Development of GCP Ontology for sharing crop information

Poster presented at 3rd International Biocuration Conference. Berlin (Germany), 17 Apr 200

To Use or Not to Use: Nepal Samvat, the National Era of Nepal

This paper presents the importance of Nepal Samvat in Nepalese cultural life and compares it with Vikram Samvat, the official calendar of Nepal. Presenting a discussion on eras prevalent in Nepal, this paper examines the significance of the Nepal Government’s recent recognition of Nepal Samvat as the national calendar of Nepal. It presents a historical and cultural overview of the different eras and calendars that are in use in Nepal. It attempts to demonstrate a continuous historical legitimacy of Nepal Samvat, in contrast with Vikram Samvat, which is shown to be a fairly recent imposition associated with the Rana period, from 1903 onward. This article argues against any claims that the implementation of Nepal Samvat as an official calendar is impractical. In addition, I address the following issues: (1) how to adapt a lunar calendar to practical use, (2) how to coordinate it with governmental and business interests, and (3) how to coordinate it with external calendars (e.g. the Common Era or ‘Christian’ calendar)

Controlling the Momentum Current of an Off-resonant Ratchet

We experimentally investigate the phenomenon of a quantum ratchet created by exposing a Bose-Einstein Condensate to short pulses of a potential which is periodic in both space and time. Such a ratchet is manifested by a directed current of particles, even though there is an absence of a net bias force. We confirm a recent theoretical prediction [M. Sadgrove and S. Wimberger, New J. Phys. \textbf{11}, 083027 (2009)] that the current direction can be controlled by experimental parameters which leave the underlying symmetries of the system unchanged. We demonstrate that this behavior can be understood using a single variable containing many of the experimental parameters and thus the ratchet current is describable using a single universal scaling law.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1210.565

Study of Phytochemical, Antioxidant and Antimicrobial Activity of Artocarpus heterophyllus

In today’s world, search for natural medicines is increasing as a result of drug resistance of pathogens and also due to negative consequences of antibiotic. Presence of phytochemicals, antioxidant potential and antimicrobial activity of Artocarpus heterophyllus was carried out in this study. Leaf of this plant was subjected to warm extraction with three different solvents namely methanol, aqueous methanol and ethyl acetate. Leaf extract showed the presence of coumarin, alkaloid, terpenoid in methanol solvent; tannin, coumarin, saponin in aqueous methanol extract and coumarin, terpenoids in ethyl acetate solvent. Further, antimicrobial activity was assessed through disc diffusion method with six pathological bacteria and two fungi strains in four different concentrations of plant extract. Largest ZOI of 16mm was obtained against B. subtilis in 200mg/ml concentration for ethyl acetate extract. Antioxidant potential was measured by DPPH (Diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl) assay. DPPH free radical Scavenging Activity was expressed in % inhibition with L Ascorbic acid as standard and leaf extract in methanol showed the best activity

Multichannel parametrization of \pi N scattering amplitudes and extraction of resonance parameters

We present results of a new multichannel partial-wave analysis for \pi N scattering in the c.m. energy range 1080 to 2100 MeV. This work explicitly includes \eta N and K \Lambda channels and the single pion photoproduction channel. Resonance parameters were extracted by fitting partial-wave amplitudes from all considered channels using a multichannel parametrization that is consistent with S-matrix unitarity. The resonance parameters so obtained are compared to predictions of quark models

Sub-Fourier characteristics of a δ\delta-kicked rotor resonance

We experimentally investigate the sub-Fourier behavior of a $\delta$-kicked rotor resonance by performing a measurement of the fidelity or overlap of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) exposed to a periodically pulsed standing wave. The temporal width of the fidelity resonance peak centered at the Talbot time and zero initial momentum exhibits an inverse cube pulse number ($1/N^{3}$) dependent scaling compared to a $1/N^{2}$ dependence for the mean energy width at the same resonance. A theoretical analysis shows that for an accelerating potential the width of the resonance in acceleration space depends on $1/N^{3}$, a property which we also verify experimentally. Such a sub-Fourier effect could be useful for high precision gravity measurements.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Ending Neglect of older people in the response to Humanitarian Emergencies

Older people make up a significant and growing number of those affected by humanitarian crises, yet they are often not sought out or prioritised within the humanitarian response. Humanitarian agencies, donors, and international bodies neglect older people's health and nutrition. The gaps in knowledge and research about the needs of older people in emergencies are considerable. Older people are not monitored in emergencies and they are not prioritised despite evidence of disproportionate mortality and morbidity in this group. We call for policy changes by humanitarian agencies and donors to ensure that the needs of this vulnerable group are met

Solving hidden terminal problem in MU-MIMO WLANs with fairness and throughput-aware precoding and a degrees-of-freedom-based MAC design

© 2016, Shrestha et al. We generally emphasize that the zeroforcing (ZF) technique backed by an appropriate medium access control (MAC) protocol can be used to address the inevitable hidden terminal (HT) problem in multi-user multiple input multiple output (MU-MIMO) wireless local area network (WLAN) settings. However, to address the implementation-specific requirements of MU-MIMO WLANs, such as fairness in client access and throughput of the network, we propose a fairness and a throughput-aware ZF precoding in our design at the physical layer (PHY). This precoding scheme not only solves the HT problem but also meets the fairness and the throughput requirements of MU-MIMO WLANs. Besides, we design a MAC layer protocol, supportive to PHY, which decides transmission opportunities (TXOPs) among access points (APs) based on the available degrees of freedom (DoF). We make a mandatory provision in our design that APs should have a sufficient DoF. This can ensure collision-free transmission whenever APs/transmitters transmit in the HT scenario. Additionally, we design an improved channel sounding process for MU-MIMO WLANs with a less signaling overhead than IEEE802.11ac. We demonstrate the feasibility of our PHY in a USRP2/GNU Radio testbed prototype in the lab settings. It is found that our PHY improves the SNR and effective SNR of the received signal from about 5 to 11 dB in the HT scenario. The performance of our MAC design is checked with simulation studies in a typical six-antenna AP and clients scenario. We observe that our MAC protocol has a slightly higher signaling overhead than traditional ready to send/clear to send (RTS/CTS) due to design constraints; however, the signaling time overheads are reduced by 98.67 μs compared to IEEE802.11ac. Another interesting aspect to highlight is the constant Throughput gain of four to five times that of the traditional RTS/CTS. Our MAC protocol obtains this gain as early as 98.67 μs compared to IEEE802.11ac