High-Throughput Methods for Phenotyping Epicuticular Wax and Grain Yield in Wheat

The increasing demand of wheat and the incidence of extreme weather events demand the development of high yielding wheat cultivars with resilience to extreme heat events. Photoprotective traits, as cuticular waxes, support the plant to maintain the photosynthetic activity, decrease stomatal water loss and regulate the plant’s internal temperature under extreme abiotic stress. The work described in this dissertation aims to develop new tools for phenotyping epicuticular wax and grain yields that can potentially contribute to accelerate the genetic gain of wheat to fulfill the demand of this economically important cereal by 2050. The objectives of this study were; i) to understand the role of leaf EW as a photoprotective mechanism for adaptation, ii) develop reliable and efficient indirect selection methodologies for the accurate estimation of EW content, and iii) define selection indices for indirect estimation of GG of GY under heat stress environments incorporating the spectral response of the plant. For the first objective, a set of RIL’s was evaluated under controlled conditions. The light reflectance of wavelength at the visible region were highly associated with EW. For the estimation of EW with a leaf clip spectroradiometer, three empirical spectral indices were developed: EWI-1 Blue/Red, EWI-2 Blue/NIR, EWI-15 625 (1/736 – 1/832) and EWI-16 (625-736) / 832. Two additional linear models are also proposed, the Model-10 and Model-11. For the second objective, a set of spring wheat landraces and product of interspecific hybridization was evaluated under severe heat stress conditions. The canopy reflectance of the NIR and SWIR was highly associated with the EW load of the flag leaves. For field phenotyping, the spectral indices DIB-2, DIB-3, and the linear model MB-DI-2 provided a reliable indirect estimation of the EW content in leaves. And for the last objective, the canopy reflectance obtained in the second study was evaluated for indirect selection of the GG of the wheat genotypes. Indirect selection with the Smith/Hazel index did not provide any additional GG when the components of GY were incorporated. The best parameters for indirect selection based on indices were BIO; the broadband vegetation indices ARI, ReCl, NDII, SAVI, GRVI and TDVI; and the narrow band vegetation index NDVI

Evaluation The Nitrogen Needs And Efficiency Of Rizhobia Strains To Provide Nitrogen To Chipilin (Crotalaria Longirostrata Hook. And Arn.)

EVALUATION THE NITROGEN NEEDS AND EFFICIENCY OF RHIZOBIA STRAINS TO PROVIDE NITROGEN TO CHIPILIN (Crotalaria Longirostrata HOOK. AND ARN.) FEBRUARY OF 2013 FATIMA DEL ROSARIO CAMARILLO CASTILLO, B.A., AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY OF CHAPINGO M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Francis X. Mangan Chipilin (Crotalaria Longirostrata) is a leguminous plant native to Central America and Southern Mexico and used in the preparation of traditional dishes in this region. Starting in 2009, farmers in Massachusetts have been growing chipilin with a weekly production of 800 kg∙ha-1. However, as much as 300 kg∙ha-1 of nitrogen has been necessary to apply to the soil in order to obtain a marketable leaf quality. With the goal to determine the nitrogen requirements of chipilín and to quantify the capacity of selected stains to infect and provide nitrogen for this crop, two-field experiments were conducted at the UMass Research farm at Deerfield, Massachusetts, in an occum fine sandy loam soil (coarse-loamy, mixed, mesic Fluventic Dystrudept) soil as a randomized complete bock design with five replications. For the field trial in 2011, nitrogen rates were (kg∙ha-1): 40, 80, 120, 160, 200 and 240 and 0, 40, 80, 120, 160, 200, 240 and 280 in 2012 in combination with four Rhizobia strains: Bradyrhizobium sp. (Vigna), Rhizobium leguminosarum biovar, Bradyrhizobium USDA 3384 and no Rhizobia were the treatments. Based on the results obtained, nitrogen fertilizer application of 80 kg∙ha-1 was economically sufficient for chipilin to reach optimum yield. However higher nitrogen rates are needed to obtain marketable leaf color and quality. Additionally a greenhouse experiment set up as a factorial experiment with five replications was conducted with seven nitrogen concentrations (mg N∙L-1)-; 0, 26.25, 52.5, 105, 157.5, 210 and 262.5 mg∙L1 and the three Rhizobia strain for the previous experiment plus Bradyrhizobium USDA 2370 as treatments. Results suggest from Bradyrhizobium USDA 3384 is not an efficient strain for chipilin, and Rhizobium leguminosarum biovar potentially may provide the most nitrogen of the strains evaluated. In the greenhouse trial, nodules number per plant decreased with the increase in nitrogen applications, but this was not the case in the field trial in 2012. Nodules were found on the root of chipilin plants in the control. This is suspected to be due to one of the following possibilities: Rhizobia inoculum presence in the seed, Rhizobia in the soil (in the field trial) or contamination during the setup of the experiment

High-Throughput Methods for Phenotyping Epicuticular Wax and Grain Yield in Wheat

The increasing demand of wheat and the incidence of extreme weather events demand the development of high yielding wheat cultivars with resilience to extreme heat events. Photoprotective traits, as cuticular waxes, support the plant to maintain the photosynthetic activity, decrease stomatal water loss and regulate the plant’s internal temperature under extreme abiotic stress. The work described in this dissertation aims to develop new tools for phenotyping epicuticular wax and grain yields that can potentially contribute to accelerate the genetic gain of wheat to fulfill the demand of this economically important cereal by 2050. The objectives of this study were; i) to understand the role of leaf EW as a photoprotective mechanism for adaptation, ii) develop reliable and efficient indirect selection methodologies for the accurate estimation of EW content, and iii) define selection indices for indirect estimation of GG of GY under heat stress environments incorporating the spectral response of the plant. For the first objective, a set of RIL’s was evaluated under controlled conditions. The light reflectance of wavelength at the visible region were highly associated with EW. For the estimation of EW with a leaf clip spectroradiometer, three empirical spectral indices were developed: EWI-1 Blue/Red, EWI-2 Blue/NIR, EWI-15 625 (1/736 – 1/832) and EWI-16 (625-736) / 832. Two additional linear models are also proposed, the Model-10 and Model-11. For the second objective, a set of spring wheat landraces and product of interspecific hybridization was evaluated under severe heat stress conditions. The canopy reflectance of the NIR and SWIR was highly associated with the EW load of the flag leaves. For field phenotyping, the spectral indices DIB-2, DIB-3, and the linear model MB-DI-2 provided a reliable indirect estimation of the EW content in leaves. And for the last objective, the canopy reflectance obtained in the second study was evaluated for indirect selection of the GG of the wheat genotypes. Indirect selection with the Smith/Hazel index did not provide any additional GG when the components of GY were incorporated. The best parameters for indirect selection based on indices were BIO; the broadband vegetation indices ARI, ReCl, NDII, SAVI, GRVI and TDVI; and the narrow band vegetation index NDVI

Offensive Language Detection in Arabic Social Networks Using Evolutionary-Based Classifiers Learned From Fine-Tuned Embeddings

Social networks facilitate communication between people from all over the world. Unfortunately, the excessive use of social networks leads to the rise of antisocial behaviors such as the spread of online offensive language, cyberbullying (CB), and hate speech (HS). Therefore, abusive\offensive and hate detection become a crucial part of cyberharassment. Manual detection of cyberharassment is cumbersome, slow, and not even feasible in rapidly growing data. In this study, we addressed the challenges of automatic detection of the offensive tweets in the Arabic language. The main contribution of this study is to design and implement an intelligent prediction system encompassing a two-stage optimization approach to identify and classify the offensive from the non-offensive text. In the rst stage, the proposed approach ne-tuned the pre-trainedword embedding models by training them for several epochs on the training dataset. The embeddings of the vocabularies in the new dataset are trained and added to the old embeddings. While in the second stage, it employed a hybrid approach of two classi ers, namely XGBoost and SVM, and a genetic algorithm (GA) to mitigate the drawback of the classi ers in nding the optimal hyperparameter values to run the proposed approach. We tested the proposed approach on Arabic Cyberbullying Corpus (ArCybC), which contains tweets collected from four Twitter domains: gaming, sports, news, and celebrities. The ArCybC dataset has four categories: sexual, racial, intelligence, and appearance. The proposed approach produced superior results, in which the SVM algorithm with the Aravec SkipGram word embedding model achieved an accuracy rate of 88.2% and an F1-score rate of 87.8%.Ministerio Espanol de Ciencia e Innovacion (DemocratAI::UGR) PID2020-115570GB-C2

Understanding Poverty and Gender: Narratives from the Field

This mixed-method study presents findings of the two-phased multi-year, multi-country, interdisciplinary research project that sought to develop a new measure of deprivation that is genuinely gender-sensitive and responsive to the expressed interests and views of poor women and men. The presentation will highlight the research methodology and how context impacts people\u27s views on the gendered dimensions of poverty, hardship and deprivation and what these suggest as potential dimensions of a new gender-sensitive measure of poverty

The methodological strategies in the learning-process of the English language during the second semester of 2014

Today is well knew the importance of learning English as a foreign language. As students of five years from the faculty of Education and Language Department of English at UNAN Managua was decided to do a research on the effectiveness of the strategies used by the teacher to develop speaking and listening skills in the seventh grade B at the Chiquilistagua public School in the second semester 2014. This research was initiated with the purpose of analyzing these strategies. At the beginning of this semester was made an observation in the classroom of the seventh grade B to study all the strategies and the effectiveness of them to develop the listening and speaking skills. These skills are very important for learning English; this research has the objective to identify effectiveness of such strategies. Speaking is one of the most important skills, it‘s necessary to practice this ability every day to get better results in the learning process. For many students the listening skill is very difficult because they do not feel enough motivation to develop that skill. Often the resources that the teacher uses aren‘t enough for that reason the development of this skills is more difficult for the

Habilidad de cuidado del cuidador principal de pacientes con accidente cerebrovascular, Chiclayo – 2021

El accidente cerebro vascular es una de las principales causas de discapacidad, generando secuelas que requieren cuidados en el hogar y el desarrollo de habilidades de cuidado. La investigación tuvo como objetivo determinar el nivel de habilidad de cuidado del cuidador principal de pacientes con accidente cerebrovascular en el Hospital Regional Docente las Mercedes, Chiclayo – 2021. Estudio cuantitativo, de diseño descriptivo transversal. La muestra fueron por 52 cuidadores principales, para la recolección de datos se empleó el cuestionario “Habilidad de Cuidado de Cuidadores Familiares de Personas con Enfermedad Crónica” de Lucy Barrera, con una confiabilidad de alfa de Cronbach de 0,77. Los resultados mostraron del total de 52 cuidadores, el 73.1% son del género femenino, el 63.5% su edad se encuentra entre los 31ª 50 años, un 28.8% tienen secundaria incompleta, de acuerdo al estado civil el 57.7% son casados (as) y el 53.8% de los cuidadores se dedican a las labores del hogar, el tiempo que llevan como cuidador el 40.4% tienen 7-18 meses y por último, el 40.4% son hijos (as). Respecto a la habilidad de cuidado general se evidenció un nivel bajo en el 36.5% de los cuidadores, en el análisis por dimensión también el nivel fue bajo en la dimensión relación, comprensión y modificación de la vida, con los porcentajes de 38.5%, 36.5% y 42.3% respectivamente. En conclusión, la mayoría de los cuidadores posee un nivel bajo de habilidad de cuidado debiendo mejorarse para garantizando un cuidado adecuado de la persona cuidada y del cuidador.TesisCiencias de la vida y cuidado de la salud human

Mobiles for Literacy in Developing Countries: An Effectiveness Framework

In recent years, the advent of low-cost digital and mobile devices has led to a strong expansion of social interventions, including those that try to improve student learning and literacy outcomes. Many of these are focused on improving reading in low-income countries, and particularly among the most disadvantaged. Some of these early efforts have been called successful, but little credible evidence exists for those claims. Drawing on a robust sample of projects in the domain of mobiles for literacy, this article introduces a design solution framework that combines intervention purposes with devices, end users, and local contexts. In combination with a suggested set of purpose-driven methods for monitoring and evaluation, this new framework provides useful parameters for measuring effectiveness in the domain of mobiles for literacy