Technical Efficiency and its Determinants in Tomato Production in Karnataka, India: Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) Approach

Low productivity in agriculture is mainly due to the inability of the farmers to exploit the available technologies fully, resulting in lower efficiencies of production. The present study has estimated the technical and scale efficiencies of tomato-producing farms in Karnataka, considering different production levels and has identified the determining factors of their technical efficiency. The study is based on the data collected from the major tomato-producing regions of Karnataka, viz. Kolar and Bangalore rural districts of Karnataka, under three-production situations, viz. small, medium and large farms. Data Envelopment analysis (DEA) and log linear regression models have been used for estimating the technical efficiency and its determining factors, respectively. The study has indicated that most of the farms irrespective of size of holding have shown technical inefficiency problems. The medium farmers have been observed with best measures of technical efficiency, which has been explained by factors such as the land and labour productivity and education. Though medium farmers have been found efficient, with higher yields, it is the small farmers who have emerged as price-efficient producers in terms of lower cost on production (Rs 1.72/kg compared to Rs 2.01 in medium farms and Rs 1.85 in large farms) and higher unit profit. Most of the farms have been observed to have potential to expand production and productivity, increasing technical efficiency as majority have been performing with increasing returns to scale.Agricultural and Food Policy,

Genetically Engineered T-Cells for Malignant Glioma: Overcoming the Barriers to Effective Immunotherapy.

Malignant gliomas carry a dismal prognosis. Conventional treatment using chemo- and radiotherapy has limited efficacy with adverse events. Therapy with genetically engineered T-cells, such as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cells, may represent a promising approach to improve patient outcomes owing to their potential ability to attack highly infiltrative tumors in a tumor-specific manner and possible persistence of the adaptive immune response. However, the unique anatomical features of the brain and susceptibility of this organ to irreversible tissue damage have made immunotherapy especially challenging in the setting of glioma. With safety concerns in mind, multiple teams have initiated clinical trials using CAR T-cells in glioma patients. The valuable lessons learnt from those trials highlight critical areas for further improvement: tackling the issues of the antigen presentation and T-cell homing in the brain, immunosuppression in the glioma microenvironment, antigen heterogeneity and off-tumor toxicity, and the adaptation of existing clinical therapies to reflect the intricacies of immune response in the brain. This review summarizes the up-to-date clinical outcomes of CAR T-cell clinical trials in glioma patients and examines the most pressing hurdles limiting the efficacy of these therapies. Furthermore, this review uses these hurdles as a framework upon which to evaluate cutting-edge pre-clinical strategies aiming to overcome those barriers

The finite temperature QCD using 2+1 flavors of domain wall fermions at N_t = 8

We study the region of the QCD phase transition using 2+1 flavors of domain wall fermions (DWF) and a $16^3 \times 8$ lattice volume with a fifth dimension of $L_s = 32$. The disconnected light quark chiral susceptibility, quark number susceptibility and the Polyakov loop suggest a chiral and deconfining crossover transition lying between 155 and 185 MeV for our choice of quark mass and lattice spacing. In this region the lattice scale deduced from the Sommer parameter $r_0$ is $a^{-1} \approx 1.3$ GeV, the pion mass is $\approx 300$ MeV and the kaon mass is approximately physical. The peak in the chiral susceptibility implies a pseudo critical temperature $T_c = 171(10)(17)$ MeV where the first error is associated with determining the peak location and the second with our unphysical light quark mass and non-zero lattice spacing. The effects of residual chiral symmetry breaking on the chiral condensate and disconnected chiral susceptibility are studied using several values of the valence $L_s$.Comment: 41 pages, 10 tables, 13 figure

Toward a unified theory of sparse dimensionality reduction in Euclidean space

Let $\Phi\in\mathbb{R}^{m\times n}$ be a sparse Johnson-Lindenstrauss transform [KN14] with $s$ non-zeroes per column. For a subset $T$ of the unit sphere, $\varepsilon\in(0,1/2)$ given, we study settings for $m,s$ required to ensure $$\mathop{\mathbb{E}}_\Phi \sup_{x\in T} \left|\|\Phi x\|_2^2 - 1 \right| < \varepsilon ,$$ i.e. so that $\Phi$ preserves the norm of every $x\in T$ simultaneously and multiplicatively up to $1+\varepsilon$. We introduce a new complexity parameter, which depends on the geometry of $T$, and show that it suffices to choose $s$ and $m$ such that this parameter is small. Our result is a sparse analog of Gordon's theorem, which was concerned with a dense $\Phi$ having i.i.d. Gaussian entries. We qualitatively unify several results related to the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma, subspace embeddings, and Fourier-based restricted isometries. Our work also implies new results in using the sparse Johnson-Lindenstrauss transform in numerical linear algebra, classical and model-based compressed sensing, manifold learning, and constrained least squares problems such as the Lasso

Night sky at the Indian Astronomical Observatory during 2000-2008

We present an analysis of the optical night sky brightness and extinction coefficient measurements in UBVRI at the Indian Astronomical Observatory (IAO), Hanle, during the period 2003-2008. They are obtained from an analysis of CCD images acquired at the 2 m Himalayan Chandra Telescope at IAO. Night sky brightness was estimated using 210 HFOSC images obtained on 47 nights and covering the declining phase of solar activity cycle-23. The zenith corrected values of the moonless night sky brightness in mag/square arcsecs are 22.14(U), 22.42(B), 21.28(V), 20.54(R) and 18.86(I) band. This shows that IAO is a dark site for optical observations. No clear dependency of sky brightness with solar activity is found. Extinction values at IAO are derived from an analysis of 1325 images over 58 nights. They are found to be 0.36 in U-band, 0.21 in B-band, 0.12 in V-band, 0.09 in R-band and 0.05 in I-band. On average, extinction during the summer months is slightly larger than that during the winter months. No clear evidence for a correlation between extinction in all bands and the average night time wind speed is found. Also presented here is the low resolution moonless optical night sky spectrum for IAO covering the wavelength range 3000-9300 \AA. Hanle region thus has the required characteristics of a good astronomical site in terms of night sky brightness and extinction, and could be a natural candidate site for any future large aperture Indian optical-infrared telescope(s).Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures, uses basi.cls, accepted for publication in Bulletin of the Astronomical Society of Indi

Correlation of serum lithium levels and thyroid function tests in subjects of bipolar affective disorder: a prospective hospital-based study

Background: Lithium is used in the prophylaxis of long-term therapy of bipolar affective disorder (BPAD) as a mood-stabilizing agent. Thyroid function abnormality is very commonly seen adverse effect, more common in females than males. This study aimed to correlate lithium levels and thyroid function abnormalities associated with it.Methods: Evaluation of medical records of 150 patients in Father Muller Medical College with BPAD, who were treated for 6 months with lithium, carried out from February, 12 2014 to July, 20 2014. Serum lithium levels done by ion selective electrode method in ilyte analyzer and thyroid function test (TFT) by electrochemiluminescence. Data are analyzed by Karl Pearson correlation coefficient.Results: Correlation of lithium levels and TFT in BPAD patients according to Karl Pearson correlation coefficient was negative with significant p&lt;0.002. Among 150 enrolled candidates, 52 (34.67%) were females and 98 (65.4%) were males, 4% (6) patients (3 males and 3 females) had thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) value &lt;0.27 with an average lithium value of 1.35 mEq/L, 6% (9) patients (5 males and 4 females) had TSH value &gt;4.2 with an average lithium levels of 0.44 mEq/L and 90% of the patients with an average lithium levels 0.66 mEq/L had no thyroid function abnormalities.Conclusions: As already known, Lithium is a drug of narrow therapeutic index and females are more prone for thyroid function abnormalities. Appropriate monitoring of serum lithium levels will aid in necessary dose adjustment and ensure proper utilization of drug

Equation of State for physical quark masses

We calculate the QCD equation of state for temperatures corresponding to the transition region with physical mass values for two degenerate light quark flavors and a strange quark using an improved staggered fermion action (p4-action) on lattices with temporal extent N_tau=8. We compare our results with previous calculations performed at twice larger values of the light quark masses as well as with results obtained from a resonance gas model calculation. We also discuss the deconfining and chiral aspects of the QCD transition in terms of renormalized Polyakov loop, strangeness fluctuations and subtracted chiral condensate. We show that compared to the calculations performed at twice larger value of the light quark mass the transition region shifts by about 5 MeV toward smaller temperaturesComment: 7 pages, LaTeX, 6 figures; minor corrections, typos corrected, references adde

Development of Core Collection using Geographic Information and Morphological Descriptors in Safflower (Carthamus tinctorius L.) Germplasm

Safflower (Carthamus tinctorius L.) ranks eighth among the major oilseeds crop grown worldwide. The leaves, flower, and seeds have medicinal and industrial significance. Its seed has the best quality of edible oil. The development of a core collection could facilitate easier access to safflower genetic resources for their use in crop-improvement programs and simplify the genebank management. The present study was initiated to develop a core subset of safflower based on 12 morphological descriptors and geographic information on 5522 safflower accessions. The accessions were stratified by country of origin, and data on 12 descriptors were used for clustering following Ward’s method. About 10% of the accessions were randomly selected from each of the 25 clusters to constitute a core subset of 570 accessions. Mean comparisons using t-test, frequency distribution using χ2-test, and Shannon-Weaver diversity index of 12 descriptors indicated that the genetic variation available for these traits in the entire collection has been preserved in the core subset. There was a fair degree of similarity in phenotypic correlation coefficients among traits in the entire collection and core subset, suggesting that this core subset has preserved most of the co-adapted gene complexes controlling these associations. This core subset, provides an opportunity to evaluate agronomic and seed quality traits and resistance to abiotic and biotic stresses to identify diverse germplasm with beneficial traits for enhancing the genetic potential of safflower

Mathematical Modelling of ductile erosion behaviour of impacted fly ash particles on steel components of coal fired boiler

In coal-fired power stations about 20% of the ash prod-uced in the boilers is deposited on the boiler walls, economisers, air-heaters and super-heater tubes. An abinitio, first principle based mathematical model emb-odying the mechanisms of erosion involving cutting, wear, plastic deformation wear and effect of temperature on erosion behaviour has been developed to predict erosion rates on the coal fired boiler components such as boiler tubes, economiser and air-preheater assembles at room & elevated temperature

Mathematical modelling of ductile erosion behaviour of impacted fly ash particles on steel components of a coal fired boiler

In coal-fired power stations about 20% of tie ash produced in the boilers is deposited on the boiler walls, economisers, air-heaters and super-heater tubes. An abin-itio, first principle based mathematical model embodying the mechanisms of erosion involving cutting, wear, plastic deformation wear and effect of temperature on erosion behaviour has been developed to predict erosion rates on the coal fired boiler components such as boiler tubes, economiser and air-preheater assemblies at room and elevated temperature