Impact of planting density on wheat crop grown under different tree species in tarai agroforestry system of central himalaya, India

A field trial based Agroforestry system was established at Pantnagar during Rabi season 2012-13 for predicting the effect of spacing on growth and yield of wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) under Eucalyptus camaldulensis and Melia azedarach. The experiment was carried out in split-plot design consisting of two tree species in main plot, viz, Eucalyptus camaldulensis and Melia azedarch and four spacing treatments in sub-plot viz, 3.0m×1.0m, 3.0m×1.5m, 3.0m×2.0m and 3.0m×2.5m with three replications. The wheat crop variety“UP-2338” was sown on December 06, 2012 and harvested on April 27, 2013. Among the tree species, the maximum (15.1 q /ha) and significantly higher grain yield with 21.8% increment was recorded under Melia as compare to Eucalyptus. Whereas, among the different spacings, the wheat growth in terms of dry biomass at 120 DAS (495.4/m2 ), yield attributes and yield in terms of grain (16.0 q/ha), straw (29.4 q/ha) and biological yield (45.4 q/ha) under Melia was significantly higher at 3 × 2.5 m spacing as compared to other planting density. The correlation coefficient (r) studies exhibited that wheat growth and yield attributing characteristics shows significantly (p<0.05) high degree (r=0.75 to 1) positive correlation with each other. The investigation was done to find out the proper planting density for intercropping of wheat with tree species without comprising the wheat growth and enhancing its sustainability

Biomarker responses (serum biochemistry) in pregnant female wistar rats and histopathology of their neonates exposed prenatally to pesticides

Experiments were conducted to investigate the effects on health of pregnant female rats exposed to pesticides glyphosate and carbendazim. Glyphosate is used as herbicide and carbendazim as a fungicide; all are commercially available readily for various agricultural and domestic purposes. The hypothesis tested in this investigation is that pesticide exposure during pregnancy causes changes in biomarker responses like serum glucose level, total protein, total cholesterol, triglycerides, SGOT, SGPT, and billirubin level. Significant changes were observed in all above biomarker responses, when compared with the reference. Histopathology of skin and kidney of rat neonates showed marked damage. Degenerative changes and vacuolization with eroded capsule were observed in kidney sample and thinning of epidermis in skin sample was seen in pesticides exposed neonates of rats. The serum biochemistry and histopathological findings are valuable markers for observing the changes caused by pesticide exposure

Outage-Watch: Early Prediction of Outages using Extreme Event Regularizer

Cloud services are omnipresent and critical cloud service failure is a fact of life. In order to retain customers and prevent revenue loss, it is important to provide high reliability guarantees for these services. One way to do this is by predicting outages in advance, which can help in reducing the severity as well as time to recovery. It is difficult to forecast critical failures due to the rarity of these events. Moreover, critical failures are ill-defined in terms of observable data. Our proposed method, Outage-Watch, defines critical service outages as deteriorations in the Quality of Service (QoS) captured by a set of metrics. Outage-Watch detects such outages in advance by using current system state to predict whether the QoS metrics will cross a threshold and initiate an extreme event. A mixture of Gaussian is used to model the distribution of the QoS metrics for flexibility and an extreme event regularizer helps in improving learning in tail of the distribution. An outage is predicted if the probability of any one of the QoS metrics crossing threshold changes significantly. Our evaluation on a real-world SaaS company dataset shows that Outage-Watch significantly outperforms traditional methods with an average AUC of 0.98. Additionally, Outage-Watch detects all the outages exhibiting a change in service metrics and reduces the Mean Time To Detection (MTTD) of outages by up to 88% when deployed in an enterprise cloud-service system, demonstrating efficacy of our proposed method.Comment: Accepted to ESEC/FSE 202

Impact of planting density on wheat crop grown under different tree species in tarai agroforestry system of central himalaya, India

A field trial based Agroforestry system was established at Pantnagar during Rabi season 2012-13 for predicting the effect of spacing on growth and yield of wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) under Eucalyptus camaldulensis and Melia azedarach. The experiment was carried out in split-plot design consisting of two tree species in main plot, viz, Eucalyptus camaldulensis and Melia azedarch and four spacing treatments in sub-plot viz, 3.0m×1.0m, 3.0m×1.5m, 3.0m×2.0m and 3.0m×2.5m with three replications. The wheat crop variety“UP-2338” was sown on December 06, 2012 and harvested on April 27, 2013. Among the tree species, the maximum (15.1 q /ha) and significantly higher grain yield with 21.8% increment was recorded under Melia as compare to Eucalyptus. Whereas, among the different spacings, the wheat growth in terms of dry biomass at 120 DAS (495.4/m2 ), yield attributes and yield in terms of grain (16.0 q/ha), straw (29.4 q/ha) and biological yield (45.4 q/ha) under Melia was significantly higher at 3 × 2.5 m spacing as compared to other planting density. The correlation coefficient (r) studies exhibited that wheat growth and yield attributing characteristics shows significantly (p<0.05) high degree (r=0.75 to 1) positive correlation with each other. The investigation was done to find out the proper planting density for intercropping of wheat with tree species without comprising the wheat growth and enhancing its sustainability

Utilitarian and Hedonic Values of eWOM Media and Online Booking Decisions for Tourist Destinations in India

In this contemporary world, electronic word of mouth (eWOM) platforms (or media) have become a prerequisite information source for online surfers, especially when planning excursions. However, tourists refer to the reviews of these platforms based on utilitarian and hedonic aspects. The utilitarian value enhances users’ task performance, whereas the hedonic value is related to pleasure and inner feelings. The present work was undertaken to study the importance of various utilitarian and hedonic determinants, and analyses their influence on the perceived usefulness (PU) of eWOM media and subsequent online booking decisions (OBD) for tourist destinations in India. In addition, the study investigates whether the influence of PU of eWOM media on OBD varies according to gender. A conceptual model was introduced based on data analysis done through SPSS 23 and AMOS 23. The model was empirically validated based on sample data comprising 338 Indian tourists. The purposive sampling technique was used in the current study, and only those samples who referred to eWOM media for information search were accepted. The findings indicate that utilitarian and hedonic determinants significantly influence tourist decision-making. TripAdvisor was the most popular web portal, followed by other social networking sites among the preferred sources of tourist destination information. The moderating analysis revealed that the impact of eWOM media PU on OBD was higher in males than in females. The study suggests that website designers and administrators design the contents according to the needs identified

Economic analysis of artificially roughened solar air heater with v-shaped ribs

Due to the minimal transfer of heat from absorber plate to moving air in the duct, solar air heaters have low performance. One of the procedures to augment the heat transfer by substantial amount is by utilizing artificial roughness, by which the performance can be improved considerably. In this study, an economic investigation of solar air heater embedded with artificial roughness is accomplished numerically employing v-shaped roughness, with the objective of optimising life cycle solar savings. The non-dimensional parameters of roughness, namely, angle of attack (α), roughness pitch (p/e) and roughness height (e/Dh) are examined by varying temperature rise over the solar air heater (∆T) and solar radiations (I) for different economic parameters values i.e., cost of collector, cost of roughness elements, and cost of conventional fuel