa Yukichi (1834 - 1901) is among those that had a significant impact on Japan’s development in the late 19th century and early 20th century. It contains a wealth of original educational theory on a variety of topics, including the function of education, the subject, goal, content, and methodology of practical learning. Fukuzawa Yukichi's perspectives on practical learning still prove to have historical influence on the development of education today.

The current trend of international integration urges every business organizations to continuously improve their competitive advantage for their survival and sustainable growth. And Kaizen has been a preferable approach in practice. Due to the special role of SMEs in the Vietnam economy, improving their competitiveness is critical. Thus, this study is aimed at identifying determinants of the successful Kaizen implementation and sustainable performance so that SMEs can have proper actions and prioritize their operations within their available resources. Through a formal (...) survey of 213 participants from 62 SMEs which have been successful in implementing Kaizen and appropriate statistical analyses, seven important determinants have been identified, namely, supports from senior management; training; environment; assessment; motivation; mindset; and engagement of all members in the organization. Among them, “mindset” is newly proposed in this study through a qualitative research and found as crucial component in the model. The finding obviously fulfills the existing literature. Moreover, the first letters of the identified factors are orderly congregated as “STEAM-ME” which is a novel model for the successful Kaizen implementation and the sustainable performance of SMEs in Vietnam. “STEAM-ME” implies that organizations need to have a new airflow as “steam” to make all of its members refreshed and brimful of energy to gain significant success in implementing Kaizen, and improve their business performance as well as competitive advantage for their sustainable development. Notably, the novel model can efficiently demonstrate organic relationships among its components which all have positive and significant impacts on the successful Kaizen implementation and sustainable performance of SMEs in Vietnam. (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)

Coercive Care: The Ethics of Choice in Health and Medicine asks probing and challenging questions regarding the use of coercion in health care and social services. This book combines philosophical analysis with comparative studies of social policy and law in a large number of industrialized countries and proposes an ideal of judicial security on a global scale.

In the current era, robots and artificial agents can do jobs that could only be achieved with human creativity in the past, therefore successfully stepped into the sacred territory that once considered exclusive to human. Given this situation, Mark Amerika made two significant contributions with his new book, “My life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence”. This book added to the emerging literary genre collaborated by human artists and AI, telling the story about the advanced ACI developed in the project FATAL (...) ERROR and its relationship with Amerika as its co-author and creator. Moreover, this book documented an in-depth investigation into the nature of creativity and its processes, asking whether creativity is exclusive to the human mind. (shrink)

In all societies that have arrived at a certain degree of social differentiation, there are two types of culture that may be qualified respectively as “popular” and “lettered”. Popular culture is that of the people as opposed to the dominant political and intellectual classes. The latter two may be distinct (but allied), as in ancient India with the pair Brahman-kshatriva. or mixed as in Confucian China with the bureaucracy of scholars-civil servants. The duality between the two kinds of culture may (...) become less distinct with the democratization of power and education as well as with the omnipresent symbolic universe of the media. None the less, it survives, as has been proven by all sociological research on the nature of leisure time as employed by classes in industrial societies, in the “West” and in the “East”. (shrink)

The influence of Buddhist philosophy in Vietnamese nation.

Ahiṃsā or non-violence. is a key concept which permeates Indian ethics. In this book the author compares, for the first time, the different meanings of ahiṃsā in Jainism, Buddhism and Vedism.