Awareness and Adoption of Paddy Farmers in Buttala Sri Lanka to Golden Rules of Pesticide Usage

Pesticides are widely used in agricultural production to prevent or control pests, diseases,weeds and other plant pathogens in an effort to reduce or eliminate yield losses and maintainhigh produce quality. There is a higher risk in pesticide usage due to hazardous nature ofthem; hence, safety measures should have practiced to minimize the threats. Especially inPaddy cultivation, various types of pesticides were applied during its various growing stagesas from the seedling to harvest. The objective of the study was to investigate the awarenessand adoption on “Golden Rules” which are (1) exercise caution at all times (2) carefulreading and understanding of label before use (3) practicing good personal hygiene (4) takecare of and maintain application equipment and (5) wear appropriate personal protectiveclothing and equipment, in the area of Buttala, Sri Lanka at three levels as “High””Moderate” and “Low”. A field survey which based on pre tested questionnaire was carriedout by using randomly selected 50 Paddy farmers without considering their age classes,education and economic status etc. to find out the awareness and adoption to “Golden Rules”in five operations (in the operations of pesticide buying, transportation, storage, applicationand disposal). Survey results revealed that the farmers of Buttala did not aware on “Goldenrules” and their adherence to “Golden Rules” is not satisfactory. Moreover, “Moderate” levelof awareness and adoption on the processes of buying (52, 48%) and storage (51, 52%) but“Low” awareness and adoption on transportation (51, 52%), application (48, 48%) anddisposal (52%, 50%) seen from total number of farmers (n=50). The risk of contaminationwas high due to careless transportation, application and disposal because of “Low” awarenessand adoption for those processes therefore immediate awareness programs are required.According to survey findings the pesticides were applied heavily because of the lack ofknowledge and elevated pest and disease problems, therefore there was a threat toenvironment mainly from application and disposal by contaminating water sources of thearea. Promoting of extension services, farmer credit facilities to buy safe equipments,directing farmers towards integrated pest management and activate regulations on pesticideusage are needed to protect public from hazardous agrochemicals. Furthermore, this is amatter of concern to overcome the hazardous problem of pesticides use before it isecologically and socially getting worst in the future

Biodegradability Assessment of Bio-based Film Products (Lunch Sheets) in the Marine Environment

Plastic pollution is a current common problem and it causes a serious impact on the marine environment. Micro debris of plastics have accumulated in oceans and exhibit a natural tendency to interrelate with the ecosystem which can cause negative effects on both humans and animals. Polythene food wrappers are used worldwide as a packaging material. Considering the negative impact of polythene wrappers, biodegradable food wrappers have been produced in Sri Lanka following the Section 23 W of the National Environmental Act. The objective of the study was to determine the biodegradability of few bio-based film products (lunch sheets) available in the Sri Lankan market labeled as 100% biodegradable in the marine environment. The biodegradability of five different brands of biodegradable food wrappers were tested together with cellulose paper as the positive control and non-biodegradable food wrapper as the negative control in the marine environment. Laboratory models of three marine environments; inter tidal zone, pelagic zone and brackish water were selected and the biodegradability for a period of six months were tested using weight measurement and FT-IR analysis. Furthermore, several environmental parameters were tested for these three marine zones. Results indicated that the highest percentage weight loss was shown by brand 3 in all three marine environments. In the pelagic zone, percentage weight loss ranged from 8.60-48.92% while highest value of 48.92% was shown by brand 3. In the brackish water environment, brand 3 showed 73.51% of percentage weight loss and values ranged from 11.76-73.51%. The percentage weight loss, ranged from 68.29-89.99% in inter tidal zone and brand 3 showed the highest value as 89.99%. All the samples showed a considerable weight loss after six months duration in inter tidal zone compared to other zones and even the negative control has undergone physical disintegration. It is assumed that oxo-biodegradation leads to this disintegration in the food wrappers in this zone. The FT-IR results have shown that there is no significant degradation of the non-biodegradable food wrapper (negative control) while the cellulose paper (positive control) and the biodegradable food wrappers have undergone a considerable degradation. Keywords: Biodegradability, Food wrappers, Marine environmen

Taking Sensor Networks from the Lab to the Jungle

Sensor networks pose unique technical and logistical challenges. One of the most widely cited applications for sensor networks is monitoring national borders for humans attempting to surreptitiously cross on foot, especially at night. Other suggested applications of sensor networks include battlefield observation and forest fire detectio

An Identity-based Ring Signature Scheme with Enhanced Privacy

There are many applications in which it is necessary to transmit authenticatable messages while achieving certain privacy goals such as signer ambiguity. The emerging area of vehicular ad-hoc network is a good example application domain with this requirement. The ring signature technique that uses an ad-hoc group of signer identities is a widely used method for generating this type of privacy preserving digital signatures. The identity-based cryptographic techniques do not require certificates. The construction of ring signatures using identity-based cryptography allow for privacy preserving digital signatures to be created in application when certificates are not readily available or desirable such as in vehicle area networks. We propose a new designated verifier identity-based ring signature scheme that is secure against full key exposure attacks even for a small group size. This is a general purpose primitive that can be used in many application domains such as ubiquitous computing where signer ambiguity is required in small groups. We consider the usefulness of identity-based cryptographic primitives in vehicular ad-hoc networks and use a specific example application to illustrate the use of identity-based ring signatures as a tool to create privacy preserving authenticatable messages. ©2006 IEEE

Security for the Mythical Air-Dropped Sensor Network

The research area of very large scale wireless sensor networks made of low-cost sensors is gaining a lot of interest as witnessed by the large number of published papers. The security aspects of such networks are addressed as well, and in particular many security papers investigating the security aspects of such networks make important assumptions about the capabilities of low-cost sensors. Consequently, the techniques proposed in the current literature to provide security properties for this low-cost wireless sensor networks are heavily shaped by such assumptions. In this position paper, we challenge such assumptions by presenting the results of an experiment we conducted using sensors representative of low cost units. And we show that the same security properties can be better provided using techniques based on application-specific knowledge, heuristics and statistical tests. Finally, we show that one of the most highly cited application scenarios to motivate such techniques, the air-dropped sensor network, is likely to be more a myth than a realistic scenario for low-cost sensors. © 2006 IEEE

One-Time Sensors: A Novel Concept to Mitigate Node Capture Attacks,

Dealing with captured nodes is generally accepted as the most difficult challenge to wireless sensor network security. By utilizing the low-cost property of sensor nodes, we introduce the novel concept of one-time sensors to mitigate node-capture attacks. The basic idea is to load each sensor with only one cryptographic token so that the captured node can inject only a single malicious message into the network. In addition, sybil attacks are avoided and explicit revocation is not necessary using one-time sensors. By using public key techniques, one-way hash functions and Merkle's hash tree, we also show efficient implementations and interesting tradeoffs for one-time sensors. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005

A Cost-Efficient Counter-Intrusion Scheme for One-Time Sensor Networks

We propose a secure one-time sensor scheme that is highly resistant to forged messages and replay message attacks. A sensor in a one-time sensor network transmits only a single message in its life time but retransmits messages from other sensors to provide message routing. The only security-specific computational capability required from a one-time sensor in our scheme is a hash function. The bulk of security related data in our scheme is static and therefore can be stored in non-volatile memory. This is an important design criteria as energy is the most critical resource in commonly used lowcost battery-powered wireless sensors. We further improve the storage efficiency of the proposed solution using Bloom filters. © 2005 IEEE

A Cost-Efficient Counter-Intrusion Scheme for One-time Sensor Networks

We propose a secure one-time sensor scheme that is highly resistant to forged messages and replay message attacks. A sensor in a one-time sensor network transmits only a single message in its life time but retransmits messages from other sensors to provide message routing. The only security-specific computational capability required from a one-time sensor in our scheme is a hash function. The bulk of security related data in our scheme is static and therefore can be stored in non-volatile memory. This is an important design criteria as energy is the most critical resource in commonly used lowcost battery-powered wireless sensors. We further improve the storage efficiency of the proposed solution using Bloom filters. © 2005 IEEE