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This study investigates the impact of board independence on firm risk of Vietnamese listed firms and the moderating effect of capital expenditure on this relationship.

This paper applies fixed effects and dynamic generalized method of moments (GMM) models to examine hypothesized associations between the proportion of nonexecutive directors and stock return volatility, as well as the moderating effect of capital expenditure. The robustness tests are implemented by applying alternative measures of overinvestment and firm risk.

The results show that the presence of nonexecutive directors on board increases firm risk. However, the combination of nonexecutive ratio and capital expenditure ratio has a significant negative impact on firm risk. The result is also confirmed by the difference between the monitoring role of nonexecutive directors in overinvesting and underinvesting firms.

The results imply that Vietnamese listed firms take stock return volatility into consideration before nominating and appointing nonexecutive directors into their board, especially in overinvesting firms. From another perspective, the shift toward having a majority of nonexecutive directors on boards can play a significant role in pursuing a stable or risky business strategy.

This paper investigates the influences of nonexecutive directors on firm risk in the context of Vietnam.

We measured step velocity V_step in the <110> direction of two dimensional islands on the {110} faces of tetragonal lysozyme crystals under high pressure, and calculated step kinetic coefficients β_step. V_step and β_step decreased with increasing pressure. The decrease in β_step indicates the increase in activation energy of the crystallization ε_kink or the mean distance between kinks on the step λ.

Monte Carlo simulations of hard-sphere (HS) crystal grown on a square patterned wall under gravity have been performed. While previous simulations were performed with step-wise controlled gravity, in the present simulations constant gravity has been applied from the first. In the case in which a flat wall is used as the bottom wall, if a large gravity is suddenly applied, the system does polycrystallize. On the other hand, in the present simulations, despite the sudden application of gravity, the system has not polycrystallize. Crystalline nucleation on the square pattern and successive crystal growth upward are suggested to overcome the homogeneous nucleation inside and result in. Defect disappearance, which has been essentially the same as that for the case with step-wise controlled gravity, has also observed for the present case. The characteristic of the square patterned bottom wall simulation with a large horizontal system size has been existence of triangular defects suggesting stacking tetrahedra.

The purpose of this paper is to reduce the waiting time on webcast for selective contents, by proposing a scheduling method called the “contents prefetched broadcasting considering user participation” (CPB‐CP) method.

The authors analyze and evaluate the performance of the proposed CPB‐CP method.

It is confirmed that the proposed method gives shorter average waiting time than the conventional methods.

A future direction of this study will involve making a scheduling method in the case where the playing time of each content item is different.

In selective contents delivery, users may wait for the next bit of content to start playing after watching the previous one. In quiz programs, users may wait to receive the content data for their selected answer after they select their answer.

In the CPB‐CP method, when a provider node pulls out of the network while delivering contents, waiting time is reduced effectively by reconstructing a delivery schedule that considers the available bandwidth of each provider node.

The purpose of this paper is to intelligibly demonstrate the effectiveness of face mask wearing as a means to prevent COVID-19 transmission. Through understanding the benefits of wearing masks, it is hoped to facilitate the change of societal behavior and more people are willing to wear face mask.

The paper investigates the 50 states in the United States of America (U.S.) and Washington, D.C. that implemented the mask mandates before September 30, 2020, which are divided into four groups: (1) those implemented the statewide mask mandates before June 5, 2020 when World Health Organization (WHO) recommended mask wearing; (2) those implemented statewide mask mandates after June 5, 2020; (3) those implemented partial mandates affecting 30 percent or more of the state’s population; and (4) those implemented partial mandates affecting less than 30 percent. Simple descriptive statistics are analyzed.

For the 50 U.S. states and Washington, D.C., the higher the mask wearing rate, the lower the number of COVID-19 cases (correlation coefficient: −0.69 (p<0.001)). For the 23 states with mobility reduction of less than 15 percent, the higher the proportion of population required to wear masks, the lower the number of cases. This can be seen from the difference in the number of cases among the four groups by ANOVA (p = 0.013).

The positive effect of wearing masks is shown based on simple descriptive statistics for intuitive and intelligible understanding, which may lead people to comprehend the importance of wearing masks, and break through their custom, culture, and norms, and wear masks.