Multi-environment Screening of Timothy (Phleum pratense) Breeding Material for Better Forage Yield in Sweden.

Timothy (Phleum pratense) is one of the most widely used forage crops in hay and pasture grass mixtures in Nordic countries; it’s also used in areas where it is one of the top forage crops harvested high yield, especially in boreal climates. There hasn’t been any large-scale breeding of Timothy to develop varieties that are adapted for Swedish climate and standards, which is surprising given that Timothy is the main forage crop used in Sweden. This thesis is a part of a bigger project which aims for developing a “starter package” that offers a more efficient breeding method to commercial actors, which can be implemented together with traditional breeding for the development and improvement of new varieties of Timothy that enable sustainable farming. This study is aimed to evaluate eco-agronomic traits such as fresh weight (cut), dry matter (DM), and botanical development stage (botdev) among advanced breeding material of timothy and estimate the impact of genotype-by-environment interactions (GEI) by testing the material at three geographic locations. A set of 264 modern accessions developed by Lantmännen were grown at three sites (Röbäcksdalen (RBD), Lövsta (LVT), and Svalöv) in Sweden together with two check varieties (Switch and Tryggve) that are well-known commercial varieties. The field trial was conducted according to a modified block design. The results of an Anova indicated a significant difference in yield among the modern accessions. There was a significant difference between the length of growing degree days in RBD and LVT. The genetic variability analyses reveal the broad-sense heritability increase across the season from DM1 to DM3 and that the genetic gain was higher than environmental effects in LVT. However, the environmental effects were large for the traits DM1 and DM3 in RBD. The suggestion is that DM2 could be more efficiently bred among the modern accessions for the site RBD, while in LVT all three DM could be bred to increase the yield. A combination of PCA and GEI reveals a significant effect on accessions and the environment. The conclusions are based on a combination of analyses such as PCA, GEI and genetic variability analyses and indicates suitable parental lines as we demonstrate here. Furthermore, these findings can speed up the breeding program and understanding of the GEI of Timothy in Sweden. There is an imperative need for a comprehensive understanding of the GEI of Timothy for today and future challenges and opportunities, to comply with climate changes. Additionally, more harvesting years and locations will provide a better understanding of the GEI of Timothy, an experiment of this kind is currently underway at the Swedish University of Agriculture

Two-Hop Interference Channels: Impact of Linear Time-Varying Schemes

We consider the two-hop interference channel (IC) with constant real channel coefficients, which consists of two source-destination pairs, separated by two relays. We analyze the achievable degrees of freedom (DoF) of such network when relays are restricted to perform scalar amplify-forward (AF) operations, with possibly time-varying coefficients. We show that, somewhat surprisingly, by providing the flexibility of choosing time-varying AF coefficients at the relays, it is possible to achieve 4/3 sum-DoF. We also develop a novel outer bound that matches our achievability, hence characterizing the sum-DoF of two-hop interference channels with time-varying AF relaying strategies.Comment: To appear in Proc. of ISIT 2013 (proof of lemma added

Short Text Classification Using An Enhanced Term Weighting Scheme And Filter-Wrapper Feature Selection

Social networks and their usage in everyday life have caused an explosion in the amount of short electronic documents. Social networks, such as Twitter, are common mechanisms through which people can share information. The utilization of data that are available through social media for many applications is gradually increasing. Redundancy and noise in short texts are common problems in social media and in different applications that use short text. However, the shortness and high sparsity of short text lead to poor classification performance. Employing a powerful short-text classification method significantly affects many applications in terms of efficiency enhancement. This research aims to investigate and develop solutions for feature discrimination and selection in short texts classification. For feature discrimination, we introduce a term weighting approach namely, simple supervised weight (SW), which considers the special nature of short text in terms of term strength and distribution. To address the drawbacks of using existing feature selection with short text, this thesis proposes a filter-wrapper feature selection approach. In the first stage, we propose an adaptive filter-based feature selection method that is derived from the odd ratio method, used in reducing the dimensionality of feature space. In the second stage, grey wolf optimization (GWO) algorithm, a new heuristic search algorithm, uses the SVM accuracy as a fitness function to find the optimal subset feature

The Role of Leadership Theories in Information Technology Acceptance: Case Study at Al-Hikma Pharmaceutical Company

The leadership literature is voluminous and much of it is confusing and contradictory. In order to make our way through this ‘forest’, I will consider a number of theories to explaining what makes an effective leader in order to connect leadership and the acceptance of information technology. The key to achieving sustainable change success is to have excellence in leadership at all organization levels. So as a change leader you can make a great difference to the success of your team by your leadership. I suggest that a change leader could make a real difference to the effectiveness of his team by adopting john Adair model which is very useful model in project management context and any change happened in organization we could consider it as a project. This research aims at exploring how both individual and organizational factors that influence Information Technology acceptance by top managers, employees Staff at al-Hikma headquarter

Microbiological research in neonatal ICU (Sumy region children's clinical hospital)

Newborns with very low and extremely low body weight at birth (VLBW and ELBW) are the most complicated category of patients in a Department of resuscitation and intensive therapy of newborns (ICU). Objective: to determine of colonization by opportunistic microorganisms and fungi, as well as their sensitivity in newborns in ICU

Creating Safe and Vibrant Communities for All New Yorkers

Communities United for Police Reform (CPR) released its budget report, Creating Safe and Vibrant Communities for all New Yorkers, a community-driven rebuke of the mayor's proposed FY23 budget. Mayor Eric Adams' proposed budget has been heavily criticized and condemned by community members across the city for continuing regressive and failed policing patterns of the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations and further bloating the NYPD budget while crucial community services receive comparatively microscopic investments. According to CPR's budget report, the mayor is proposing the largest-ever NYPD budget -- $11.2 billion, with minuscule investments in community-led violence prevention and intervention solutions that actually work