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This paper investigates the evidence of productivity spillover from foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) to local firms through horizontal, backward, and forward spillover channels, using establishment-level data from Vietnam in 2006–2017. The paper also considers the effects of foreign ownership types on the existence and magnitude of the productivity spillover. In addition, the paper examines whether the involvement of domestic firms in global production networks (GPNs) impacts on the nature of the spillover. The findings indicate that productivity from FIEs spills over to local firms through backward and forward channels, but not horizontal channels. Ownership structures of FIEs serve as an important determinant of productivity spillover: joint ventures tend to generate more significant positive productivity spillover to domestic firms than fully owned foreign firms. Lastly, local firms operating within GPNs benefit more from the presence of FIEs compared to those involved in horizontal specialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) is the second most important vegetable crop after potatoes, and global demands have been steadily increasing in recent years. Conventional and modern breeding techniques have been applied to breed and domesticate tomato varieties to meet the need for higher yield or superior agronomical traits that allow them to sustain under different climatic conditions. In the current study, we applied bulk population breeding by crossing eight tomato accessions procured from the Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center with three heat-resistant tomato inbred lines from Vietnam and generated ten elite tomato (ET) lines in the F8 generation. The individual F8 lines exhibited robust vigor and adaptability to climatic conditions of North Vietnam. Among the ten lines, ET1 and ET3 displayed indeterminate growth. ET2 showed semi-determinate, while all the other lines had determinate growth. The different ET lines showed distinctive superior agronomical traits, including early maturing (ET4, ET7, and ET10), highly efficient fruit set (ET1), higher yield (ET1, ET8, ET10), jointless pedicels (ET2), and partial parthenocarpy (ET9). Molecular analysis revealed that the ET3 line consisted of Ty-1 and Ty-3 loci that positively contribute to Tomato yellow leaf curl virus resistance in tomato plants. The elite tomato lines developed in this study would contribute significantly to the Vietnamese and Asian gene pool for improved tomato production and would be a valuable resource for various breeding goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Living standards are rising due to a more developed society, and recreation, particularly tourism, is becoming more critical. Expanding the tourist industry is one of the most significant concerns in economic growth. Tourism revenue has helped increase residents' income, leading to socio-economic development. In recent years, emerging Vietnamese tourism spots like Hon Son, Sapa, Hue, Phu Quoc in Vietnam, and others have consistently drawn travellers to visit and experience through social networking platforms. Tourism potential is tremendous, but foreign visitors' information about tourist destinations still needs to be improved. This work proposes an approach to integrating machine learning algorithms into an information system to consult tourism traveling. Machine learning algorithms can classify question topics, predict user intent, and predict conversation scenarios to give appropriate responses. Our method is evaluated on the dataset, including 7319 samples on 11 topics collected from the TWCS dataset, using three algorithms: Bag of Words, BERT, and RoBERTa. BERT achieved the highest performance among the surveyed algorithms with 90 % in accuracy and 90.1 % in F1-Score. From the trained model, the team built a mobile application on Android to deploy the chatbot application with the Flutter framework based on Dart, an object-oriented programming language developed by Google using the concept of containers. The system's functionality serves two primary user groups: administrators and application users. Administrators can utilize the application's primary functions to manage content set up, and train a chatbot. Users can access information about locations, read location articles, check hotel prices, and use chatbots to find answers to their location-related questions. Administrators can also train the chatbot model to expand its knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Besides the successful use of support software in cutting-edge medical procedures, the significance of determining a disease early signs and symptoms before its detection is a growing pressing requirement to raise the standard of medical examination and treatment. This creates favourable conditions, reduces patient inconvenience and hospital overcrowding. Before transferring patients to an appropriate doctor, healthcare staff must have the patient's symptoms. This study leverages the PhoBERT model to assist in classifying patients with text classification tasks based on symptoms they provided in the first stages of Vietnamese hospital admission. The outcomes of PhoBERT on more than 200 000 text-based symptoms collected from Vietnamese hospitals can improve the classification performance compared to Bag of Words (BOW) with classic machine learning algorithms, and some considered deep learning architectures such as 1D-Convolutional Neural Networks and Long Short-Term Memory. The proposed method can achieve promising results to be deployed in automatic hospital admission procedures in Vietnam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Mekong Delta region of Vietnam has great potential for agricultural development thanks to natural incentives. Many livestock industries have developed for a long time and play an important role in the country with many agricultural export products. In the era of breakthrough technologies and advances in information technology, many techniques are used to support the development of smart agriculture. In particular, computer vision techniques are widely applied to help farmers save a lot of labour and cost. This study presents an approach for counting eels based on Mathematical Morphology Operations and Boundary Detection from images of breeding eels captured with the proposed photo box. The proposed method is evaluated using data collected directly from a breeding eel farm in Vietnam. The authors of the research evaluate and investigate the length distribution of eels to select the appropriate size for counting tasks. The experiments show positive results with an average Mean Absolute Error of 2.2 over a tray of more than 17 eels. The contribution of the research is to provide tools to support farmers in eel farms to save time and effort and improve efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

(d) The contacted fish exhibited severely attenuated and flattened epithelium (yellow arrow) and alteration in their pigment layer on the dorsal skin (black arrow, H&E stain) gl Field observations suggested that the sea anemone may be the cause of the acute death of the snubnose pompano and permit. Keywords: broodstock; mortality; permit; red drum; snubnose pompano EN broodstock mortality permit red drum snubnose pompano 1799 1803 5 10/14/22 20221101 NES 221101 In February 2022, unusual acute mortalities were observed in snubnose pompano ( I Trachinotus blochii i ) and permit ( I T. falcatus i ) broodstock held in sea cages in Nha Phu lagoon, Khanh Hoa, Vietnam. Thirty fish ( I n i = 30) were divided evenly among three groups: high density (25 sea anemones per 100 ml), low density (5 sea anemones per 100 ml) and control (no sea anemone). [Extracted from the article]

Brown Planthopper (BPH) is one of the most dangerous insects that cause damage to rice. Aphids infected rice fields with low productivity can be lost even. Dealing with this situation, the Plant Protection industry has invented the light trap - a device based on the specific activity of insects phototaxis. These measures are considered effective and less costly today. However, the current light traps are usually installed next to the home of the staff assigned to manage light traps for easy tracking without attention to the impact of environmental factors around. Currently, the plant protection industry wants more scientific basis in light traps arranged so they want to review and make the factors of climate and geography in the light traps installed but not yet performed. In this paper, we propose an approach to find appropriate positions to replace light traps based on a combination between weather factors and geographical factors with data on infected areas by BPH with various infection levels exhibited on the maps based on Cellular Automata method. We present the simulation results with 8 considered cases to determine positions for light traps in an area of more than 1400 square kilometres including 84 communes in Can Tho city, one of the largest rice granaries in Vietnam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sliding Mode algorithm is familiar in control and automation. It has many categories with different names and different methods on choosing sliding surface. Additionally, some laboratories in Vietnam have researched on this but most of their results are on simulation. Therefore, in this paper, authors present one of direction general sliding mode control- Incremental Sliding Mode Control- to control Futura Pendulum (Rotary Inverted Pendulum). Balancing and trajectory tracking problems are solved through this process. This direction is proved to work well through both simulation and experiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • The genetic diversity of Pyricularia oryzae populations was elevated in Vietnam. • Six genetic clusters were defined: 4 pandemic and 2 endemic. • Blast population structure in Vietnam was shaped by a combination of three factors. • Mating types were unevenly distributed in the whole population and among clusters. • Recombination signals were detected in some restricted areas of Northern mountains. We characterized the genetic structure of 609 strains of Pyricularia oryzae, the fungal pathogen causing rice blast disease, in three main regions in Vietnam using microsatellites (SSR) markers. From the 447 distinct multilocus genotypes identified, six genetic clusters were defined, all of them showing elevated genetic and genotypic diversities. Four of these clusters were related to rice-attacking lineages already described at the worldwide scale, whereas the two remaining clusters were endemic to Vietnam. Strains were unevenly distributed into the six clusters depending on their groups of rice variety (indica / japonica) or type of varieties (traditional / modern) of origin, but none of the clusters was specifically related to these two factors. The highest diversity of blast population was found in Northern mountainous area, and the lowest in Red River Delta in both terms of genetic diversity and gene diversity. Hierarchical AMOVAs confirmed that all three factors considered (rice variety group, type of variety origin and geography) significantly contributed to the population structure of P. oryzae in Vietnam, with highest contribution from rice variety group. Mating types were unevenly distributed among clusters. Combined with results of female fertility and linkage disequilibirum, we hypothesized that clonal reproduction probably occurred in all clusters, but that sexual reproduction likely took place at least in some restricted areas in the Northern mountainous area for strains belonging to the cluster related to the previously described recombinant lineage (worldwide lineage 1). Our study pictures the genetic diversity, population structure and reproductive mode of the blast fungus in central and north Vietnam, and shows that the observed population structure is explained by several factors, the most important one being the variability of rice variety. All these new information might help for elaborating appropriate strategies to controlling the blast disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated a low-cost and low-skill dependent pressure casting technique (PCAST) to fabricate and fit transtibial (TT) prosthetic sockets in a developing country. Thirteen adult volunteers (average age 47 yr) with unilateral TT amputation participated. After fitting, five participants were lost to follow-up (four rejected the prosthesis and one died). The eight remaining participants used the prosthesis for an average of 167 +/- 1 d and indicated regular use throughout this period. Success was evaluated by measures of satisfaction (Satisfaction with Prosthesis Questionnaire [SATPRO]), physical function, and gait recorded after fitting and following the usage period. SATPRO results showed high levels of satisfaction on both occasions. After the usage period, the timed up-and- go and six-minute walk performances increased by 1.7 +/- 2.0 s and 60 +/- 29 m (p = 0.001), respectively, whereas gait speed, cadence, step and stride length, support base, and percent gait cycle times remained unchanged. The results show that a TT PCAST socket (with some minor modifications) was successfully fitted to eight of the participants (success rate of 62%). It is reasonable to conclude that this technique may assist people with TT amputation in a developing country where there is a lack of trained personnel. Importantly, this technique may reduce TT prosthetic costs and increase fitting opportunity in a developing country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study, for the first time, has investigated the relationships between alterations of mangiferin contents in mango leaves at different maturity stages and their antibacterial properties. Leaves were classified into six different maturity stages based on their color: (1) young dark reddish brown, (2) young yellow, (3) young light green, (4) mature green, (5) old dark green, and (6) old yellow leaves. Ethanol extracts were then examined against Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, applying broth dilution and agar well diffusion methods. In addition, we also measured the mangiferin contents in leaves at different stages for the purpose of evaluating how the changes in this phytochemistry value affects their activities against bacteria. The results showed that extracts from leaves at young ages had better antibacterial properties than those from old leaves, as evidenced by the lower minimum inhibitory concentrations and larger inhibitory zones. In addition, we also found that the contents of mangiferin were significantly decreased followed the maturation process. These results suggest that mango leaves at young stages, especially dark reddish brown and young yellow leaves, are preferable for application in bacterial infections and other therapies related to mangiferin's constituents.

Objectives: We investigated the characteristics of prophylactic antimicrobial use in clean and clean-contaminated surgical procedures and assessed the efficacy of a prophylactic antimicrobial stewardship intervention at Thong Nhat Hospital, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam., Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted on 354 patients who underwent either clean or clean-contaminated surgical procedures at Thong Nhat Hospital. Eligible patients were classified with respect to three periods of intervention from 2017 to 2020. Data collection included surgical procedures, patient characteristics, and prophylactic antimicrobial usage. We determined the efficacy of antimicrobial stewardship intervention based on comparisons among the primary outcome (the appropriateness of prophylactic antimicrobials) and secondary outcomes (postoperative antimicrobial prophylaxis (AP) prolongation, length of postoperative hospital stay, and cost of antimicrobials)., Results: The mean age of patients in periods 1, 2, and 3 was 54.5 ± 16.6, 50.2 ± 16.5, and 52.8 ± 17.3 years, respectively, with an overall male/female ratio of 1.1/1. No significant differences were detected in basic patient characteristics during the three periods. Majority of the surgical procedures were clean (56%-59%) and scheduled (85%-86%). Prophylactic antimicrobial stewardship intervention enhanced AP appropriateness (by 12.7%, 12.7%, and 39.0% in periods 1, 2, and 3, respectively, p < 0.001), decreased postoperative prophylactic antimicrobial duration [3.0 (0-6), 1.5 (0-5), and 0.0 (0-1) days, respectively, p < 0.001], and reduced average antimicrobial expenses (p < 0.001)., Conclusions: The prophylactic antimicrobial stewardship interventions introduced at Thong Nhat Hospital had several positive impacts on the appropriateness of prophylactic antimicrobial use and treatment costs., (© 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)