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 lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:All Mine!: Happiness, Ownership, and Naming in Eleventh-Cenury China by Stephen OwenNguyen T. Thanh-Huyen (bio)All Mine!: Happiness, Ownership, and Naming in Eleventh-Cenury China. By Stephen Owen. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. Pp. 208. Paperback $30.00, isbn 978-0-231-20311-1. Reading Stephen Owen's new book, All Mine!: Happiness, Ownership, and Naming in Eleventh-Century China (hereafter All Mine!), many readers will find that the perspectives of eleventh-century Song scholar-officials (...) on finding happiness in material things are still highly relevant to the increasingly materialistic culture in China and the world in the present day. Under the Song dynasty, the pursuit of happiness through material objects is "what contemporaries themselves recognized as uncomfortable topics" (p. 14). In writing this book, Owen attempts to survey a literary phenomenon in which material-contingent happiness permeated Song literature despite the moral surveillance of classical ideology on happiness and ownership that stretched back to the Lunyu (Analects of Confucius). At the same time, the author elucidates how material-contingent happiness in literature drove and was driven by the sociocultural changes and the growth of commercialization in the Song. All Mine! is a fine balance between literary study and intellectual history. Owen's approach tends to be all-inclusive, as he covers a diverse range of genres (including prose, poetry, miscellany, and biography) and texts with which readers generally have different levels of familiarity. For every text, Owen provides thorough explanation on its background, allusions, and references, while also offering in-depth cultural, aesthetic, and structural analysis. He calls our attention to the subtle differences between similar texts, such as the biographies of Ouyang Xiu 歐陽脩 and Tao Yuanming 陶淵明, to show how they deliver entirely different ideas about happiness and ownership and signal a radical transition from the old to a new world of values. Regarding intellectual history, the book studies the conflicts between different discourses on happiness. Owen reveals different forces of censorship against happiness of acquisition and ownership, presenting them especially clearly with Ouyang Xiu's stories in Chapter 1 ("The Biography of the Retired Layman Six") and Chapter 2 ("The Magistrate of Peach Blossom Spring"). The author also pays close attention to the act of naming as a form of ownership. As he points out, the process of Song literati trying to "get the right name" for objects and sites often converged with the process of elaborating different [End Page 1] person-thing relationships based on the social status of the owner and the characteristics of the object of ownership, thereby grounding the principles for judging the morality of material-contingent happiness. Readers can also see the happiness-ownership paradox in literature as closely related to the commercialization of elite-praised goods that was flourishing in Song society. This validates Owen's choice "to think of cultural and historical phenomena as ecosystems or solar systems in constant change, each particular changed by and changing the whole" (p. 13). Perhaps the most impressive chapters in the book are 3 and 5, which deal with the Song's perspective on ownership as transient and unstable, and its relationship with happiness. Chapter 3 explores the pervasive awareness that "things are held by power, not by right" (p. 67). The source of "power" could be financial, social, political, and military advantage, or something humans can't control, like death. Owen relates many sad Song stories of elites whose things were taken by someone with greater power. The most interesting one is perhaps that of Su Dongpo 苏東坡 and his "Nine Blossoms Mountain in a Jug," in which Su was not willing to give up the little world that he attached to this rock mountain, despite being very conscious about the dangers of possession. "It is alright if the superior man lets his interests be temporarily invested in things, but it is not alright if he lets his interest remain in those things," the author writes (p. 72). Chapter 3 contains many examples of "names as a form of ownership." Ownership of physical things can be transient and infringeable, but the writings on names of objects and sites by famous Song literati like Ouyang Xiu and Su Dongpo... (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)

Plagiarism in higher education has become widespread among students in Vietnam. This paper aims to examine the seriousness of the problem by comparing the severity of plagiarism in two universities, one of which uses Turnitin software to check its student reports. For that purpose, 977 samples have been drawn from 1434 required graduation reports written by senior undergraduates in the economics and management field from 2013 to 2015. Turnitin’s “Similarity Index” was used to check for alleged plagiarism, which was found (...) to be more widespread at the university not using Turnitin. At that university, 91.7% of the graduation reports were defined as plagiarized, while 61.7% of the reports were plagiarized at the university using the software. The main source of this problem was the use of information from the internet without citing the original authors. (shrink)

In this paper, a proposed modified stochastic fractal search algorithm is applied to find the most appropriate site and size of capacitor banks for distribution systems with 33, 69, and 85 buses. Two single-objective functions are considered to be reduction of power loss and reduction of total cost of energy loss and capacitor investment while satisfying limit of capacitors, limit of conductor, and power balance of the systems. MSFS was developed by performing three new mechanisms including new diffusion mechanism and (...) two new update mechanisms on the conventional stochastic fractal search algorithm. As a result, MSFS can reduce 0.002%, 0.003%, and 0.18% of the total power loss from SFS for the three study systems. As compared to other methods, MSFS can reduce power loss from 0.07% to 3.98% for the first system, from 3.7% to 7.3% for the second system, and from 0.92% to 6.98% for the third system. For the reduction of total cost, the improvement level of the proposed method over SFS and two other methods is more significant. It is 0.03%, 1.22%, and 5.76% for the second system and 2.31%, 0.87%, and 3.77% for the third system. It is emphasized that the proposed method can find the global optimal solutions for all study cases while SFS was still implementing search process nearby or far away from the solutions. Furthermore, MSFS can converge to the best solutions much faster than these compared methods. Consequently, it can be concluded that the proposed method is very effective for finding the best location and size of added capacitors in distribution power systems. (shrink)

Legal text retrieval serves as a key component in a wide range of legal text processing tasks such as legal question answering, legal case entailment, and statute law retrieval. The performance of legal text retrieval depends, to a large extent, on the representation of text, both query and legal documents. Based on good representations, a legal text retrieval model can effectively match the query to its relevant documents. Because legal documents often contain long articles and only some parts are relevant (...) to queries, it is quite a challenge for existing models to represent such documents. In this paper, we study the use of attentive neural network-based text representation for statute law document retrieval. We propose a general approach using deep neural networks with attention mechanisms. Based on it, we develop two hierarchical architectures with sparse attention to represent long sentences and articles, and we name them Attentive CNN and Paraformer. The methods are evaluated on datasets of different sizes and characteristics in English, Japanese, and Vietnamese. Experimental results show that: (i) Attentive neural methods substantially outperform non-neural methods in terms of retrieval performance across datasets and languages; (ii) Pretrained transformer-based models achieve better accuracy on small datasets at the cost of high computational complexity while lighter weight Attentive CNN achieves better accuracy on large datasets; and (iii) Our proposed Paraformer outperforms state-of-the-art methods on COLIEE dataset, achieving the highest recall and F2 scores in the top-N retrieval task. (shrink)

The Coronavirus disease pandemic of 2019 is a vast worldwide public health hazard, impacting people of all ages and socioeconomic statuses. Vaccination is one of the most effective methods of controlling a pandemic like COVID-19. This study aims to investigate the relationship between the number of vaccination injections and fear of COVID-19 and test whether beliefs benefit from vaccination COVID-19 mediate the effect of fear of COVID-19 on the number of vaccination injections. A total of 649 Vietnamese adults were enrolled (...) online to finish answering, including scales The Health Belief Model (HBM) and The Fear of COVID-19 (FCV-19S), consisting of 340 (52.4%) males and 309 (47.6%) females. The data were analyzed using variance, regression, and a simple mediation model. The total score of COVID-19 fear wasM= 22.26,SD= 5.49. Vietnamese fear of COVID-19 was at a medium level. Our results suggest that 18- to 20-year-olds are more fearful of COVID-19 than others. People who received the first dosage exhibited a greater fear of COVID-19 than those who received the second dose and were not inoculated. Additionally, the beliefs benefit of vaccination COVID-19 has a role in the relationship between the number of vaccination injections and fear of COVID-19. During the pandemic, adults in Vietnam are more afraid of COVID-19 than during prior outbreaks. Besides, the Vietnamese populace demonstrated a considerable demand for and high acceptability of the COVID-19 vaccine. The current study indicates that psychological counselors and therapists should counsel clients on the value of vaccination and address the fear of COVID-19 as public understanding of the benefits of vaccines increases. To further clarify the effect of this issue on the correlation between fear of COVID-19 and the number of vaccinations, the results of this study indicate that the existing vaccine communication factor for COVID-19 vaccination should be modified to increase confidence in the benefits of immunization. (shrink)

Case law retrieval is the task of locating truly relevant legal cases given an input query case. Unlike information retrieval for general texts, this task is more complex with two phases (legal case retrieval and legal case entailment) and much harder due to a number of reasons. First, both the query and candidate cases are long documents consisting of several paragraphs. This makes it difficult to model with representation learning that usually has restriction on input length. Second, the concept of (...) relevancy in this domain is defined based on the legal relation that goes beyond the lexical or topical relevance. This is a real challenge because normal text matching will not work. Third, building a large and accurate legal case dataset requires a lot of effort and expertise. This is obviously an obstacle to creating enough data for training deep retrieval models. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called supporting model that can deal with both phases. The underlying idea is the case–case supporting relation and the paragraph–paragraph as well as the decision-paragraph matching strategy. In addition, we propose a method to automatically create a large weak-labeling dataset to overcome the lack of data. The experiments showed that our solution has achieved the state-of-the-art results for both case retrieval and case entailment phases. (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)

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)

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)

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)

Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is an effective treatment for advanced Parkinson’s disease. However, identifying stimulation parameters, such as contact and current amplitudes, is time-consuming based on trial and error. Directional leads add more stimulation options and render this process more challenging with a higher workload for neurologists and more discomfort for patients. In this study, a sweet spot-guided algorithm was developed that automatically suggested stimulation parameters. These suggestions were retrospectively compared to clinical monopolar reviews. A cohort of 24 Parkinson’s disease (...) patients underwent bilateral DBS implantation in the subthalamic nucleus at our center. First, the DBS’ leads were reconstructed with the open-source toolbox Lead-DBS. Second, a sweet spot for rigidity reduction was set as the desired stimulation target for programming. This sweet spot and estimations of the volume of tissue activated were used to suggest (i) the best lead level, (ii) the best contact, and (iii) the effect thresholds for full therapeutic effect for each contact. To assess these sweet spot-guided suggestions, the clinical monopolar reviews were considered as ground truth. In addition, the sweet spot-guided suggestions for best lead level and best contact were compared against reconstruction-guided suggestions, which considered the lead location with respect to the subthalamic nucleus. Finally, a graphical user interface was developed as an add-on to Lead-DBS and is publicly available. With the interface, suggestions for all contacts of a lead can be generated in a few seconds. The accuracy for suggesting the best out of four lead levels was 56%. These sweet spot-guided suggestions were not significantly better than reconstruction-guided suggestions (p = 0.3). The accuracy for suggesting the best out of eight contacts was 41%. These sweet spot-guided suggestions were significantly better than reconstruction-guided suggestions (p < 0.001). The sweet spot-guided suggestions of each contact’s effect threshold had a mean error of 1.2 mA. On an individual lead level, the suggestions can vary more with mean errors ranging from 0.3 to 4.8 mA. Further analysis is warranted to improve the sweet spot-guided suggestions and to account for more symptoms and stimulation-induced side effects. (shrink)

Post-mortem reproduction is a complex and contested matter attracting attention from a diverse group of scholars and resulting in various responses from a range of countries. Vietnam has been reluctant to deal directly with this matter and has, accordingly, permitted post-mortem reproduction implicitly. First, by analysing Vietnam’s post-mortem reproduction cases, this paper reflects on the manner in which Vietnamese authorities have handled each case in the context of the contemporary legal framework, and it reveals the moral questions arising therefrom. The (...) article then offers an account of Vietnamese social norms as an explanation for the tendency to conduct post-mortem reproduction. In arguing that a deeper and more thorough examination of the moral and ethical reasoning is required, the paper advocates in favour of supportive post-mortem reproduction regulation. In doing so, the paper seeks to reconcile the Vietnamese legal framework and post-mortem reproduction experiences of other countries. The article concludes that Vietnam and countries sharing the similar cultural traits should permit post-mortem reproduction explicitly. This would require full engagement with the ethical and legal issues arising, and careful promulgation of regulations and guidelines based on comparative experiences of a range of countries in handling this matter. (shrink)

The annotated dataset is an essential requirement to develop an artificial intelligence system effectively and expect the generalization of the predictive models and to avoid overfitting. Lack of the training data is a big barrier so that AI systems can broaden in several domains which have no or missing training data. Building these datasets is a tedious and expensive task and depends on the domains and languages. This is especially a big challenge for low-resource languages. In this paper, we experiment (...) and evaluate many various approaches on sentiment analysis problems so that they can still obtain high performances under limited training data. This paper uses the preprocessing techniques to clean and normalize the data and generate the new samples from the limited training dataset based on many text augmentation techniques such as lexicon substitution, sentence shuffling, back translation, syntax-tree transformation, and embedding mixup. Several experiments have been performed for both well-known machine learning-based classifiers and deep learning models. We compare, analyze, and evaluate the results to indicate the advantage and disadvantage points of the techniques for each approach. The experimental results show that the data augmentation techniques enhance the accuracy of the predictive models; this promises that smart systems can be applied widely in several domains under limited training data. (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.

This research proposes a modified metaheuristic optimization algorithm, named as improved stochastic fractal search, which is formed based on the integration of the quasiopposition-based learning and chaotic local search schemes into the original SFS algorithm for solving the optimal capacitor placement in radial distribution networks. The test problem involves the determination of the optimal number, location, and size of fixed and switched capacitors at different loading conditions so that the network total yearly cost is minimized with simultaneous fulfillment of operating (...) constraints. Also, the hourly on/off scheduling plans of switched shunt capacitors considering a modified cost objective function are obtained. The proposed ISFS algorithm has been tested on two IEEE 69-bus and 119-bus RDNs and a practical 152-bus RDN. For clarifying the effectiveness and validation of the ISFS, the simulated results have been compared with those of other previously utilized solution approaches in the literature as well as the original SFS. From result comparison, the proposed ISFS outperforms other previous approaches regarding solution quality and statistical performance for the compared cases, especially in the complex and large-scale networks. Notably, compared with the original SFS, the proposed ISFS shows a significantly better performance in all the tested cases. (shrink)

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)

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)

The relationship between Vietnam and China could be captured in the Chinese expression of “同床异梦”, which means lying on the same bed but having different dreams. The two countries share certain cultural and political similarities but also diverge vastly in their national interests. This paper adds to the extant literature on this topic by analyzing the element of trust/mistrust in their interactions in trade-investment, tourism, and defense-security. The analysis shows how the relationship is increasingly interdependent but is equally fragile due (...) to the lack of trust on both sides. The mistrust or even distrust of Chinese subjects run deep within the Vietnamese mindset, from the skepticism of Chinese investment, Chinese tourists, discrimination against ethnic Chinese, to the caution against Chinese aggression in the South China Sea. The paper forecasts that, despite the deep-seated differences and occasional mistrust, going forward, neither side would risk damaging the status quo even when tensions peak. (shrink)

The linkage between ethical judgment and ethical behavioral intention was investigated. The Multidimensional Ethics Scale (MES) was used to measure ethical judgment ratings of hypothetical behaviors in retail, sales, and automobile repair scenarios. Confirmatory factor analysis on a sample of 300 undergraduate business students showed that a model with three latent variables representing three correlated ethical dimensions of moral equity, relativism, and contractualism, three correlated scenario latent variables, and correlated residuals presented a good fit to the data. Further, structural models (...) of the relationship of ethical judgment to behavioral intentions revealed that behavioral intentions were more highly related to the scenario factors than to the ethical dimensions across three scenarios. Adding a method factor to the model improved goodness-of-fit and changed some structural model conclusions. (shrink)

In this study, we examined moral issues and gender differences in ethical judgment using Reidenbach and Robin’s [Journal of Business Ethics9 (1990) 639) multidimensional ethics scale (MES). A total of 340 undergraduate students were asked to provide ethical judgment by rating three moral issues in the MES labeled: ‚sales’, ‚auto’, and ‚retail’ using three ethics theories: moral equity, relativism, and contractualism. We found that female students’ ratings of ethical judgment were consistently higher than that of male students across two out (...) of three moral issues examined (i.e., sales and retails) and ethics theories; providing support for Eagly’s [1987, Sex Differences in Social Behavior: A Social-role Interpretation. (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc, Hillsdale, NJ, England)] social role theory. After controlling for moral issues, women’s higher ratings of ethical judgment over men’s became statistically non-significant. Theoretical and practical implications based on the study’s findings are provided. (shrink)

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

PurposeThis paper examines the influence of leader humility on knowledge sharing intention. Drawing on social exchange theory, we test the direct and indirect mechanisms to explain the influence leader humility has on knowledge sharing intention.Design/Methodology/ApproachA two-wave, time-lagged field study was conducted. We surveyed 252 professional employees from Australia.FindingsResults show a significant direct, positive association between leader humility and knowledge sharing intention. While leader humility had a direct, positive association with affective trust in supervisor and work engagement, it did not directly (...) impact on organizational citizenship behaviors directed toward the individual. There were three SET-related, serial mediators in the relationship between leader humility and knowledge sharing intention. These were affective trust, work engagement, and OCB-I.Research Limitations/ImplicationsFuture studies should collect multi-source data such as peers’ or supervisors’ ratings of the focal respondents’ work engagement, OCB-I, and knowledge sharing behaviors to augment single-source data. Future studies could adopt an affect theory of social exchange to further explore the relationships tested in this study.Originality/ValueThis study contributes to the affect SET and knowledge management literature on how leadership behaviors impact the intention to share knowledge. Our study highlights the preference of the willingness to share knowledge with their co-workers is mediated by affective trust in their immediate supervisors, work engagement, and OCB-I that are equally important as treating their subordinates with humility. (shrink)

Vietnam has seen fast-rising debts, both domestic and external, in recent years. This paperreviews the literature on credit market in Vietnam, providing an up-to-date take on the domesticlending and borrowing landscape. The study highlights the strong demand for credit in both therural and urban areas, the ubiquity of informal lenders, the recent popularity of consumer financecompanies, as well as the government’s attempts to rein in its swelling public debt. Given thehigh level of borrowing, which is fueled by consumerism and geopolitics, (...) it is inevitable that theamount of debt will soon be higher than the saving of the borrowers. Unlike the conventional wisdom that creditors have more bargaining power over the borrowers, we suggest that—albeitlacking a quantitative estimation—when the debts pile up so high that the borrowers could not repay, the power dynamics may reverse. In this new politics of debt, the lenders fear to lose the money's worth and continue to lend and feed the insolvent debtors. The result is a toxic lending/borrowing market and profound lessons, from which the developing world could learn. (shrink)

Background: Treatment of psychotic disorders in pregnancy is often ethically and clinically challenging, especially when psychotic symptoms impair decision-making capacity. There are several competing ethical obligations to consider: the ethical obligation to maternal autonomy, the maternal and fetal beneficence-based obligations to treat peripartum psychosis, and the fetal beneficence-based obligation to minimize teratogenic exposure. Objective: This article outlines an ethical framework for clinical decision-making for the management of chronic psychosis in pregnancy, with an emphasis on special considerations in the previable and (...) periviable period. Case Presentation: A 31-year-old gravida 2, para 1 with intrauterine pregnancy at 12 weeks and 4 days gestation was brought to the emergency department by her husband seven months after delivering her first child, due to sudden onset of behavioral changes that included self-isolation, not eating, and not taking care of her child. Her past medical history included hypothyroidism and inflammatory bowel disease, but no prior psychiatric illness. After being admitted to the psychiatric hospital, she continued to have poor oral intake and weight loss despite initial inpatient treatment with antipsychotics, levothyroxine, and discontinuation of corticosteroids. Her pregnancy was also complicated by the diagnosis of multiple fetal anomalies at 20 weeks gestation, when the fetus was periviable. Conclusions: For previable or periviable pregnancies, the patient and/or surrogate should decide whether to pursue prenatal genetic screening and invasive diagnostic testing, as well as whether to continue or terminate the pregnancy. When the choice is made to continue the pregnancy, initiation of long-term psychiatric treatment (including medications with potential adverse fetal effects) should be based on shared decision-making between the physician and the patient and/or surrogate. Although some pharmacologic interventions may have potential adverse effects on the developing fetus, the use of psychotropic medications can be ethically justified, even if the patient herself does not have the capacity to consent and requires a surrogate, when the goal is to restore maternal autonomy and minimize the risks of maternal and fetal harm from untreated psychiatric illness. (shrink)

United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals 4 Quality Education has highlighted major challenges for all nations to ensure inclusive and equitable quality access to education, facilities for children, and young adults. The SDG4 is even more important for developing nations as receiving proper education or vocational training, especially in science and technology, means a foundational step in improving other aspects of their citizens’ lives. However, the extant scientific literature about STEM education still lacks focus on developing countries, even more so in (...) the rural area. Using a dataset of 4967 observations of junior high school students from a rural area in a transition economy, the article employs the Bayesian approach to identify the interaction between gender, socioeconomic status, and students’ STEM academic achievements. The results report gender has little association with STEM academic achievements; however, female students (αa_Sex[2] = 2.83) appear to have achieved better results than their male counterparts (αa_Sex[1] = 2.68). Families with better economic status, parents with a high level of education (βb(EduMot) = 0.07), or non-manual jobs (αa_SexPJ[4] = 3.25) are found to be correlated with better study results. On the contrary, students with zero (βb(OnlyChi) = -0.14) or more than two siblings (βb(NumberofChi) = -0.01) are correlated with lower study results compared to those with only one sibling. These results imply the importance of providing women with opportunities for better education. Policymakers should also consider maintaining family size so the parents can provide their resources to each child equally. (shrink)

This study investigates the relationship between corporate governance and corporate sustainability performance in the emerging Asian markets where the central role of sustainable development was perceived after the 2008 global financial crisis. We base our study on the triple bottom line approach that incorporates three dimensions of sustainability: economic, environmental, and social performance. A governance index comprising ten firm-specific provisions is proposed to summarise internal corporate governance. Consistent with agency theory, we confirm that firms with better corporate governance have better (...) corporate sustainability performance. We also determine which main factors drive the governance-sustainability relation. The findings have practical implications for firms, shareholders, and policy makers by emphasising the role of corporate governance in assessing and enhancing corporate sustainability performance. (shrink)

In this study, a U.S. Mid-Atlantic university’s business ethics education program was assessed as part of the assurance of learning assessment using a sample of one hundred and thirty upper level undergraduate business students. Across three moral dilemmas, i.e., Accounting, Finance and Human Resource Management, Jones’ (1991) issue contingent ethical decision-making model received considerable support. Both moral awareness and moral judgment were found to be related to moral intent. A focus in moral awareness in business ethics curriculum was recommended as (...) a result of lying being viewed as acceptable by a majority of respondents in the Human Resource Management scenario. Implications for business ethics education were discussed. (shrink)

In this study, a U.S. Mid-Atlantic university’s business ethics education program was assessed as part of the assurance of learning assessment using a sample of one hundred and thirty upper level undergraduate business students. Across three moral dilemmas, i.e., Accounting, Finance and Human Resource Management, Jones’ (1991) issue contingent ethical decision-making model received considerable support. Both moral awareness and moral judgment were found to be related to moral intent. A focus in moral awareness in business ethics curriculum was recommended as (...) a result of lying being viewed as acceptable by a majority of respondents in the Human Resource Management scenario. Implications for business ethics education were discussed. (shrink)