Pickled vietnamese carrots

Prof Hiroki Tahara of the Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (APU) was one of the first students at the Center for Vietnamese and Southeast Asian Studies, the precursor of the Faculty of Vietnamese Studies under the HCM City University of Social Sciences and Humanities.

Vietnam has an important position in the Asia-Pacific region. It follows a proactive, multilateral foreign policy, and attaches importance to high-tech investment flows from countries and territories.

In Vietnam, Apichit Mingwongtham from Thailand has become well known to many young people.

The visually impaired third-year university student in Vietnam is famous for two awards – favorite essay (for foreign authors) and first prize in the ‘Vietnam Letter 2019’ competition. Apichit wrote a moving story about the difficult journey he experienced when coming to Vietnam to learn Vietnamese.

Meanwhile, the number of short-term training courses has been increasing rapidly. There were nearly 7,000 students from July 2018 to June 2019.

Vu Dung

A tour of forums in cryptocurrency mining networks reveals that miners want to sell their computers, graphic cards and the like.

A post by Chi Hung on a major online group for cryptocurrency mining says: “I can’t keep up with the trend any longer, so I want to sell my 1060 6G graphic card to whoever wants it. Negotiable prices.”

Ngoc Van, an administrator of a site that sells cryptocurrency mining tools, said the number of people looking to sell their gear is higher than those looking to buy.

“Most sellers are small-scale miners. After they have recouped their investments, they would want to liquidate their assets to book profits.” They fear that if the market starts to tumble their equipment would sit on the shelf as happened during a previous Bitcoin bust a few years ago, he said.

Sinh Le, who works for a major supplier of cryptocurrency mining equipment in HCMC, said there are two reasons for the sell-off.

“Firstly, Vietnamese miners mainly focus on Ethereum, but the difficulty in harvesting it has increased as more machines started to mine for it, leading to lower productivity and profits.

“Secondly, miners want to secure their profits early without any risk. So instead of continuing to mine, they flip investments instead.”

Many sellers believe the cryptocurrency market has reached a stage where small-scale miners without deep pockets are forced to sell their gear while large-scale ones continue to expand.

But selling the equipment is not easy: Several days after posting his ad, Hung has not found a buyer.

He explained: “Even a month ago if there was a post about someone selling their mining gear, people would immediately snap it up. But now there are too many sellers, while owners of large mining operations are stable. That means new miners do not dare jump in and selling the gear becomes very difficult.”

Other reasons for the inability to sell include high prices. HCMC tech retail chain Tin hoc Ngoi sao said miners once bought a set for VND5 million ($216.96) but now wish to sell it at five or six times that price, and people simply cannot afford it.

Minh Hieu of the southern Dong Nai Province, a veteran miner, said after spending VND500 million it would take around half a year for a miner to recoup the money provided cryptocurrency prices remain steady. But in the case of volatile items like Bitcoin and Ethereum, that might not be possible, he said.

“The demand is still there, but sellers need to price their gear appropriately. Graphic cards for mining are only sellable in the mining community, not to gamers, as the cards have been deteriorated significantly,” he added.

The arrests were made by police in Hyogo Prefecture last week as the two, 32 and 33, were accused of stealing medicines, essential goods and functional food worth 3.2 million yen ($30,000) from drugstores in eight prefectures since March 2020, Japanese news outlet NHK reported.

The two suspects, who used to be trainees in Japan, pleaded guilty, saying they had committed the burglaries to “cover their living expenses and gambling.” Stolen items mainly included sunscreen, shaving products, tonics, and essential items.

“I used to go to the Japanese immigration department to register to fly home because my internship period ended and I was unemployed. But I was unable to return home due to Covid-19 travel restrictions,” said one of the two suspects.

“Vietnam has great demand for Japanese consumer goods. I had sold stolen goods to an acquaintance through social media platform SNS,” he added.

The duo have been put under criminal investigation while Japanese police are hunting another Vietnamese accomplice involved in the case.

The number of Vietnamese residents in Japan reached 448,053 last year, making it the second largest expat community in the country after the Chinese.

In recent years, the growing presence of Japanese companies in Vietnam has sparked greater interest among younger Vietnamese to study and/or undertake technical training programs in Japan in the hope of landing a well-paid job.

The made-in-Vietnam sea observation satellite underwent vibration, shock and thermal vacuum testing in a simulated pre-launch environment, the last steps in its hardware development, at the Kyushu Institute of Technology in Japan.

The satellite weighs four kilos and belongs to the cubesat category, a type of miniaturized satellite for space research made of multiple 10 centimeter × 10 centimeter × 10 centimeter modules.

Vietnam’s NanoDragon satellite undergoes thermal vacuum testing at the Kyushu Institute of Technology, Japan. Photo courtesy of VNSC.

Le Xuan Huy, deputy general director of VNSC, said the NanoDragon satellite ended its tests on April 7, meeting all targets as required in terms of design and safety prior to launch.

The satellite is operating normally after being transferred back to Vietnam, awaiting its launch into orbit. Japan’s Epsilon rocket is expected to launch NanoDragon as part of the second “Innovative atellite technology demonstration” program within Japan’s 2021 fiscal year ending March 2022.

The satellite was developed with the purpose of demonstrating it could use micro-satellite beam technology to receive the Automatic Identification System (AIS) signal to track and monitor activities at sea. The NanoDragon satellite is also designed to verify the quality of Japan’s MEISEI satellite navigation and positioning system and a new advanced onboard computer developed exclusively for microsatellites.

The NanoDragon satellite is expected to operate in solar synchronous orbit at an altitude of about 560 kilometers from Earth.

Japan sent the 50-kilogram Vietnamese satellite MicroDragon into space from Uchinoura Space Center in Kagoshima Prefecture, southern Japan, in January 2019.

It was used to observe Vietnam’s coastline, evaluate water quality, locate fishery resources and monitor changes to serve aquaculture, detect cloud coverage and aerosols, collect ground-based sensor signals and transmit them to stations on Earth.

Vietnam sent its first indigenous satellite into space in 2013. The one-kilogram PicoDragon remained in orbit for three months. The country had launched four prior satellites, all made by foreign companies.