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Under the tendency of the marketisation of tertiary education, universities/colleges and governments across the world have increasingly regarded international education as an education services export sector. Vietnam has always been regarded as a country of importing rather than exporting international education. Nevertheless, more and more evidence shows that Vietnamese tertiary education institutions are increasingly successful in recruiting international students. To gain further insight into international students in Vietnam, we conducted a survey with 49 tertiary education institutions in Vietnam. Our findings reveal that while most full-time international students in Vietnam are intra-regional (i.e., coming from Asian countries), short-time international students are both intra-regional and extra-regional. Using a Bayesian analysis as a method, we found that, first, the main concerns of international students in Vietnam do not revolve around academic-related factors; and second, the success of Vietnamese tertiary education institutions in attracting international students was mainly associated with operation-related factors.

The importance of the relationships between industry and academia is stressed by strategists, politicians, Vocational Education Training (VET) policy makers, and industrial planners. Industry without knowledge surely dies, and knowledge without application of that knowledge is valueless. This paper focuses on the relationships between the VET providers and industries. More specifically, the purpose of this paper is (1) to discuss the factors which enhance or constrain the strategic partnership, (2) to present the experiences of this relationship in the developing and developed countries, (3) to propose a model that links the two institutions, the VET providers and industries, in the Vietnamese context.

BACKGROUND The debate about limits to the human life span is often based on outcomes from mortality at the oldest ages among longevity pioneers. To this day, scholars disagree on the existence of a late-life plateau in human mortality. Amid various statistical analysis frameworks, the parametric proportional hazards model is a simple and valuable approach to test the presence of a plateau by assuming different baseline hazard functions on individual-level data. OBJECTIVE We replicate and propose some improvements to the methods of Barbi et al. (2018) to explore whether death rates reach a plateau at later ages in the French population as it does for Italians in the original study. METHODS We use a large set of exceptionally reliable data covering the most recently extinct birth cohorts, 1883-1901, where all 3,789 members who were born and died in France, were followed from age 105 onward. Individual life trajectories are modeled by a proportional hazards model with fixed covariates (gender, birth cohort) and a Gompertz baseline hazard function. RESULTS In contrast with Barbi et al. (2018)'s results, our Gompertz slope parameter estimate is statistically different from zero across all model specifications, suggesting death rates continue to increase beyond 105 years old in the French population. In addition, we find no significant birth cohort effect but a significant male disadvantage in mortality after age 105. CONCLUSIONS Using the best data currently available, we did not find any evidence of a mortality plateau in French individuals aged 105 and older. CONTRIBUTION The evidence for the existence of an extreme-age mortality plateau in recent Italian cohorts does not extend to recent French cohorts. Caution in generalizations is advised, and we encourage further studies on long-lived populations with high-quality data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to study the return of investment in gold assets quoted at the Paris stock exchange during 54 years, from 1950 to 2003. Contrarily to what is thought about this mythical metal, its risk-return is very inferior to other financial assets (stocks and bonds). While it has a high degree of risk, its return is less than that of the risk-free asset. Moreover for individual investors, investment in gold has given a very low result in real terms. A capital of 100 new francs invested in the gold coin napoleon in December 1949 would have been liquidated for 56 new francs in December 2003. So its real rate of return was -1% per year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The future development of safe CO2 storage on land needs a particular effort on monitoring methods. In the specific geological context of the sedimentary Paris Basin (France), the Géocarbone-Monitoring project carried out from 2006 to 2008 the evaluation and testing of different monitoring methods. The targeted reservoirs are either depleted reservoirs in the carbonate Dogger formation or saline aquifers in the silico-clastic formations of the Triassic. To map the migration of the CO2 plume, the project evaluated geophysical methods as active seismic, electrical resistivity and gravity. Results show that the geological context implies further research to be conducted to overcome problems related either to data acquisition in the case of gravity or to the geological context in the case of seismic and electrical resistivity. The InSAR remote sensing method was not able to detect ground deformation over seasonal gas storage, mainly because of the dense vegetation cover. Methods for soil gas measurement at the surface were successfully tested on natural analogs, revealing the complexity of mechanisms involved in the origin of the CO2 flux, its temporal and spatial variations, as well as the need for continuous surface measurements in order to control seasonal variations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article presents a historical background of border demarcation and settlement of disputes between Vietnam and their Indochinese neighbors. It investigates the efforts of Vietnam in securing its western and southwestern land border and maintaining a peaceful external environment for the domestic reform. Vietnam and neighboring Laos and Cambodia in Indochina gained their independence from France during the first half of 1950s.

We report the direct genotyping analysis of Toxoplasma gondii in ocular samples collected from 20 patients, as well as associated clinical and epidemiological data. This work was aimed at better understanding the impact of genotypes of Toxoplasma gondii strains on toxoplasmic retinochoroiditis. For this purpose, we studied the aqueous humor (AH) or vitreous humor (VH) of 20 patients presenting with ocular toxoplasmosis (OT) in 2 hospitals in France. Genetic characterization was obtained with microsatellite markers in a multiplex PCR assay. In contrast to the results of previous studies, we found no association between atypical Toxoplasma gondii genotypes and the occurrence of OT. Considering the local epidemiological data, our OT patients seemed to be infected more frequently by ordinary type II strains found in the environment. In conclusion, direct genotyping of Toxoplasma gondii strains from aqueous or vitreous humor showed a predominance of the type II genotype in ocular toxoplasmosis; this may be due to a high exposure rate of this genotype in humans.

We report an unusual case of Plasmodium falciparum malaria in a European returning from tropical regions associating an anterior ischemic optic neuropathy and an asymptomatic centropontine myelinolysis. The transient antiphospholipid antibodies detected in the patient may have played a role in the ischemic process at the origin of this unusual clinical association.

Objective: To determine whether procalcitonin is a reliable diagnostic and prognostic marker in septic shock compared with nonseptic shock., Design: Prospective controlled trial., Setting: Intensive care unit of the Avicenne Teaching Hospital, Bobigny, France., Patients: All patients admitted to our intensive care unit over a 12-month period with clinical evidence of shock., Interventions: None., Measurements and Main Results: Echocardiography or pulmonary artery flotation catheter measurements were used to assess hemodynamics, and multiple specimens were obtained for microbiological studies. Standard criteria were used to diagnose septic shock. Serum concentrations of procalcitonin, C-reactive protein, and lactate were determined on the day of shock onset (day 1) and on days 3, 7, and 10. Seventy-five patients were included, 62 in the septic shock group and 13 in the cardiogenic shock group. Serum procalcitonin on day 1 was significantly higher in patients with than without septic shock (median, 14 [0.3-767] ng/mL vs. 1 [0.5-36] ng/mL, p < .01). A cutoff value of 1 ng/mL had 95% sensitivity and 54% specificity for separating patients with and without sepsis. C-reactive protein failed to discriminate between these two groups. Among patients with sepsis, procalcitonin concentrations were significantly higher in those who died than in the survivors, at all four measurement time points (median, 16 [0.15-767] ng/mL vs. 6 [0.2-123] ng/mL, p = .045 on day 1; 6.5 [0.3-135] ng/mL vs. 1.05 [0.11-53] ng/mL, p = .02 on day 10). A cutoff value of 6 ng/mL on day 1 separated patients who died from those who survived with 87.5% sensitivity and 45% specificity. C-reactive protein was not helpful for predicting mortality. Serum lactate was a nonspecific prognostic marker., Conclusions: These data indicate that procalcitonin may be a valuable early diagnostic and prognostic marker in patients with septic shock.