The concept of strategy has been developed first in a military and political context. Military strategy books, such as The Art of War by Sun Tzu and On War by von Clausewitz, are famous and have become business classics. Sun Tzu developed the tactical side of military strategy and Von Clausewitz highlighted the dynamic and unpredictable nature of military strategy. The growth of firms and indus...

We present a heuristic search algorithm for solving goal based Markov decision processes (MDPs) named Multi-threaded BLAO* (MBLAO*). Hansen and Zilberstein proposed a heuristic search MDP solver named LAO* (Hansen & Zilberstein 2001). Bhuma and Goldsmith extended LAO* to the bidirectional case (Bhuma & Goldsmith 2003) and named their solver BLAO*. Recent experiments on BLAO* (Dai & Goldsmith 20...

This paper provides an account of industrial relations in Laos, in light of the transformation theory from the industrial relations literature. The scope of the paper is limited to employment in the formal, wage-earning sector of the civilian economy. The paper argues that the history of industrial relations in Laos can be divided into four eras: the French colonial era (1890s to 1947); the Roy...

This paper describes on-line recognition of handwritten Lao characters by adopting Markov random field (MRF). The character set to recognize includes consonants, vowels and tone marks, 52 characters in total. It extracts feature points along the pen-tip trace from pen-down to pen-up, and then sets each feature point from an input pattern as a site and each state from a character class as a labe...

We characterized the full-length genomes of 22 hepatitis C virus genotype 6 (HCV-6) isolates: 10 from Vietnam (classified into subtypes 6e, 6h, 6p, 6r, 6s, and 6u), one from China (confirmed as a new subtype 6xd), and 11 from the Lao PDR (representing a new subtype 6xe plus eight novel variants). With these 22 new genomes, HCV-6 now has a diverse and extended taxonomic structure, comprised of 2...

Chemical reactivity and stability of highly epitaxial mixed-conductive LaBaCo2O5.5+δ (LBCO) thin films on (001) LaAlO3 (LAO) single-crystalline substrates, fabricated by using pulsed laser deposition system, were systematically investigated. Microstructure studies from x-ray diffraction indicate that the films are c-axis oriented with the interface relationship of [100]LBCO//[100]LAO and (001)L...

BACKGROUND Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) has the highest maternal mortality rate (MMR) and infant mortality rate (IMR) due to traditional practice and beliefs on pregnancy, delivery and postpartum. The objective of this study was to get a better understanding of cultural beliefs and practices surrounding pregnancy, ANC and postpartum care among rural women in Lao PDR. METHODS Eig...

BACKGROUND Nonfluoroscopic three-dimensional electroanatomical system is widely used nowadays, but X-ray remains indispensable for complex electrophysiology procedures. This study aimed to evaluate the value of optimized parameter setting and different projection position to reduce X-ray radiation dose rates. METHODS From June 2013 to October 2013, 105 consecutive patients who underwent compl...

Epidemiology of dengue infection in Lao PDR Dengue disease is widely distributed in the whole country of Lao PDR, which consists of seven provinces. There has been a significant burden of dengue diseases over the past 4 years (Fig 1) (Khampapongpane et al, 2014). In 2010, there is a high burden of disease covering the whole country of Lao PDR with more than 400 cases per 100,000 population in m...

Background Invasive non-typhoidal Salmonella (iNTS) disease is a well-described cause of mortality in children and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected adults in sub-Saharan Africa. Additionally, there is an ill-defined burden of iNTS disease in Southeast Asia. Methods Aiming to investigate the causative serovars of non-invasive and iNTS disease and their associated antimicrobial susce...