BackgroundThe landscape of clinical research has evolved over the past decade. With technological advances, the practice of using electronic informed consent (eIC) has emerged. However, a number of challenges hinder the successful and widespread deployment of eIC in clinical research. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the views of various stakeholders on the potential advantages and challenges of eIC.MethodsSemi-structured interviews were conducted with 39 participants from 5 stakeholder groups from across 11 European countries. The stakeholder groups included physicians, patient organization representatives, (...) regulator representatives, ethics committee members, and pharmaceutical industry representatives, and all were involved in clinical research. Interviews were analyzed using the framework method.ResultsInterviewees identified that a powerful feature of eIC is its personalized approach as it may increase participant empowerment. However, they identified several ethical and practical challenges, such as ensuring research participants are not overloaded with information and offering the same options to research participants who would prefer a paper-based informed consent rather than eIC. According to the interviewees, eIC has the potential to establish efficient long-term interactions between the research participants and the research team in order to keep the participants informed during and after the study. Interviewees emphasized that a personal interaction with the research team is of utmost importance and this cannot be replaced by an electronic platform. In addition, interviewees across the stakeholder groups supported the idea of having a harmonized eIC approach across the European Member States.ConclusionsInterviewees reported a range of design and implementation challenges which needs to be overcome to foster innovation in informing research participants and obtaining their consent electronically. It was considered important that the implementation of eIC runs alongside the face-to-face contact between research participants and the research team. Moreover, interviewees expect that eIC could offer the opportunity to enable a personalized approach and to strengthen continuous communication over time. If successfully implemented, eIC may facilitate the engagement of research participants in clinical research. (shrink)

The present study, using a non-experimental approach, investigated a theoretical concept of best practice, which we recently introduced – namely: a ‘state of consonance’ and a ‘state of disconsonance’ of best practice. Consonance of best practice posits that different levels of best practice, as well as other comparable psychological constructs would cluster or ‘group’ together. Disconsonance of best practice, in contrast, would indicate non-overlapping of contrasting levels of best practice. Taiwanese undergraduates from five private universities in Taipei City and New (...) Taipei City, Taiwan took part in the study by responding to a suite of Likert-scale questionnaires, which took approximately 30–35 min to complete. Cluster analysis, commonly known as ClA, was used to analyze the data and seek theoretical understanding into the nature of the consonance of best practice. Results, overall, showed support for our proposition, resulting in four distinct profiles: ‘a Balanced Profile,’ ‘an Intrinsic Motivation Profile,’ ‘a Current Best Practice + Interest Profile,’ and ‘a Current Best Practice + Motivation Profile.’ This evidence, helping to advance further research development, has a number of practical implications for consideration. For example, how could we use the Balanced Profile to develop learning objectives and/or pedagogical practices that would encourage students to enjoy their learning experiences? (shrink)

As a generation of ‘digital natives,’ secondary students who were born from 2002 to 2010 have various approaches to acquiring digital knowledge. Digital literacy and resilience are crucial for them to navigate the digital world as much as the real world; however, these remain under-researched subjects, especially in developing countries. In Vietnam, the education system has put considerable effort into teaching students these skills to promote quality education as part of the United Nations-defined Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4). This issue (...) has proven especially salient amid the COVID−19 pandemic lockdowns, which had obliged most schools to switch to online forms of teaching. This study, which utilizes a dataset of 1061 Vietnamese students taken from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)’s “Digital Kids Asia Pacific (DKAP)” project, employs Bayesian statistics to explore the relationship between the students’ background and their digital abilities. Results show that economic status and parents’ level of education are positively correlated with digital literacy. Students from urban schools have only a slightly higher level of digital literacy than their rural counterparts, suggesting that school location may not be a defining explanatory element in the variation of digital literacy and resilience among Vietnamese students. Students’ digital literacy and, especially resilience, also have associations with their gender. Moreover, as students are digitally literate, they are more likely to be digitally resilient. Following SDG4, i.e., Quality Education, it is advisable for schools, and especially parents, to seriously invest in creating a safe, educational environment to enhance digital literacy among students. (shrink)

In today’s global higher education environment, international students represent not only an important source of external income for universities: the degree of cross-border student mobility also reflects the internationalization of higher education sector. Universities have engaged in efforts to sell themselves to prospective students and promotional videos are among the most widely used marketing tools for this purpose. This study reports the results of a study analyzing the content of 140 higher education promotional videos from 14 countries available on YouTube. (...) The results reveal that while the pattern of use of YouTube for two-waycommunication with viewers, information contents and appeal messages among sampled universities is fairly homogenous, some marked differences emerge when cultural background and global position ranking of the university are taken into account. The implications of these findings are that, although, transnational higher education has been profoundly globalized, culture still plays a significant role in marketing practice for the recruitment of mobile students. In addition, different universities have various student-targeted segments. These findings provide the basis of a series of recommendations for universities looking to optimize their use of YouTube and promotional video design to market to international students. (shrink)

Motile eukaryotic cilia and flagella are hair-like organelles responsible for cell motility and mucociliary clearance. Using cryo-electron tomography, it has been shown that the doublet microtubule, the cytoskeleton core of the cilia and flagella, has microtubule inner protein structures binding periodically inside its lumen. More recently, single-particle cryo-electron microscopy analyses of isolated doublet microtubules have shown that microtubule inner proteins form a meshwork inside the doublet microtubule. High-resolution structures revealed new types of interactions between the microtubule inner proteins and the (...) tubulin lattice. In addition, they offered insights into the potential roles of microtubule inner proteins in the stabilization and assembly of the doublet microtubule. Herein, we review our new insights into microtubule inner proteins from the doublet microtubule together with the current body of literature on microtubule inner proteins. High-resolution cryo-electron microscopy structure of the doublet microtubule from Tetrahymena reveals insights into the interactions between microtubule inner proteins with the doublet microtubule tubulin lattice and implication of their functions in the stability and assembly of the doublet microtubule. (shrink)

BackgroundBalancing the rights and obligations of custodians and applicants in relation to access to biobanks is of utmost importance to guarantee trust and confidence. This study aimed to reveal which issues divide different stakeholders in an attempt to determine the rights and/or obligations held on human biological materials and data.MethodsTwenty-eight informants in the Benelux and Scandinavia were interviewed in order to capture the perspectives of experts and stakeholders in relation to the rights and obligations held by custodians and applicants with (...) respect to access to HBM and data.ResultsThere was no consensus among the informants on whether the custodian of a biobank should decide upon the scientific merits and the utility of an access request. Nearly all informants agreed that a new request or an amendment to the initial request has to be submitted when an applicant wants to use leftover HBM in a new or follow-up project. Several informants felt that it might be justified to charge higher access fees to external or industrial applicants that did not contribute to the collection of HBM and data. Most informants agreed that a custodian of a biobank could request the sharing and return of research results. It was furthermore argued that some of the benefits of research projects should be fed back into biobanks.ConclusionsThe interviews revealed a rather complex web of rights and obligations allocated to the custodian and the applicant in relation to access to HBM and data stored in biobanks. Some rights and obligations are negotiated on a case-by-case basis, while others are stipulated in access arrangements. We did find a consensus on the attribution of certain general rights to the custodians and the applicant. (shrink)

Background: Prejudices against minorities can be understood as habitually negative evaluations that are kept in spite of evidence to the contrary. Therefore, individuals with strong prejudices might be dominated by habitual or “automatic” reactions at the expense of more controlled reactions. Computational theories suggest individual differences in the balance between habitual/model-free and deliberative/model-based decision-making.Methods: 127 subjects performed the two Step task and completed the blatant and subtle prejudice scale.Results: By using analyses of choices and reaction times in combination with computational (...) modeling, subjects with stronger blatant prejudices showed a shift away from model-based control. There was no association between these decision-making processes and subtle prejudices.Conclusion: These results support the idea that blatant prejudices toward minorities are related to a relative dominance of habitual decision-making. This finding has important implications for developing interventions that target to change prejudices across societies. (shrink)

History and belief of Hoa Hao religion in Vietnam, a religious tradition, based on Buddhism, founded in 1939 by Huỳnh Phú Sổ (Buddha Master), a native of the Mekong River Delta region of southern Vietnam.

Biography of Tran Duc Thao, 1917-1993, a Vietnamese philosopher.

Analizamos las ideologías para demostrar que su raíz materialista está en el origen de muchos problemas en la sociedad. La economía –es decir, la producción y el consumo– define a la persona humana. El ser humano es un subproducto de la economía. Esta definición ofusca la conciencia que es la base de la ética y por lo tanto de la dignidad de la persona, porque la ciencia y la tecnología se dan siempre en relación con hombres libres cuyos encuentros tienen (...) un significado cultural-ético. No podemos ser indiferentes a lo transcendente que no se puede verificar por experimentos o deducir de manera racional. La fe nos abre un horizonte distinto. (shrink)

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

Animal welfare is an importantsocietal issue in Switzerland. Policy makershave responded with a strict legislation onanimal protection and with two programs topromote animal friendly husbandry. Alsoprivate actors in the meat industry initiatedprograms for animal friendly meat productionto meet consumers' expectations. Labeled meathas a market share of over 20%. Depending onthe stakeholders responsible for the labels,their objectives vary. While retailers want toattract consumers with meat produced in ananimal friendly and environmentally compatiblemanner and with products of consistently goodsensory quality, producers want to (...) keep marketshares and increase their revenues. (shrink)

In Vietnam, patriotism is the highest value in the nation's spiritual value system. Patriotic feelings were formed from the very beginning of the founding of the country and continue to grow strongly to this day. It soon became the reason for life, the ideal, and the belief in the spiritual life of the Vietnamese people. The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive and in-depth view of patriotism as a specific philosophy of the Vietnamese nation. To that end, (...) the paper focuses on analyzing what patriotism is and its expressions. It discusses the basic tenets of Vietnamese patriotism: the spirit of independence, self-reliance, the sense of national self-reliance, solidarity in national construction and defense and a humanistic spirit. The paper thus highlights the peculiarities of the patriotic philosophy of the Vietnamese nation and how it manifests in the rural villages. (shrink)

Purpose This study aims to ascertain the impact of data collecting awareness on perceived information security concerns and information-sharing behavior on social networking sites. Design/methodology/approach Based on communication privacy management theory, the study forecasted the relationship between information-sharing behavior and awareness of data collecting purposes, data collection tactics and perceived security risk using structural equation modeling analysis and one-way ANOVA. The sample size of 521 young social media users in Vietnam, ages 18 to 34, was made up of 26.7% men (...) and 73.3% women. When constructing the questionnaire survey method with lone source respondents, the individual’s unique awareness and experiences with using online social networks (OSNs) were taken into account. Findings The results of the investigation demonstrate a significant relationship between information-sharing and awareness of data collecting, perceptions of information security threats and behavior. Social media users have used OSN privacy settings and paid attention to the sharing restriction because they are concerned about data harvesting. Research limitations/implications This study was conducted among young Vietnamese social media users, reflecting specific characteristics prevalent in the Vietnamese environment, and hence may be invalid in other nations’ circumstances. Practical implications Social media platform providers should improve user connectivity by implementing transparent privacy policies that allow users to choose how their data are used; have clear privacy statements and specific policies governing the use of social media users’ data that respect users’ consent to use their data; and thoroughly communicate how they collect and use user data while promptly detecting any potential vulnerabilities within their systems. Originality/value The authors ascertain that the material presented in this manuscript will not infringe upon any statutory copyright and that the manuscript will not be submitted elsewhere while under Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society review. (shrink)

Life education, also known as life and death education, is an important subject in Taiwan with institutions offering degree programs and courses that focus on quality learning and implementation of life education. What is interesting from the perspective of Taiwanese Education is that the teaching of life education also incorporates a number of Eastern-derived and conceptualized tenets, for example, Buddhist teaching and the importance of spiritual wisdom. This premise contends then that life education in Taiwan, in general, is concerned with (...) the promotion, fulfillment, and cherishing of quality life experiences (e.g., personal contentment, happiness). One example of life education, which resonates with other spiritual beliefs and religious faiths (e.g., Hinduism), is related to spiritual cultivation and the enlightenment of life wisdom. Our own teaching of the subject, likewise, places emphasis on the goal of teaching students to seek meaningful understanding of and appreciation for three major, interrelated components of life education: life wisdom, life practice, and life care. Life education is a beneficial subject as its theoretical understanding may help individuals cope with pathologies and negative life experiences. One negative life experience, in this case, is the ultimate fate of humankind: death. Approaching death and/or the onset of grief is something that we all have to experience. How does one approach death? It is not easy feat and, of course, grief for a loved one is personal and some of us struggle with this. We contend that spiritual cultivation and enlightenment, arising from life education, may assist us with the coping of death (e.g., the possibility of transcendence beyond the realm of life). Forming the premise of the present article, we propose that a person’s ‘spiritual and enlightened self’, reflecting the convergence of three major aspects of life education (i.e., Philosophical reflection, Enrichment of personal well-being, and Spiritual cultivation), would result in the initiation and creation of a number of virtues and positive characteristics – for example: having a positive outlook in life, showing compassion, forgiveness, etc. These virtues and quality characteristics, from our philosophical reasoning, are equivalent to those qualities that positive psychology advocates for. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage, destiné aux étudiants, enseignants et chercheurs, s’adresse aussi bien aux philosophes qu’aux historiens de l’art et, plus généralement, à tous ceux qui s’intéressent aux phénomènes artistiques. Il propose une approche novatrice et résolument interdisciplinaire des dispositifs artistiques dans leur dimension historique et discursive comme des œuvres d’art dans leur dimension symbolique. À la faveur d’études iconographiques précises, notamment d’œuvres relevant de l’art roman, les propositions théoriques faites initialement trouvent leur application concrète et montrent leur fécondité. De nombreuses illustrations (...) en noir et blanc dans le corps du texte et un cahier central en couleurs permettent de visualiser les oeuvres étudiées. Un glossaire à la fin du texte fourni une définition précise des concepts utilisés. (shrink)

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

In this paper we try to initiate a search for an explicite and direct denition of ultraproducts in categories which would share some of the attractive properties of products, coproducts, limits, and related category theoretic notions. Consider products as a motivating example.

In Andreka-Nemeti [1] the class ST r of all small trees over C is dened for an arbitrary category C. Throughout the present paper C de- notes an arbitrary category. In Def. 4 of [1] on p. 367 the injectivity relation j= ) is dened. Intuitively the members of ST r represent the formulas and j= represents the validity relation be- tween objects of C considered as models and small trees of C considered as formulas. If ' 2 ST r (...) and a 2 Ob C then the statement a j= ' is associated to the model theoretic statement \the formula ' is valid in the model a". It is proved there that the Los lemma is true in every category C if we use the above quoted concepts. To this the notion of an ultra- product Pi2Iai=U of objects 2 IOb C of C if we use the above quoted concepts. To this the notion of an ultraproduct Pi2Iai=U of objects 2 IOb C of C is dened in [1], in [2] and in [7] Def. 12. Then the problem was asked there \for which categories is the characterization theorem of axiomatizable hulls of classes of models Mod T h K = Uf U p K true?", where the operators Uf and U p on classes of models is dened on p. 319 of the book [3]. Of course, here in the denition of Uf and U p on classes K Ob C of objects of C we have to replace the standard notion of ultraproducts of models by the above quoted category theoretic ultraproduct Pi2Iai=U of objects of C. That is for any C and K Ob C we dene U p K exactly as in [2] p. 136, but a more detailed denition is found in [7] Def. 17. (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)

Business ethics in the socialist-oriented market economy in Vietnam.

The application of recycled aggregate as a sustainable material in construction projects is considered a promising approach to decrease the carbon footprint of concrete structures. Prediction of compressive strength of environmentally friendly concrete containing recycled aggregate is important for understanding sustainable structures’ concrete behaviour. In this research, the capability of the deep learning neural network approach is examined on the simulation of CS of EF concrete. The developed approach is compared to the well-known artificial intelligence approaches named multivariate adaptive regression (...) spline, extreme learning machines, and random forests. The dataset was divided into three scenarios 70%-30%, 80%-20%, and 90%-10% for training/testing to explore the impact of data division percentage on the capacity of the developed AI model. Extreme gradient boosting was integrated with the developed AI models to select the influencing variables on the CS prediction. Several statistical measures and graphical methods were generated to evaluate the efficiency of the presented models. In this regard, the results confirmed that the DLNN model attained the highest value of prediction performance with minimal root mean squared error. The study revealed that the highest prediction performance could be attained by increasing the number of variables in the prediction problem and using 90%-10% data division. The results demonstrated the robustness of the DLNN model over the other AI models in handling the complex behaviour of concrete. Due to the high accuracy of the DLNN model, the developed method can be used as a practical approach for future use of CS prediction of EF concrete. (shrink)