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PurposeThe authors examine the factors affecting households' resilience capacities and the impacts of these capacities on household consumption and crop commercialization.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use panel data of 1,648 households from Thailand collected in three years, 2010, 2013 and 2016. The authors employ an econometric model with an instrumental variable approach to address endogenous issues.FindingsThe study results show that the experience of shocks in previous years positively correlates with households' savings per capita and income diversification. Further, a better absorptive capacity in the form of better savings and a better adaptive capacity in the form of higher income diversification have a significant and positive influence on household expenditure per capita and crop commercialization.Practical implicationsDevelopment policies and programs aiming to improve income, increase savings and provide income diversification opportunities are strongly recommended.Originality/valueThe authors provide empirical evidence on the determinants of resilience strategies and their impacts on local food commercialization from a country in the middle-income group.

Purpose:Traumatic cervical spondyloptosis is a rare clinical pathology that often causes complete paralysis. When a patient presents neurologically intact or incomplete paralysis, the management becomes more complicated. Preservation of neural function and restoration of anatomic alignment collectively remain the golden goals of therapy. There are still few reports on this issue, however, the existing literature did not clearly define severity of injuries and the treatment strategy in such cases. On the occasion of reporting one treated traumatic C6-7 spondyloptosis case, we reviewed existing literatures. Material and Methods:The patient was a 48-year-old man who had motorcycle accident and was presented with post-operation for right frontal epidural hematoma in 3 days before admitting to hospital. Neurological assessment showed motor strength grade 3/5 in the proximal upper and lower-extremity muscle groups on the right side, and 1/5 on the left side with incontinence of sphincters. X-rays and computed tomography (CT) scan revealed a three-column ligamentous injury with complete anterior displacement of C6 to C7 vertebral body. We applied the “Key - Lock” principle for better understanding of the biomechanics of the injury and found out the favorable strategy. The patient underwent posterior approach with decompression and anterior approach with reduction and anterior cervical discectomy fusion for C6-7. Results:After 8 months follow-up, the patient had recovered muscular strength in bilateral upper and lower-extremities muscle groups, sphincter function had fully recovered, and he was able to ambulate by himself. Plain radiograph and CT scan showed good aligment and progressive maturation of his fusion procedure. Conclusion:Traumatic cervical spondyloptosis of C6-7 is a high-energy unstable fracture and rare. This report develops a new principle called “Key and Lock” for more understand the biomechanics of the injury and treatment. Our patient was successfully treated with open reduction, decompression, and anterior cervical discectomy fusion.

Understanding households’ resilience-building strategies is vital for the domains of humanitarian assistance, economic development, and poverty reduction, especially in the places where are vulnerable to shocks. In this study, we offer the first trial that takes into account the correlation between households’ risk attitude and their resilience-building strategies, namely savings as an absorptive capacity and income diversification as an adaptive capacity. We examine the effects of these resilience strategies on reducing the impacts of shocks and poverty. We use a panel data of 1227 identical households for Vietnam in two waves of the Thailand–Vietnam Socio-Economic Panel project to investigate the above issues. We address the endogenous problems of households’ risk attitude, savings, and income diversification. Our results show that more risk-averse households tend to save more and diversify their income portfolios. These precautionary strategies to build up their resilience capacity help prevent them from reducing consumption caused by shocks and from falling into poverty in absolute, relative, and multidimensional measures. We suggest that rural development policies in developing countries should focus on facilitating more income generation and employment opportunities. Furthermore, the development of rural education and infrastructure for information and communication technology should be taken into account of designing poverty reduction programs.

Since the economic and political reforms in 1986, Vietnam government has introduced a high extent of decentralization in fiscal and administrative aspects. This paper examines the impact of foreign...

Natural resources are important in sustaining the livelihoods of rural households and the environment. However, over-exploitation is causing an alarming depletion of natural resources in many developing countries. At the same time, rapid economic growth has created non-farm employment opportunities for local people. In this context, examining the interrelationship between non-farm employment and natural resource extraction provides useful information for reducing resource extraction and improving rural households’ welfare. In this study, we use a dataset of 1780 identical households from three survey waves undertaken in 2010, 2013, and 2016 in Vietnam to (i) identify the determinants of rural households’ participation in non-farm activities, (ii) examine the interrelationship between non-farm employment and natural resource extraction, and (iii) investigate the impact of non-farm employment on rural households’ welfare. The findings from pooled sample estimations reveal that (i) cable internet at home and rural road quality positively affect households’ decisions to participate in non-farm employment; (ii) non-farm income and income from natural resource extraction have a negative association; and (iii) non-farm income significantly contributes to poverty reduction in both relative and absolute terms. Our findings suggest that improved provision of non-farm opportunities and increased investment in infrastructure and telecommunication are needed to improve rural households’ welfare and consequently reduce their natural resource exploitation.

This paper investigates the determinants of fishery export from Vietnam using a structural gravity modelling. Taken additional trade-related variables from the World Bank’s open data into the estimation of the gravity model, this research will be the first trial to examine the impacts of these variables on export of fishery products and to propose policy implications for stimulating export in Vietnam. The empirical results show that each 1% reduction of export costs might increase approximately 3.7% of the export value of fishery products. This finding is critical because the current administrative system for export of agricultural commodity in Vietnam consists of many stages and includes a long period of animal quarantine inspection, document checking, and customs clearance that might cause additional export costs. Therefore, policies aiming at reducing the costs of border and documentary compliance for export will be significant to stimulate export in developing countries as Vietnam.

With growth in the physical size of wind turbines, an increased structural loading of wind turbine components affecting operational reliability is expected. To mitigate structural loading in wind turbines, a novel strategy for structural load mitigation and rotor speed regulation of utility-scale wind turbines in above-rated wind speed region is proposed in this contribution. Spatial and temporal variation of wind speed is responsible for fatigue loading during power production. Previous attempts have proposed advanced control schemes incorporating disturbance models for cancelling the effects of wind disturbances. These controllers are usually designed based on reduced order models of nonlinear wind turbines, hence do not account for modeling errors and nonlinearities. Although robust controllers have been proposed to handle nonlinearities during wind turbine operation, these controllers are designed about specific operating points, hence suffer performance deterioration in changing operating conditions. In this contribution, a robust disturbance accommodating controller (RDAC), which is robust against modeling errors and nonlinearities, is combined with an adaptive independent pitch controller (aIPC), designed to be adaptive to changing operating points due to wind speed variability, to mitigate structural loads in rotor blades and tower and to regulate rotor speed. The proposed control scheme is tested on a 1.5 MW National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) reference wind turbine (RWT). Simulation results show that the proposed method successfully mitigates structural loading in rotor blades and tower without sacrificing rotor speed and power regulation performance in the presence of model uncertainties and changing operating conditions.

This research aimed to examine the factors affecting the participation of female rural–urban migrants in online marketplaces, and the welfare gains and their distribution. Our analysis was based on a unique dataset of rural households, villages, and rural–urban migrants in Thailand and Vietnam. Online market participation is classified into three activities: financial transactions, trading, and business. We accounted for the endogeneity issue of online market participation in the assessment of welfare impact by using an instrumental variable approach. Our results show that participation has a positive effect on the consumption of female migrants only when they participate in the complete bundle of online market activities. In addition, we find that the poor benefit insignificantly from online marketplaces. This raises a concern about increasing welfare inequality and suggests the poor should be supported so they are not left behind.

Variability in wind profiles in both space and time is responsible for fatigue loading in wind turbine components. Advanced control methods for mitigating structural loading in these components have been proposed in previous works. These also incorporate other objectives like speed and power regulation for above-rated wind speed operation. In recent years, lifetime control and extension strategies have been proposed to guarantee power supply and operational reliability of wind turbines. These control strategies typically rely on a fatigue load evaluation criteria to determine the consumed lifetime of these components, subsequently varying the control set point to guarantee a desired lifetime of the components. Most of these methods focus on controlling the lifetime of specific structural components of a wind turbine, typically the rotor blade or tower. Additionally, controllers are often designed to be valid about specific operating points and hence exhibit deteriorating performance in varying operating conditions. Therefore, they are not able to guarantee a desired lifetime in varying wind conditions. In this paper an adaptive lifetime control strategy is proposed for controlled aging of rotor blades to guarantee a desired lifetime while considering damage accumulation level in the tower. The method relies on an online structural health monitoring system to vary the lifetime controller gains based on a state-of-health (SoH) measure by considering the desired lifetime at every time step. For demonstration, a 1.5 MW National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) reference wind turbine is used. The proposed adaptive lifetime controller regulates structural loading in the rotor blades to guarantee a predefined damage level at the desired lifetime without sacrificing the speed regulation performance of the wind turbine. Additionally, a significant reduction in the tower fatigue damage is observed.

International audience; The main contribution of this paper consists of the development of two methods for actuator fault estimation in dealing with the partially decoupled disturbances of the descriptor system, which is divided into decoupled and non-decoupled unknown inputs (UI). Based on the conventional UI observer, both of the solutions decouples the fault estimation with the first group of UI, while the second UI group is handled differently by each method. Finally, a numerical example with comparisons points out the performance of each approach.

The New Rural Development program (NRD) is among the top developmental policies of Vietnam’s government to cope with imperative issues in the rural regions, especially a widening income gap between...

International audience; The main contribution of this article is a new methodology of a polytopic observer-based controller in estimating and accommodating polynomial actuator degradation for uncertain stochastic linear parameter varying system. In this design, robust observer-based controller gains are synthesized with a unique linear matrix inequality solution such that the impact of disturbance on observer estimation is attenuated by a frequency-shaping filter, while ensuring the closed-loop stability against system uncertainties and stochastic noise. Finally, an example is illustrated to highlight the performance of the proposed method.

Myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs) are a heterogeneous population of immature myeloid cells with inhibitory effects on T cell-mediated immune response. MDSCs accumulate under many pathological conditions, including cancers, to avoid anticancer immunity. Unlike mouse MDSCs, common specific surface markers for human MDSCs are not clearly defined, mainly due to the complexity of MDSC subsets. In this study, we investigate specific responses of the infrared dye MHI-148 to MDSCs. Mice bearing 4T1 breast cancer cells were established, and splenocytes were isolated. Flow cytometric analyses demonstrated that MHI-148 was reactive to over 80% of MDSC-specific cells manifesting CD11b(+)/Gr-1(+) acquired from both tumor-bearing mice and naive mice. Cells sorted positive for either CD11b/Gr-1 or MHI-148 were also identical to their counterparts (99.7% and 97.7%, respectively). MHI-148, however, was not reactive to lymphocyte or monocyte populations. To determine whether MHI-148-reactive cells exert inhibitory effects on T cell proliferation, an EdU-based T cell assay was performed. MHI-148 reactive cells significantly reduced T cell proliferation with increased arginase activity and nitrite production. In an attempt to test MHI-148 as a marker for human MDSCs, MHI-148 was specifically reactive to CD11b(+)/CD33(+)/CD14(-) granulocytic MDSCs acquired from selected cancer patients. This study demonstrates that the near-infrared dye MHI-148 specifically reacts to mouse splenocytes with known MDSC-specific markers that have T cell suppressive functions. The dye also selectively binds to a subpopulation of immature myeloid cells acquired from cancer patients. While it is not clear how MHI-148 specifically stains MDSCs, this dye can be a novel tool to detect MDSCs and to predict the prognosis of human cancer patients.

The main contribution of this paper is a H ∞ observer design for a new class of general singular Nonlinear Parameter-varying system in the presence of disturbances and Lipschitz nonlinearity. In specific, this observer tackles the impact of disturbance on estimation error thanks to the H ∞ norm, while the robust parameter-dependent stability of estimation dynamics helps to widen the feasible region of LMI solution under the Lipschitz constraint. Finally, a numerical example with the gridding solution is illustrated to highlight the proposed design.

International audience; The main contribution of this paper is a methodology, derived from H2 cost functional, Parseval’s Theorem in controller design and the principle of unknown input observer, for the estimation and accommodation of polynomial actuator degradation. In this design, the observer-based controller, integrated with a frequency-shaping filter and a state-feedback compensator, attenuates the disturbance influence on observer estimation and maintains the system stability. Furthermore, due to its simplicity, industrial engineers and readers can easily apply the proposed method to health maintenance system. Finally, an application to suspension system is illustrated to highlight the performance of the proposed method.

Purpose: To describe some factors affecting patient caregiver’s satisfaction at Outpatient Department, Vietnam National Chidren’s Hospital in 2019. Method: A cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted on 514 caregivers (aged 18 years and over). Results: There was no difference by gender (p> 0.05) of satisfaction of the patient’s caregivers on the quality of medical services. The satisfaction rate was approximately equal for both men and women (male 74.3%, female 74.8%). There was a statistically significant difference between caregivers’ occupation and satisfaction. Through the data, we saw the highest rate of caregivers’ satisfaction was among farmers and free workers 73.9%. The percentage of dissatisfaction was higher at 42.4% among pupils, students, and officials. Conclution: The higher the educational level is, the higher the level of dissatisfaction. Student and official group has the highest rate of dissatisfaction.

The New Rural Development (NRD) program is one of the most important policies in agriculture and rural development of Vietnam by 2020. In the period of 2010 – 2015, the government mobilized about 851,380 billion Vietnam Dong (VND) (approximately US$38.7 billion) for investments in rural development projects across the country. Among the top priorities, solving a broadening income and poverty gap between urban and rural areas, between leading and lagging regions, and among ethnic groups are one of the most essential issues. This research paper is targeted to provide an empirical evidence for answering the question whether the government assistance could effectively and positively impact on rural households’ income through the NRD program by using a hierarchical linear modelling (HLM). The results of the mixed effect model could firmly reveal that the financial assistance could positively influence on rural households’ income through investments in roads, income generation models, and technical trainings.

The main contribution of this paper is the design of robust $\mathcal{H}_{\infty}$ proportional-integral (PI) observer for fault detection, isolation and magnitude estimation, applied for uncertain linear time-invariant (LTI) system. It is based on a combination of PI observer and $\mathcal{H}_{\infty}$ norm in order to deal with system uncertainty and disturbance attenuation. This multi-objective problem is tackled by the solution of linear matrix inequality (LMI) feasibility problem, obtained from the analysis of estimation errors and the use of majoration lemma. The application to a real suspension system is then presented to highlight the performances of the proposed observer.

Behaviors of migrants towards shocks are worthy to study to understand their reflection on external unexpected events to narrow the gap in the literature of migrations. Besides, rural development policies are believed to help reverse the rural-urban migration. This research paper was aimed at taking these critical points from literature into examination for justifications such as impacts of shocks, rural development interventions, and other determinants on migrants’ decision to return and staying duration in the cities with an empirical analysis from the unique Thailand – Vietnam Socio-Economic Panel (TVSEP) data. The estimation results from the two-step Heckman model show that demographic shocks positively affect migrants’ decision to return, while social shocks affecting the migrants during the time in the cities are negatively impact their decision to return. In the outcome stage of migration period, the result signifies that economic shocks positively influence migrants’ staying period in the cities. Besides, migrants from poor communes with poverty reduction projects are more unlikely to return. This implies that current rural development policies in Vietnam with a goal of poverty reduction might not be attractive or efficient enough to fill the gap between the rural and urban regions.

The main contribution of this paper is a robust $\mathscr{H}_{2}$ observer design to estimate the actuator degradation under the influence of disturbances and parametric uncertainty. In this design, the observer conception, based on the $\mathscr{H}_{2}$ frequency-shaping filter and theorem of Parseval, allows the estimation of degradation in polynomial form while coping with system uncertainty. Moreover, the usage of the proposed method also relaxes the conditions for unknown input observer (UIO) or the min-max optimization in linear matrix inequality (LMI) for the disturbance attenuation, which facilitates the robust observer design by engineers. Finally, an application to suspension system is presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed method.

Composites of carbon nanotubes – titanate nanotubes (MWNTs/ TNTs) – were successfully synthesized by the hydrothermal reaction process. The morphology of the MWNTs/TNTs composites was observed by transmission electron microscopy. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy was used to characterize the molecular interactions between TNTs and MWNTs in the composites. The X-ray diffraction of TNTs and MWNTs/TNTs composites exhibited the existence of titanate phase (100), (102), (020) and (422). The charge recombination of MWNTs/TNTs composites was examined by photoluminescence spectrum. The photocatalytic activity of TNTs and MWNTs/TNTs composites was evaluated on the basis of the model oxidation reaction of H2S.

CD46 is a complement inhibitor membrane cofactor which also acts as a receptor for various microbes, including species B adenoviruses (Ads). While most Ad gene therapy vectors are derived from species C and infect cells through coxsackie-adenovirus receptor (CAR), CAR expression is downregulated in many cancer cells, resulting inefficient Ad-based therapeutics. Despite a limited knowledge on the expression status of many cancer cells, an increasing number of cancer gene therapy studies include fiber-modified Ad vectors redirected to the more ubiquitously expressed CD46. Since our finding from tumor microarray indicate that CD46 was overexpressed in cancers of the prostate and colon, fiber chimeric Ad5/35 vectors that have infection tropism for CD46 were employed to demonstrate its efficacy in colorectal cancers (CRC). CD46-overexpressed cells showed a significantly higher response to Ad5/35-GFP and to Ad5/35-tk/GCV. While CRC cells express variable levels of CD46, CD46 expression was positively correlated with Ad5/35-mediated GFP fluorescence and accordingly its cell killing. Injection of Ad5/35-tk/GCV caused much greater tumor-suppression in mice bearing CD46-overexpressed cancer xenograft compared to mock group. Analysis of CRC samples revealed that patients with positive CD46 expression had a higher survival rate (p=0.031), carried tumors that were well-differentiated, but less invasive and metastatic, and with a low T stage (all p

Zinc is a group IIB heavy metal. It is an important regulator of major cell signaling pathways in most mammalian cells, functions as an antioxidant and plays a role in maintaining genomic stability. Zinc deficiency leads to severe diseases in the brain, pancreas, liver, kidneys and reproductive organs. Zinc loss occurs during tumor development in a variety of cancers. The prostate normally contains abundant intracellular zinc and zinc loss is a hallmark of the development of prostate cancer development. The underlying mechanism of this loss is not clearly understood. The knowledge that excess zinc prevents the growth of prostate cancers suggests that zinc-mediated therapeutics could be an effective approach for cancer prevention and treatment, although challenges remain. This review summarizes the specific roles of zinc in several cancer types focusing on prostate cancer. The relationship between prostate cancer and the dysregulation of zinc homeostasis is examined in detail in an effort to understand the role of zinc in prostate cancer.

The main contribution of this paper is an integrated design of robust fault estimation (FE) and fault accommodation (FA), applied to uncertain linear time invariant (LTI) systems. In this design, the robust $\mathscr{H}_{\infty}$ proportional-integral (PI) observer allows a precise estimation of actuator fault by dealing with system disturbances and uncertainties, while the feed-back controller compensates the actuator fault, and therefore assuring the closed-loop stability. Thanks to the application of majoration and Young inequalities, the observer-controller decoupling problem is solved and both above objectives are combined into only one linear matrix inequalities (LMI) allowing a simultaneous solution for both observer and controller. Finally, an example of vehicle suspension system is illustrated to highlight the performance of the proposed method.

International audience; The main contribution of this paper is the design of robust $H_\infty$ proportional-integral (PI) observers for actuator fault estimation, applied to uncertain linear time-invariant system. The observer design is based on the PI observer, combining the $H_\infty$ norm to deal with system uncertainties and disturbance attenuation. Then the application to the suspension system is presented in order to highlight the performance of the proposed estimator.

The prostate gland contains a high level of intracellular zinc, which is dramatically diminished during prostate cancer (PCa) development. Owing to the unclear role of zinc in this process, therapeutic applications using zinc are limited. This study aimed to clarify the role of zinc and its underlying mechanism in the growth of PCa. ZnCl2 suppressed the proliferation of androgen receptor (AR)-retaining PCa cells, whereas it did not affect AR-deficient PCa cells. In LNCaP and TRAMP-C2 cells, zinc downregulated the expression of AR in a dose- and time-dependent fashion. Zinc-mediated AR suppression accordingly inhibited the androgen-mediated transactivation and expression of the androgen target, prostate specific antigen (PSA). This phenomenon resulted from facilitated protein degradation, not transcriptional control. In studies using mice bearing TRAMP-C2 subcutaneous tumors, the intraperitoneal injection of zinc significantly reduced tumor size. Analyses of both xenograft tumors and normal prostates showed reduced expression of AR and increased cell death. Considering the significant loss of intracellular zinc and the dominant growth-modulating role of AR during PCa development, loss of zinc may be a critical step in the transformation of normal cells to cancer cells. This study provides the underlying mechanism by which zinc functions as a PCa suppressor, and forms the foundation for developing zinc-mediated therapeutics for PCa.

CD46 is generally overexpressed in many human cancers, representing a prime target for CD46-binding adenoviruses (Ads). This could help to overcome low anti-tumoral activity by coxsackie-adenoviral receptor (CAR)-targeting cancer gene therapy viruses. However, because of scarce side-by-side information about CAR and CD46 expression levels in cancer cells, mixed observations of cancer therapeutic efficacy have been observed. This study evaluated Ad-mediated therapeutic efficacy using either CAR-targeting Ad5 or CD46-targeting Ad5/35 fiber chimera in bladder cancer cell lines. Compared with normal urothelia, bladder cancer tissue generally overexpressed both CAR and CD46. While CAR expression was not correlated with disease progression, CD46 expression was inversely correlated with tumor grade, stage, and risk grade. In bladder cancer cell lines, expression levels of CD46 and CAR were highly correlated with Ad5/35- and Ad5-mediated gene transduction and cytotoxicity, respectively. In a human EJ bladder cancer xenograft mouse model, with either overexpressed or suppressed CD46 expression levels, Ad5/35-tk followed by ganciclovir (GCV) treatment significantly affected tumor growth, whereas Ad5-tk/GCV had only minimal effects. Overall, our findings suggest that bladder cancer cells overexpress both CAR and CD46, and that adenoviral cancer gene therapy targeting CD46 represents a more suitable therapy option than a CAR-targeting therapy, especially in patients with low risk bladder cancers.

International audience; The main contribution of this paper is the design of robust $\mathcal{H}_{\infty}$ proportional-integral (PI) observer for fault detection, isolation and magnitude estimation, applied for uncertain linear time-invariant (LTI) system. It is based on a combination of PI observer and $\mathcal{H}_{\infty}$ norm in order to deal with system uncertainty and disturbance attenuation. This multi-objective problem is tackled by the solution of linear matrix inequality (LMI) feasibility problem, obtained from the analysis of estimation errors and the use of majoration lemma. The application to a real suspension system is then presented to highlight the performances of the proposed observer.

A nanopowder of iron was prepared using a high-energy ball milling method, which is capable of producing nanoparticles at a reasonably larger scale compared to conventional chemical methods. Analyses using x-ray diffraction and magnetic measurements indicate that the iron nanoparticles are a single phase of a body-centered cubic structure and have quite stable magnetic characteristics in the air. The iron nanoparticles were then mixed with paraffin and pressed into flat square plates for free-space microwave transmission and reflection measurements in the 4–8 GHz range. Without an Al backing plate, the Fe nanoparticles seem to only weakly absorb microwave radiation. The reflected signal S 11 drops to zero and a very large negative value of reflection loss (RL) are observed for Al-backed samples, suggesting the existence of a phase matching resonance near frequency f ∼ 6 GHz.