Farmers’ Knowledge and Awareness towards the Use of Agrochemicals in Vegetable Cultivation, Fako Cameroon

Agrochemicals are contemporary, omnipresent tool used in vegetable cultivation. Farmers’ knowledge and awareness of the proper usage of agrochemicals are critical for mitigating the negative effects on human health. This cross-sectional study was aimed at assessing the usage knowledge, risk awareness of toxicological and chemical classes, proper handling and use practices for agrochemicals homologated for use in vegetable farming, and the occurrence of health-related symptoms as a result of exposure among these farmers. The study included 93 vegetable growers from agricultural hotspot towns in Fako, southwest Cameroon. The field study, ran from November 2021 to December 2023, using a questionnaire to collect information on farmers demographic, and their knowledge of pesticide classes, and the related risk of associated with the handling of agrochemicals. Results show that all vegetable farmers, particularly those engaged in agribusiness, employ pesticide inputs to maximize production. Six pesticides, two fertilizer types, and one unknown substance were identified. While 23 active compounds were found, the most utilized were abamectin, emamectin (10.46%), dimethoate (9.30%,) and ethoprophos (8.13%). Two active chemicals, dimethoate and methalaxyl, are illegal yet remain in circulation. Toxicological classes I and II, with the greatest harmful effect on human health, were the most commonly utilized (64.27%). Thirty-nine percent of farmers never use personal protection equipment when working with agrochemicals, demonstrating a significant gap in knowledge and awareness of agrochemicals and their various applications and handling procedures in the field. The government should implement an intensive specialized educational program for on-field farmers with incentives in order to promote sustainable agriculture methods that ensure environmental and human safety.

Action Research in Language Education

Action research is a kind of research in language education, but it has its own characteristics. And its implementation will help a lot in both teachers＇ professional development and classroom teaching. This article has made a tentative study of the practical use of Action Research and some problems teachers confront in using it. This article is also concerned with some solutions to the problems teachers may face, e.g., being lack of knowledge about action research and expertise, being lack of time of action research, having too large class, being short of support including money, constraints from students and authority＇s response. The implentation of action research needs teachers, experts, and school athority＇s effort to improve language teching and language education.

Rural coping and adaptation strategies for climate change by Himalayan communities in Nepal

Climate change has major impacts on the livelihoods of forest-dependent communities.The unpredictable weather conditions in rural Nepal have been attributed to a changing climate.This study explored the climate change adaptation and coping strategies that rural communities adopt for the conservation of natural resources and livelihoods in the mid-hills of Nepal.This paper explored major climatic hazards,assessed different coping and adaptation measures,and barrier faced to climate change adaptation based on perceptions by forest-dependent communities.We conducted focus group discussions,questionnaire surveys,and semistructured interviews with local communities and stakeholders.The results showed that rural communities had experienced significant impacts of climate change and variability.In response,they are practicing diverse coping and adaptation strategies,including the construction of bioengineering structures and planting different species that grow quickly and establish promptly.

Recognition of practical speech emotion using improved shuffled frog leaping algorithm

Due to the drawbacks in Support Vector Machine（SVM）parameter optimization,an Improved Shuffled Frog Leaping Algorithm（Im-SFLA）was proposed,and the learning ability in practical speech emotion recognition was improved.Firstly,we introduced Simulated Annealing（SA）,Immune Vaccination（Iv）,Gaussian mutation and chaotic disturbance into the basic SFLA,which bManced the search efficiency and population diversity effectively.Secondly,Im-SFLA Was applied to the optimization of SVM parameters,and an Im-SFLA-SVM method Was proposed.Thirdly,the acoustic features of practical speech emotion,such aS ridgetiness,were analyzed.The pitch frequency,short-term energy,formant frequency and chaotic characteristics were analyzed corresponding to different emotion categories,and we constructed a 144-dimensional emotion feature vector for recognition and reduced to 4-dimension by adopting Linear Discriminant Analysis（LDA） Finally,the Im-SFLA-SVM method Was tested on the practical speech emotion database,and the recognition results were compared with Shuffled Frog Leaping Algorithm optimization-SVM（SFLA-SVM）method,Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm optimization-SVM（PSo-SVM） method,basic SVM,Gaussian Mixture Model（GMM）method and Back Propagation（BP）neural network method.The experimentM resuits showed that the average recognition rate of Im-SFLA-SVM method was 77.8%,which had improved 1.7%,2.7%,3.4%,4.7%and 7.8%respectively,compared with the other methods.The recognition of fidgetiness was significantly improve,thus verifying that Im-SFLA was an effective SVM parameter selection method,and the Im-SFLA-SVM method may significantly improve the practical speech emotion recognition.