Nowadays, the power systems are getting more and more complicated because of the delays introduced by the communication networks. The existence of the delays usually leads to the degradation and/or instability of power system performance. On account of this point, the traditional load frequency control approach for power system sketches a destabilizing impact and an unacceptable system performance. Therefore, this paper proposes a new LFC based on adaptive integral second-order sliding mode control approach for the large-scale power system with communication (...) delays. First, a new linear matrix inequality is derived to ensure the stability of whole power systems using Lyapunov stability theory. Second, an AISOSMC law is designed to ensure the finite time reachability of the system states. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time the AISOSMC is designed for LFC of the LSPSwCD. In addition, the report of testing results presents that the suggested LFC based on AISOSMC can not only decrease effectively the frequency variation but also make successfully less in mount of power oscillation/fluctuation in tie-line exchange. (shrink)

This paper endeavors to understand the research landscape of finance research in Vietnam during the period 2008 to 2020 and predict the key defining future research directions. Using the comprehensive database of Vietnam’s international publications in social sciences and humanities, we extract a dataset of 314 papers on finance topics in Vietnam from 2008 to 2020. Then, we apply a systematic approach to analyze four important themes: Structural issues, Banking system, Firm issues, and Financial psychology and behavior. Overall, there have (...) been three noticeable trends within finance research in Vietnam: (1) assessment of financial policies or financial regulation, (2) deciphering the correlates of firms’ financial performances, and (3) opportunities and challenges in adopting innovations and ideas from foreign financial market systems. Our analysis identifies several fertile areas for future research, including financial market analysis in the post-COVID-19 eras, fintech, and green finance. (shrink)

This article addresses the problem of automatically extracting legal indices which express the important contents of legal documents. Legal indices are not limited to single-word keywords and compound-word keywords, they are also clause keywords. We approach index extraction using structural information of Japanese sentences, i.e. chunks and clauses. Based on the assumption that legal indices are composed of important tokens from the documents, extracting legal indices is treated as a problem of collecting chunks and clauses that contain as many important (...) tokens as possible. Each token is assigned a weight which is a statistical score, e.g. TF–IDF and Okapi BM25, to indicate its importance. The importance of a chunk or clause is determined based on the average weight of tokens included in that chunk or clause. Then, highly weighted chunks and clauses are recognized as the indices for legal documents. The experimental results on Japanese National Pension Act data show that our proposed method achieves better performance than TextRank, the most popular unsupervised method in extracting single-word and compound-word keywords. In addition, this approach is also applicable to extract clause keywords with high performance. (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)

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

BackgroundThe informed consent process in clinical trials has been extensively studied to inform the development processes which protect research participants and encourage their autonomy. However, ensuring a meaningful informed consent process is still of great concern in many research settings due to its complexity in practice and interwined socio-cultural factors.ObjectivesThis study explored the practices and meaning of the informed consent process in two clinial trials conducted by Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in collaboration with the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in (...) Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.MethodsWe used multiple data collection methods including direct observervations, in-depth interviews with study physicians and trial participants, review of informed consent documents from 2009 to 2018, and participant observation with patients’ family members. We recruited seven physicians and twenty-five trial participants into the study, of whom five physicians and thirteen trial participants completed in-depth interviews, and we held twenty-two direct observation sessions.ResultsWe use the concept “fragmented understanding” to describe the nuances of understanding about the consent process and unpack underlying reasons for differing understandings.ConclusionsOur findings show how practices of informed consent and different understanding of the trial information are shaped by trial participants’ characteristics and the socio-cultural context in which the trials take place. (shrink)

We present our method for tackling a legal case retrieval task by introducing our method of encoding documents by summarizing them into continuous vector space via our phrase scoring framework utilizing deep neural networks. On the other hand, we explore the benefits from combining lexical features and latent features generated with neural networks. Our experiments show that lexical features and latent features generated with neural networks complement each other to improve the retrieval system performance. Furthermore, our experimental results suggest the (...) importance of case summarization in different aspects: using provided summaries and performing encoded summarization. Our approach achieved F1 of 65.6% and 57.6% on the experimental datasets of legal case retrieval tasks. (shrink)

Natural language processing techniques contribute more and more in analyzing legal documents recently, which supports the implementation of laws and rules using computers. Previous approaches in representing a legal sentence often based on logical patterns that illustrate the relations between concepts in the sentence, often consist of multiple words. Those representations cause the lack of semantic information at the word level. In our work, we aim to tackle such shortcomings by representing legal texts in the form of abstract meaning representation, (...) a graph-based semantic representation that gains lots of polarity in NLP community recently. We present our study in AMR Parsing and AMR-to-text Generation specifically for legal domain. We also introduce JCivilCode, a human-annotated legal AMR dataset which was created and verified by a group of linguistic and legal experts. We conduct an empirical evaluation of various approaches in parsing and generating AMR on our own dataset and show the current challenges. Based on our observation, we propose our domain adaptation method applying in the training phase and decoding phase of a neural AMR-to-text generation model. Our method improves the quality of text generated from AMR graph compared to the baseline model. 2018; and “Legal Text Generation fromMeaning Representation”, published in the 32nd International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems 2019.). (shrink)

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

This paper investigates the task of reference resolution in the legal domain. This is a new interesting task in Legal Engineering research. The goal is to create a system which can automatically detect references and then extracts their referents. Previous work limits itself to detect and resolve references at the document targets. In this paper, we go a step further in trying to resolve references to sub-document targets. Referents extracted are the smallest fragments of texts in documents, rather than the (...) entire documents that contain the referenced texts. Based on analyzing the characteristics of reference phenomena in legal texts, we propose a four-step framework to deal with the task: mention detection, contextual information extraction, antecedent candidate extraction, and antecedent determination. We also show how machine learning methods can be exploited in each step. The final system achieves 80.06 % in the F1 score for detecting references, 85.61 % accuracy for resolving them, and 67.02 % in the F1 score for the end-to-end setting task on the Japanese National Pension Law corpus. (shrink)

This article develops a discursive explanation of mixed constitution: mixed constitutional ideas and discourse generate mixed constitutional design and practice. On that base, it explores the nature, factors, and functions of the mixed constitution in Vietnam. The emergence of competing constitutional ideas (Confucian, socialist, liberal, universal) animates a constitutional discourse in which different actors adhere to different ideas. Consequently, the 2013 Constitution of Vietnam embodies a mixture of the ideas in its provisions on political institutions, economy, and especially human rights. (...) The enforcement of the constitution induces competing claims to constitutional meanings. The mixed constitution is shaped by path dependency and global diffusion of constitutional ideas. It functions as the base to constrain ideational monopoly and widen the public discourse on constitutional development. (shrink)

The book examines the psycho-religious mechanism behind the violent extremism of suicide attacks in the post-9/11 world. It employs the mindsponge concept, an original dataset, and original research results obtained from the authors' statistical investigations using the Hamiltonian Markov chain Monte Carlo technique. It provides insights and implications for policymakers and strategists in their efforts to engage in peace talks and reduce violent conflicts worldwide.

We assessed the attitudes, perceptions, and stereotypes toward Latino immigrants among 247 mental health professionals across 32 U.S. states. We also randomly presented two versions of an attitude measure that varied in their references to immigrants. Participants reported that they did not agree with the anti-immigration law Arizona SB 1070 and other similar bills. Also, greater multicultural awareness was related to positive attitudes and fewer stereotypes toward immigrants. Furthermore, participants who were asked to think about “undocumented immigrants” viewed Latino immigrants (...) more positively than those who were asked think about “illegal aliens.” Findings show the continued need for multicultural awareness and competence training for mental health professionals, which align with the American Psychological Association’s Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct. Limitations and future directions for research are discussed. (shrink)

In the recruitment process, manually selecting suitable candidates from curriculum vitae (CVs) for a job description (JD) is both time-consuming and expensive. Traditional keyword-based methods struggle to capture skill semantics, prompting the development of more advanced JD-CV matching systems. This paper aims to investigate and construct an ontology-based skills recommendation system, with objectives including creating a skills ontology and developing skills matching methods for JD-CV pairs. The objective of our approach is to enhance the accuracy and contextual relevance of recommendations (...) by utilizing the proposed score. The proposed skills ontology and skills matching strategies are applied to a real dataset in Vietnam. The results of our study can automatically recommend a list of CVs for a given JD. Furthermore, the findings indicate that our proposed model surpasses comparative approaches by a margin of at least 1% to 5%. Overall, the study demonstrates the potential of utilizing ontology-based approaches to offer a practical solution for enhancing hiring practices. (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)

Space tourism is an emerging field where few people have direct experience. However, considering the potential in the near future, it is beneficial to better understand how related information influences people’s attitudes about this new form of tourism. Employing information-processing-based Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics on a dataset of 361 respondents consuming content related to space tourism on Chinese social media, we found that induced happiness and impression are positively associated with willingness to try space tourism. Information authenticity positively moderates (...) these two associations. Our findings emphasize three aspects of information during the processes of reception and filtering: meaning, intensity, and trust. Since promotional materials for space tourism rely heavily on mental simulations rather than objective feedback, creative uses of digital technology are advantageous. However, precautions must be taken to prevent exploitation, such as false advertising, exaggeration, and emotional manipulation. (shrink)

Climate change prevention necessitates the communication of transparent and reliable scientific evidence to improve public awareness and support. Felt responsibility is an essential factor influencing human environment-related psychology and behavior. However, the knowledge about the relationship between the felt responsibility and perceived uncertainty of scientific evidence regarding climate change has remained limited. The current study examines factors associated with the perceived uncertainty of scientific evidence (including felt responsibility to act on climate change) among stakeholders of marine and coastal ecosystems in (...) 42 countries. Employing the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics on a dataset of 709 stakeholders generated by MaCoBioS—a research project funded by the European Commission Horizon 2020, we reveal several main insights. Stakeholders with lower educational levels, being males and not from high-income countries, are more likely to think scientific evidence regarding how to act on climate change is uncertain. Moreover, people with a higher felt responsibility to act on climate change are also more likely to perceive higher uncertainty of scientific evidence. Based on these findings, we discuss how scientific evidence should be communicated to build the eco-surplus culture and, subsequently, the felt responsibility of stakeholders while inoculating them from climate change misinformation and disinformation. (shrink)

The study of cultural evolution has taken on an increasingly interdisciplinary and diverse approach in explicating phenomena of cultural transmission and adoptions. Inspired by this computational movement, this study uses Bayesian networks analysis, combining both the frequentist and the Hamiltonian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach, to investigate the highly representative elements in the cultural evolution of a Vietnamese city’s architecture in the early 20th century. With a focus on the façade design of 68 old houses in Hanoi’s Old Quarter (...) (based on 78 data lines extracted from 248 photos), the study argues that it is plausible to look at the aesthetics, architecture, and designs of the house façade to find traces of cultural evolution in Vietnam, which went through more than six decades of French colonization and centuries of sociocultural influence from China. The in-depth technical analysis, though refuting the presumed model on the probabilistic dependency among the variables, yields several results, the most notable of which is the strong influence of Buddhism over the decorations of the house façade. Particularly, in the top 5 networks with the best Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) scores and p<0.05, the variable for decorations (DC) always has a direct probabilistic dependency on the variable B for Buddhism. The paper then checks the robustness of these models using Hamiltonian MCMC method and find the posterior distributions of the models’ coefficients all satisfy the technical requirement. Finally, this study suggests integrating Bayesian statistics in the social sciences in general and for the study of cultural evolution and architectural transformation in particular. (shrink)

Vietnam is a communist country. For a Marxist ideologue, “religion is the opium of the masses.” But many communist countries—over the years—have evolved from a strictly atheistic persuasion to a tolerance for religious practices. Except probably in North Korea, this transformation from an atheistic perspective to religious tolerance has become a phenomenon in communist countries like Russia and China.Vietnam did not have that experience. This paper will show that religious pluralism was tolerated, even accepted, in communist Vietnam. I will show (...) how vibrant this religious amalgamation is in Vietnam and demonstrate, as in the case of market economics thriving in communist countries, that Vietnamese communism and religious pluralism can robustly coexist with each other. (shrink)

Precognition is an anomaly in information transmission and interpretation. Extant literature suggests that paranormal beliefs and gender may have significant influences on this unknown information process. This study examines the effects of these two factors, including their interactions, on precognition performance by employing the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics. Using Bayesian analysis on secondary data of 60 participants, we found that men may have higher chances to score a hit in a precognition task compared to women. Interestingly, stronger beliefs in (...) the paranormal may decrease the success probability in performing precognition tasks. Considering the interactions between the two factors, the effect of paranormal beliefs on precognition task performance is stronger in men than women. Using mindsponge-based reasoning, we argue that paranormal beliefs may increase the interference of imagination in the reception of hypothetical precognitive information. Women tend to rely more on intuition, which may lessen the interference effect of imagination on hypothetical psi reception. Based on the findings, we suggest that researchers should be careful when assessing participants’ psi potential for experiments. We also demonstrate some advantages of utilizing the BMF in parapsychological research. (shrink)

Vietnam is home to a prospering technology community and numerous enterprises that range from small start-ups to development giants. Virtually all public services are offered online. In fact, the country even has a system for e-residency and “data embassies.” This achievement derives in part from the nation’s transparent and enduring political preferences, but more importantly from Vietnamese law and its regulatory system regarding information, the digital general public, and intellectual property rights (IPR) protection. In this examination of the most pertinent (...) aspects of Vietnam’s digital economy legislation, this study explores the nation’s regulatory structure regarding copyright and patents within the context of digital transformation. The study discusses the relationship between foreign and national regulations in terms of IPR protection and the advancement of digitalization. Research on Vietnamese regulations and the practical application of major patent and copyright regulations has revealed that in many respects, the nation is highly reliant on the effective operation of a broader foreign institutional and legal framework. Thus, in the near future, technological advancement will necessitate the establishment of additional transnational regulatory systems. (shrink)

Computational drug repositioning has been proven as a promising and efficient strategy for discovering new uses from existing drugs. To achieve this goal, a number of computational methods have been proposed, which are based on different data sources of drugs and diseases. These methods approach the problem using either machine learning- or network-based models with an assumption that similar drugs can be used for similar diseases to identify new indications of drugs. Therefore, similarities between drugs and between diseases are usually (...) used as inputs. In addition, known drug-disease associations are also needed for the methods as prior information. It should be noted that those associations are still not well established due to the fact that many of marketed drugs have been withdrawn and this could affect the outcome of the methods. In this study, we propose a novel method named RLSDR to find new uses of drugs. More specifically, it relies on a semi-supervised learning model, Regularized Least Square, thus it does not require definition of non-drug-disease associations as previously proposed machine learning-based methods. In addition, the similarity between drugs measured by chemical structures of drug compounds and the similarity between diseases which share phenotypes can be represented in a form of either similarity network or similarity matrix as inputs of the method. Moreover, instead of using a gold-standard set of known drug-disease associations, we construct an artificial set of the associations based on known disease-gene and drug-target associations. Experiment results demonstrate that RLSDR achieves better prediction performance on the artificial set of drug-disease associations than that on the gold-standard ones in terms of area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve. In addition, it outperforms two representative network-based methods irrespective of the prior information of drug-disease associations. Novel indications for a number of drugs are also identified and validated by evidences from a different data resource. (shrink)

Food security is one of the major concerns in the Philippines. Although livestock and poultry production accounts for a significant proportion of the country’s agricultural output, smallholder households are still vulnerable to food insecurity. The current study aims to examine how livestock production and selling difficulties affect smallholder households’ food-insecure conditions. For this objective, Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics was employed on a dataset of the Food and Agriculture Organization’s Data in Emergencies Monitoring (DIEM) system. We found that production and (...) selling difficulties significantly adversely affect food insecurity in the Philippines. However, their effects vary according to the severity of food insecurity. In particular, production and selling difficulties affect the households’ likelihood of eating less healthy and nutritious food equally. However, the production difficulties have more negligible impacts on the possibility of skipping meals and even ambiguous impacts on the likelihood of not eating for a whole day compared to the effects of selling difficulties. Moreover, we also found that the market plays a crucial role in facilitating not only livestock trading but also livestock production (e.g., purchase of feed and medicines). Based on these findings, we suggest that the livestock market needs to be expanded and regulated to maintain the balancing prices between livestock products and products and services used for livestock production, and facilitate the product-exchanging mechanism. (shrink)

Extant literature suggests a positive correlation between social trust (also called generalized trust) and life satisfaction. However, the psychological pathways underlying this relationship can be complex. Using the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF), we examined the influence of social trust in a high-violence environment. Employing Bayesian analysis on a sample of 1237 adults in Cali, Colombia, we found that in a linear relationship, generalized trust is positively associated with life satisfaction. However, in a model including the interactions between trust and education (...) level as well as between trust and socioeconomic status, generalized trust is found to be negatively associated with life satisfaction. In this non-linear relationship, both education level and socioeconomic status have moderating effects against the negative association between generalized trust and life satisfaction. In other words, less educated people living in worse socioeconomic conditions are more likely to have lower life satisfaction when they have higher levels of social trust. In contrast, highly educated people living in better socioeconomic conditions are more likely to have higher life satisfaction when they have higher levels of social trust. Due to the facilitating function of trust in information processing, lowering the rigor of the filtering system in a high-violence social environment will likely put an individual at risk. Based on our findings, we suggest that policymakers should consider the impacts of social contexts when advocating for increasing social trust. We also recommend that researchers carefully examine the psychological mechanism underlying an observed association before making suggestions for policymaking. (shrink)

Cheating is widely considered a condemnable behavior in society and a big problem in the educational system. In this study, we employ the information-processing-based Bayesian Mindsponge Framework to explore deeper the subjective cost-benefit evaluation involving the perceived value of cheating. Conducting Bayesian analysis on 493 university students from Germany, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, and Japan, we found that students who have more positive attitudes toward cheating are more likely to cheat. However, a higher capability of cognitive reflection acts as a moderator (...) that negates the above effect. Re-evaluation of prior thoughts allows for more accurate assessments of the associated risks and possible costs, which help reduce the probability of carrying out cheating behavior. As rapid technological advancement may introduce new and efficient cheating methods, a better understanding of the psychology of cheating in students can help schools prepare better countermeasures. (shrink)

In the trust-health relationship, how trusting other people in society may promote good health is a topic often examined. However, the other direction of influence – how health may affect trust – has not been well explored. In order to investigate this possible effect, we employed Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics to go deeper into the information processing mechanisms underlying the expressions of trust. Conducting Bayesian analysis on a dataset of 1237 residents from Cali, Colombia, we found that general health (...) status is positively associated with generalized trust, but recent experiences of illnesses/injuries have a negative moderating effect. Personalized trust is largely unchanged across different general health conditions, but the trust level becomes higher with recent experiences of illnesses/injuries. Psychophysiological mechanisms of increasing information filtering intensity toward unfamiliar sources during a vulnerable state of health is a plausible explanation of found patterns in generalized trust. Because established personal relationships are reinforced information channels, personalized trust is not affected as much. Rather, the results suggest that people may rely even more on loved ones when they are in bad health conditions. This exploratory study shows that the trust-health relationship can be examined from a different angle that may provide new insights. (shrink)

O confucionismo existe, na vida espiritual do povo vietnamita, desde muito tempo. A parte positiva do Confucionismo pode-se dizer que é o fato de ele contribuir para o fortalecimento das relações familiares, entre os parentes, bem como nas relações sociais de um modo geral; outra parte positiva consiste em motivar as pessoas a desenvolverem o gosto pela leitura e aprendizagem. Estima-se que a ética confucionista precisa ser provocada, a fim de contribuir para a construção da sociedade nos dias atuais. Na (...) contramão dessa positividade, pode-se afirmar que o confucionismo, de maneira geral, não valoriza, na medida necessária, o papel das mulheres na sociedade; na realidade, ele as classifica como pessoas insignificantes. É digno de se observar, entretanto, que, no contexto social específico do Vietnã, as mulheres encontram um lugar próprio na sociedade. Nossa pesquisa visa mostrar exatamente essa diferente concepção do papel da mulher na socidade vietnamita. (shrink)

Products made from animal fur and skin have been a major part of human civilization. However, in modern society, the unsustainable consumption of these products – often considered luxury goods – has many negative environmental impacts. This study explores how people’s perceptions of biodiversity affect their attitudes and behaviors toward consumption. To investigate the information process deeper, we add the moderation of beliefs about biodiversity loss. Following the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics, we use mindsponge-based reasoning for constructing conceptual models (...) and employ Bayesian analysis aided by Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms on a dataset of 535 Vietnamese urban residents. The results show that people’s preference for using products made from animal skin/fur is negatively associated with perceived consequences of biodiversity loss when they believe biodiversity loss is real and a major problem. In contrast, if urban residents believe biodiversity loss is unreal or not a significant issue, the association between perceived consequences of biodiversity loss and personal preference happens in the opposite direction. The same effects of biodiversity loss perception on people’s possession of skin/fur products was not found, indicating a more complex information process on behaviors compared to attitudes. Nevertheless, in the scenario that people believe biodiversity loss is not a significant issue, the higher the perceived consequences of biodiversity loss are, the greater number of animal-based products they likely own. Our results suggest that policymakers should not neglect the factor of personal belief besides knowledge and awareness in environmental campaigns. (shrink)

After employing the mindsponge mechanism and 3D information process of creativity to explain the serendipity process in previous chapters, we realize that it may be helpful to delve into the relations between serendipity and the formulation of new values and information connections through non-linear processes. Thus, this chapter summarizes some preliminary attempts to use non-linear information processes to explain serendipity. We also briefly mention the benefits of information exchange among members of social groups and explain this approach.

The nationwide economic reform in 1986 transformed Vietnam from a centrally planned economy to a socialist-oriented market economy. Entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial spirits within the populace are suggested to fuel the structural changes. Despite the importance of entrepreneurship in Vietnam’s economy, studies in Vietnam mainly pay attention to the practical aspects of entrepreneurial activities and neglect the cognitive and theoretical aspects of entrepreneurship. Thus, the current study employs the information-processing perspective of the Mindsponge Theory to explore how entrepreneurs’ knowledge accumulation can (...) affect their perceived likelihood of business success. Bayesian analysis indicates that business-related experience positively affects entrepreneurs’ business success likelihood. Greater willingness/readiness to transform thinking, acting, and beliefs can improve the business success of entrepreneurs who study others’ failures carefully. However, for entrepreneurs who perceive learning from others’ failures as unnecessary, higher willingness/readiness to transform diminishes their chance of success. Based on these findings, we recommend Vietnamese entrepreneurs accumulate knowledge through experience, learning, and an open mind for better decision-making and innovation creation capabilities. However, the learning process should be selective. (shrink)

Modern society faces major environmental problems, but there are many difficulties in studying the nature–human relationship from an integral psychosocial perspective. We propose the ecomind sponge conceptual framework, based on the mindsponge theory of information processing. We present a systematic method to examine the nature–human relationship with conceptual frameworks of system boundaries, selective exchange, and adaptive optimization. The theoretical mechanisms were constructed based on principles and new evidence in natural sciences. The core mechanism of ecomindsponge is the subjective sphere of (...) influence, which is the limited mental representation of information received from and processed based on the objective sphere of influence–actual interactions in reality. The subjective sphere is the sum of two sub-spheres: influencing (proactive) and being influenced (reactive). Maladaptation in thinking and behavior of the mind as an information collection-cum-processor results from the deviation of the subjective sphere from reality, which includes two main types: “stupidity” and “delusion”. Using Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics on a dataset of 535 urban residents, we provide consistent statistical evidence on the proposed properties of subjective spheres. The dynamic framework of ecomindsponge can be used flexibly and practically for environmental research as well as other psychosocial fields. (shrink)

Food prices are a daily concern in many households’ decision-making, especially when people want to have healthier diets. Employing Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics on a dataset of 710 Indonesian citizens, we found that people from wealthier households are less likely to have concerns about food prices. However, the degree of health considerations in food consumption was found to moderate against the above association. In other words, people of higher income-based social classes may worry more about food prices if they (...) care more about the health impacts of their food choices. These findings provide more insights for policymakers on the psychological aspects of promoting the balance between finance and health in food consumption. (shrink)

Since the outbreak of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19), tremendous efforts have been made by scientists, health professionals, business people, politicians, and laypeople around the world. Covid-19 vaccines are one of the most crucial innovations that help fight against the virus. This paper attempts to revisit the Covid-19 vaccines production process by employing the serendipity-mindsponge-3D creativity management theory. Vaccine production can be considered an information process and classified into three main stages. The first stage involved the processes of absorbing information (...) (e.g., digital data and open science) and rejecting unhelpful information (e.g., misinformation and fake news) for effectively acquiring useful insights. Useful insights were later employed by experts, enterprises, governments, and international organizations through interdisciplinary coordinated efforts for developing vaccines within a short period. Finally, the appearance of multiple types of vaccines enabled more strategic options for vaccine distribution and administration. Findings from this vaccine creativity management process could be used as critical lessons for further improvements of vaccination programs. (shrink)

Religious beliefs are defined as thinking, feeling and behaving in accordance with the beliefs and teachings of a religious system. In other words, religious beliefs are indicative of the role of religion in the individual and social life of people, as well as adherence to values and beliefs in daily life, performing religious practices and rituals and participating in activities of religious organisations. Religious beliefs are a set of dos and don'ts, and values are considered one of the most important (...) psychological supports that can provide meaning in all moments of life and save a person from meaninglessness by providing explanatory support in specific situations. In addition, work conscience is defined as a feeling of inner commitment to comply with agreed-upon requirements for work. In other words, work conscience means heartfelt satisfaction and practical commitment to the tasks that a person is supposed to perform properly, in a way that there will be no negligence in performing the duty even if no supervisor oversees the activity. Given the significant role of nurses in hospitals, especially during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, the religious beliefs of healthcare employees have become more important. Therefore, the present study aimed to evaluate the effect of religious beliefs on the work conscience of 1800 Muslim nurses in Iraq during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021. Standard questionnaires were applied to assess the respondents' religious beliefs and work conscience. In addition, data analyses (Cronbach's alpha, Pearson's correlation, etc.) were performed in Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). According to the results, religious beliefs have a positive effect on nurses' work conscience (p = 0.822). CONTRIBUTION: The findings of this study showed that the employees of an organisation, especially nurses and healthcare staff, can rely on their religious beliefs and benefit from their advantages in order to strengthen their work conscience during a hard time such as the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

Coastal protection is crucial to human development since the ocean has many values associated with the economy, ecosystem, and culture. However, most ocean protecting efforts are currently ineffective due to the burdens of finance, lack of appropriate management, and international cooperation regimes. For aiding bottom-up initiatives for ocean protection support, this study employed the Mindsponge Theory to examine how the public’s perceived economic and cultural values influence their willingness to support actions to protect the ocean. Analyzing the European-Union-Horizon-2020-funded dataset of (...) 709 respondents from 42 countries, we discovered that perceived economic values have negative effects on the tendency of ocean protection supports (i.e., food, transportation, renewable energy, oil and gas, and recreation). In contrast, certain perceived cultural values can help increase the willingness to do so (i.e., mental well-being and sense of identity). However, the effects of perceived cultural values are only moderately reliable. These findings suggest that designing cultural information delivery campaigns can help promote coastal reserve supports, such as fundraisings and preserving the oceans from the community. (shrink)

The water scarcity crisis is becoming more severe across the globe and recycled water has been suggested as a feasible solution to the crisis. However, expanding the use of potable and recycled public water has been hindered by public acceptance. Previous studies suggest threat perception and trust of provided information have positive linear relationships with recycled water acceptance. However, given the complex filtering role of trust in the human mental process, we argue that the effects of threat perception and trust (...) may have non-linear relationships with acceptance of recycled water for drinking. To support and validate this argument, we employed Bayesian Mindsponge Framework analytics on 726 Spanish residents. We found that individuals more concerned about water shortage are less likely to accept using recycled water for drinking if their trust in the water quality and safety is low. Meanwhile, people more concerned about water shortage are more likely to accept using recycled water for drinking if they trust the water quality and safety. The findings suggest the non-linear relationships between threat perception, trust, and recycled water acceptance while validating mindsponge-based reasoning. Moreover, the results also highlight the importance of trust in influencing the mental process’s outcome: recycled water acceptance. (shrink)

Patients with serious illnesses or injuries may decide to quit their medical treatment if they think paying the fees will put their families into destitution. Without treatment, it is likely that fatal outcomes will soon follow. We call this phenomenon “near-suicide”. This study attempted to explore this phenomenon by examining how the seriousness of the patient’s illness or injury and the subjective evaluation of the patient’s and family’s financial situation after paying treatment fees affect the final decision on the treatment (...) process. Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics were employed to analyze a dataset of 1042 Vietnamese patients. We found that the more serious the illnesses or injuries of patients were, the more likely they were to choose to quit treatment if they perceived that paying the treatment fees heavily affected their families’ financial status. Particularly, only one in four patients with the most serious health issues who thought that continuing the treatment would push themselves and their families into destitution would decide to continue the treatment. Considering the information-filtering mechanism using subjective cost–benefit judgments, these patients likely chose the financial well-being and future of their family members over their individual suffering and inevitable death. Our study also demonstrates that mindsponge-based reasoning and BMF analytics can be effective in designing and processing health data for studying extreme psychosocial phenomena. Moreover, we suggest that policymakers implement and adjust their policies (e.g., health insurance) following scientific evidence to mitigate patients’ likelihood of making “near-suicide” decisions and improve social equality in the healthcare system. (shrink)

This document represents some preliminary and unpublished content of a chapter in the edited book titled A New Theory of Serendipity: Nature, Emergence and Mechanism, which will soon be published and distributed by De Gruyter Poland (Sciendo Imprint; part of Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin, Germany). A proper referencing should be like: Quan-Hoang Vuong, Tam-Tri Le, Quy Khuc, Minh-Hoang Nguyen. (2022). A new theory of serendipity. In: QH Vuong. (Ed.) A New Theory of Serendipity: Nature, Emergence and Mechanism (pp. (...) 91-108). Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter. (shrink)

Humankind is facing many existential global problems that require international and transgenerational efforts to be solved. Preparing our next generation with sufficient knowledge and skills to deal with such problems is imperative. Fortunately, the digital environment provides foundational conditions for children’s and adolescents’ exploration and self-learning, which might help them cultivate the necessary knowledge and skills for future survival. We conducted the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics on a dataset of 2069 students from 54 Vietnamese elementary, secondary, and high schools (...) to test this presumption. The results showed that students with higher digital literacy are more curious and have better knowledge regarding global issues (i.e., climate change, disease, overpopulation, aging, etc.). Students’ curiosity also mediates the relationship between digital literacy and global issues knowledge. Based on these findings, we argue that digital explorative space is essential for digital natives’ education for survival, individually (i.e., for future employment requirements) and socially (i.e., for making informed decisions and creating innovations that can be helpful to society). Children’s and adolescents’ exposure to digital explorative space should be promoted to improve their digital literacy rather than prohibition. During the exploration, emotional intelligence is critical in mitigating existential risks, or threats, to digital natives to navigate and overcome chaotic processes occurring in unchartered waters in the virtual world. (shrink)

Tute Bianche are not a movement but a device of subjectivation working inside vaster movements. Each is free to put or to remove Tute Bianca. It indicates that he respects the style of it: the refusal of the separation violence/nonviolence, reference to t zapatisme, the relationship of a particular type with the media. Tute Bianche are auto-sarcastic, ironic, rich in invention. In search of a hegemony of minority cultures, they put in crisis representations, destabilize media, etc. But if since Seattle (...) one can speak about a real movement it is mainly because hundred thousand persons put their body at the risk of the bats, of the eargas, and now, balls. (shrink)