Perceptions and practices of pesticides safety measures of rice farmers in the central region of Vietnam

The use of pesticides is increasing rapidly and the pesticide use crisis is badly damaging the environment, the economy, and public health in Vietnam. However, the country is yet to become successful in reducing pesticide use mostly because of policy implementation and inadequate understanding of farmers. This study examined and discussed the perceptions and safety level of using pesticides by applying a widely used index of 39 indicators equivalent to 39 safety measures grouped into four categories to assess the safety behaviour of rice farmers in the central region of Vietnam. A field survey of 320 rice farmers and 12 local leaders was conducted in Quang Tri and Thua Thien Hue provinces. The result revealed that there exists a significant difference (p0.001) between the perception and practices of pesticide safety measures of rice farmers in the study area. The overall score appears relatively high (4.09 and 3.89 out of 5.0 for perception and practices, respectively), indicating that farmers believe what they are doing is safe, though there are significant variations among the categories and among farmers in practicing pesticide safety measures. Regarding the farmers’ safety level, it was observed that there are still 18.1% and 34.4% of rice farmers are under unsafe and potentially unsafe conditions, respectively. Hence, an effective extension and communication program regarding the management and safety use of pesticides is the most vital policy solution to protect the rice farmers from potential health risks and ensure the sustainability of agriculture

Adoption of disaster risk reduction strategy in agriculture sector at Southkhali Union of Sharankhola Upazila, Bangladesh

Climate change is contemporary global threat especially for coastal area of Bangladesh which drastically affects in agricultural sector. The purpose of the study was to determine the extent of adopting disaster risk reduction strategies by farmer towards agriculture sector in Southkhali union of Sharankhola upazila. Data were collected following a structured pretested interview schedule, FGD and KII and then verified with secondary sources of information. Coefficients of Correlation and regression analysis were used to find out the contribution of factors to the variation of adopting disaster risk reduction strategy by farmers in agriculture sector. The study found that the salinity was the major climate change effect in agriculture sector of this area that resulted soil salinity in agriculture and the most common adopted strategies are rain water harvesting (90%), tree plantation (89.16%) and homestead gardening (80.83%) in agriculture. Correlation analysis indicated that age (0.383**), farming experience (0.441**), communication exposure (0.271*) and organizational support (0.226*) had positive significant relationship and climate change effect (-0.266**) had negative significant relationship with adoption of disaster risk reduction strategy of farmers in agriculture. Regression analysis revealed that farming experience (β=0.546) has the strongest contribution and  climate change effect (β=-0.139) had negative contribution to the adoption of disaster risk reduction strategies in agriculture. Based on this observation it can be concluded that the awareness and skill of farmer should be more developed through arranging different training program and providing necessary support to promote environmentally safe cultivation and to enhance climate change adaptation in agriculture sector

Can Mutual Funds Outguess the Market: Evidence from Bangladesh?

Abstract This study principally analyzes the fund managers' ability to outguess the market in Bangladesh. We perform the investigation on weekly data of 25 mutual funds for the period of May 16, 2010 to April 28, 2016. To serve our objective, we tested both selection and market timing skills of the fund managers. We have used six measures; average return, Sharpe ratio, Treynor ratio, Information ratio, Jensen's alpha and M square; to confirm the selection skill of fund managers and found no selection skill persistent to most of the fund managers (excluding Aims 1st M.F, ICB AMCL 2nd NRB M.F. and 6th ICB M.F.). In addition, the negative values of alpha indicate that fund managers become not only failed to add value to their portfolio, but also pool wrong assets which hurt the return resulting negative profit. On the other hand, we have employed two popular methodologies; Treynor and Mazu

Varietal performance and effect of planting method on yield and yield contributing characteristics of rice

The experiment was carried out to study the performance of two aman rice varieties (BRRI dhan31 and BRRI dhan41) under different planting methods (line sowing with sprouted seeds by drum seeder, haphazard transplanting and transplanting in line). Both the variety and planting method had significant effect on crop characters plant height, number of total tillers m-2, effective tillers m-2, grains panicle-1, sterile spikelets panicle-1, total spikelets panicle-1, grain yield except panicle length and 1000-grain weight. BRRI dhan41 produced the highest grain yield (4.06 t ha-1). Line sowing method with sprouted seeds by drum seeder showed better performance in respect of no. total tillers m-2 (415.81), effective tillers m-2 (401.85) and grain yield (4.80 t ha-1). The highest no. of total tillers m-2 (421.12), effective tillers m-2 (410.65) and grain yield (5.08 t ha-1) were recorded due to effect of the interaction of line sowing method with sprouted seeds by drum seeder and the variety BRRI dhan41

Maximally mixing active nematics

Active nematics are an important new paradigm in soft condensed matter systems. They consist of rod-like components with an internal driving force pushing them out of equilibrium. The resulting fluid motion exhibits chaotic advection, in which a small patch of fluid is stretched exponentially in length. Using simulation, this Letter shows that this system can exhibit stable periodic motion when sufficiently confined to a square with periodic boundary conditions. Moreover, employing tools from braid theory, we show that this motion is maximally mixing, in that it optimizes the (dimensionless) ``topological entropy'' -- the exponential stretching rate of a material line advected by the fluid. That is, this periodic motion of the defects, counterintuitively, produces more chaotic mixing than chaotic motion of the defects. We also explore the stability of the periodic state. Importantly, we show how to stabilize this orbit into a larger periodic tiling, a critical necessity for it to be seen in future experiments

Characterization of Malaysian Trichoderma isolates using random amplified microsatellites (RAMS)

Trichoderma species are commercially applied as biocontrol agents against numerous plant pathogenic fungi due to their production of antifungal metabolites, competition for nutrients and space, and mycoparasitism. However, currently the identification of Trichoderma species from throughout the world based on micro-morphological descriptions is tedious and prone to error. The correct identification of Trichoderma species is important as several traits are species-specific. The Random Amplified Microsatellites (RAMS) analysis done using five primers in this study showed different degrees of the genetic similarity among 42 isolates of this genus. The genetic similarity values were found to be in the range of 12.50-85.11% based on a total of 76 bands scored in the Trichoderma isolates. Of these 76 bands, 96.05% were polymorphic, 3.95% were monomorphic and 16% were exclusive bands. Two bands (250 bp and 200 bp) produced by primer LR-5 and one band (250 bp) by primer P1A were present in all the Trichoderma isolates collected from healthy and infected oil palm plantation soils. Cluster analysis based on UPGMA of the RAMS marker data showed that T. harzianum, T. virens and T. longibrachiatum isolates were grouped into different clades and lineages. In this study we found that although T. aureoviride isolates were morphologically different when compared to T. harzianum isolates, the UPGMA cluster analysis showed that the majority isolates of T. aureoviride (seven from nine) were closely related to the isolates of T. harzianum

Query-focused abstractive summarization using sequence-to-sequence and transformer models

Query Focused Summarization (QFS) summarizes a long document with respect to a given input query. Creating a query-focused abstractive summary by using a neural network model is a difficult task which is yet to be fully solved. In our thesis, we propose two neural network models for the query-focused abstractive summarization task. We propose a model based on the sequence-to-sequence architecture with a pointer-generator mechanism. Furthermore, we also use the transformer architecture to design a model for the abstractive summarization. Afterward, we train both our models with the Debatepedia dataset so that the model can learn to summarize a long document with respect to a query. We evaluate the output of our models against the human-created reference summary. Our transformer model outperforms our sequence-to-sequence model in all ROUGE scores

Perceptions of medical students regarding community-based teaching experiences: an observation from Bangladesh

Introduction: Community orientation in medical education, which prepares medical students to become more effective practitioners, is now a global movement. Many medical schools around the world have adopted the concept as the main curricular framework in order to align learning programs with the needs of the community and the learner. Despite many changes over the past few decades, many improvements are still needed in medical education in Bangladesh. This study investigated medical students’ perceptions of the community-based learning experiences incorporated into the Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) degree at Uttara Adhunik Medical College, Dhaka (UAMC), Bangladesh. Methods: A total of 135 students from three undergraduate year levels of the MBBS degree at UAMC, Dhaka, Bangladesh, undertook study tours (community-based teaching, CBT) as a part of a community medicine course and visited a medical college, two rural health centres and a meteorology centre in the Cox’s Bazar district, 400 km from Dhaka city. A questionnaire was used to assess the perceptions of students regarding the administration, organisation and learning experiences of the study tours. Students were required to write reports, present their findings and answer questions in their examinations related to the study tours and CBT. Results: The majority of the students agreed or strongly agreed that the tour was a worthwhile (93%) and enjoyable (95%) learning experience that helped them to understand rural health issues (91%). More than half of the students reported that the study tours increased their awareness about common rural health problems (54%) and provided a wider exposure to medicine (61%). Only 41% of students reported that the study tour increased their interest in undertake training in a rural area. A substantial number of students also expressed their concerns about the planning, length, resources, finance and organisation of the study tours. Conclusions: Overall, the study tours had a positive effect, enhancing students’ awareness and understanding of common rural health problems. As study tours failed to increase the motivation of the students (approximately 60%) to work in rural areas, CBT in the medical curriculum should be reviewed and implemented using effective and evidence-based models to promote interest among medical students to work in rural and underserved or unserved areas