In 1993 the Victorian Government introduced casemix funding as part of its restructure of the public hospital system. Casemix funding provides a new basis for government funding according to outcomes. At the same time, restructure of hospitals allows for a reconsideration of who is eligible to use them. Historical research into the growth of the public hospital system in Melbourne shows that at...

The quality of financial analysts’ equity research is pivotal for an efficient capital market. This study investigates the quality of earnings forecasts and stock recommendations for initial public offerings (IPOs) in Germany. The empirical study includes 12,605 earnings forecasts and 6,209 stock recommendations of individual analysts for the time period from 1997 to 2004. The focus of this stu...

Approximately 1.2 million Vietnamese live in the United States. Health care providers need to understand that this population differs greatly from other cultures depending on gender, religion, generation, reason for migration, enclave identity, educational level, and language preference. This article will explore the history, communication practices, biocultural ecology, and health care princip...

This paper describes the perception of a social constructivist approach to teaching and learning among Vietnamese teachers in a Confucian heritage culture and the changes these teachers undergo through their interaction with a new science curriculum that was designed culturally appropriate. A framework of teacher professional development combining state-of-the-art knowledge on professional deve...

The goal of this research was to explore the generality of developmental processes related to intergenerational value discrepancies across 701 families from immigrant and non-immigrant groups. In a study involving 471 immigrant families (197 Armenian, 103 Vietnamese, and 171 Mexican) and 230 non-immigrant families (95 African American and 135 European American), adolescents and parents reported...

In this study, we clarified the status of the fat-soluble vitamins retinol and tocopherol, as well as beta-carotene, as antioxidants in the prevention of cardiovascular disease in middle-aged Vietnamese populations with different incomes. In order to measure simultaneously the serum concentrations of retinol, beta-carotene and tocopherol, we carried out high-performance liquid chromatography an...

This paper presents our work on rapid language adaptation of acoustic models based on multilingual cross-language bootstrapping and unsupervised training. We used Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems in the six source languages English, French, German, Spanish, Bulgarian and Polish to build from scratch an ASR system for Vietnamese, an underresourced language. System building was performe...

In this paper, we present our work on automatic question detection from the speech signal. We are interested in developing automatic detection system and investigate the portability of such system to a new language. The first goal of this paper is to propose and evaluate a combined approach for automatic question detection where prosodic features are augmented by the use of lexical features. It...

Treebank is an important resource for both research and application of natural language processing. For Vietnamese, we still lack such kind of corpora. This paper presents up-to-date results of a project for Vietnamese treebank construction. Since Vietnamese is an isolating language and has no word delimiter, there are many ambiguities in sentence analysis. We systematically applied a lot of li...