Disambiguation of Super Parts of Speech (or Supertags): Almost Parsing

In a lexicalized grammar formalism such as Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar (LTAG), each lexical item is associated with at least one elementary structure (supertag) that localizes syntactic and semantic dependencies. Thus a parser for a lexicalized grammar must search a large set of supertags to choose the right ones to combine for the parse of the sentence. We present techniques for disambiguating supertags using local information such as lexical preference and local lexical dependencies. The similarity between LTAG and Dependency grammars is exploited in the dependency model of supertag disambiguation. The performance results for various models of supertag disambiguation such as unigram, trigram and dependency-based models are presented.Comment: ps file. 8 page

Evaluation of Naked Barley Landraces for Agro-morphological Traits

Naked barley (Hordeum vulgare var. nudum L.) is a traditional, culturally important, climate-resilient winter cereal crop of Nepal. Evaluation of the naked barely genotypes for yield and disease is fundamental for their efficient utilization in plant breeding schemes and effective conservation programs. Therefore, to identify high yielding and yellow rust resistant landraces of naked barley for hilly and mountainous agro-ecosystem, twenty naked barley landraces collected from different locations of Nepal, were evaluated in randomized complete block design (RCBD) with three replications during winter season of 2016 and 2017 at Khumaltar, Lalitpur, Nepal. Combined analysis of variances revealed that NGRC04902 (3.46 t/ha), NGRC00886 (3.28 t/ha), NGRC02309 (3.21 t/ha) and NGRC06026 (3.10 t/ha) were the high yielding landraces and statistically at par with the released variety 'Solu Uwa' (3.15 t/ha). The landraces namely NGRC00837 (ACI Value: 1.86) was found resistant to yellow rust diseases. Landraces NGRC06034 (131.7 days) and NGRC02363 (130.8 days) were found early maturing and NGRC02306 (94.36 cm) was found dwarf landraces among tested genotypes. These landraces having higher yield and better resistance to yellow rust need to be deployed to farmers' field to diversify the varietal options and used in resistant breeding program to improve the productivity of naked barley for Nepalese farmers

Sub-Nanosecond Time of Flight on Commercial Wi-Fi Cards

Time-of-flight, i.e., the time incurred by a signal to travel from transmitter to receiver, is perhaps the most intuitive way to measure distances using wireless signals. It is used in major positioning systems such as GPS, RADAR, and SONAR. However, attempts at using time-of-flight for indoor localization have failed to deliver acceptable accuracy due to fundamental limitations in measuring time on Wi-Fi and other RF consumer technologies. While the research community has developed alternatives for RF-based indoor localization that do not require time-of-flight, those approaches have their own limitations that hamper their use in practice. In particular, many existing approaches need receivers with large antenna arrays while commercial Wi-Fi nodes have two or three antennas. Other systems require fingerprinting the environment to create signal maps. More fundamentally, none of these methods support indoor positioning between a pair of Wi-Fi devices without~third~party~support. In this paper, we present a set of algorithms that measure the time-of-flight to sub-nanosecond accuracy on commercial Wi-Fi cards. We implement these algorithms and demonstrate a system that achieves accurate device-to-device localization, i.e. enables a pair of Wi-Fi devices to locate each other without any support from the infrastructure, not even the location of the access points.Comment: 14 page

North-South Distribution of Solar Flares during Cycle 23

In this paper, we investigate the spatial distribution of solar flares in the northern and southern hemisphere of the Sun that occurred during the period 1996 to 2003. This period of investigation includes the ascending phase, the maximum and part of descending phase of solar cycle 23. It is revealed that the flare activity during this cycle is low compared to previous solar cycle, indicating the violation of Gnevyshev-Ohl rule. The distribution of flares with respect to heliographic latitudes shows a significant asymmetry between northern and southern hemisphere which is maximum during the minimum phase of the solar cycle. The present study indicates that the activity dominates the northern hemisphere in general during the rising phase of the cycle (1997-2000). The dominance of northern hemisphere is shifted towards the southern hemisphere after the solar maximum in 2000 and remained there in the successive years. Although the annual variations in the asymmetry time series during cycle 23 are quite different from cycle 22, they are comparable to cycle 21.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, 1 table; Accepted for the publication in the proceedings of international solar workshop held at ARIES, Nainital, India on "Transient Phenomena on the Sun and Interplanetary Medium" in a special issue of "Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy (JAA)

Biotechnology for Conservation and Utilization of Agricultural Plant Genetic Resources in Nepal

Agricultural biodiversity is the basis of human life and food security. Nepal with 577 cultivated species possesses huge diversity at varietal as well as landrace levels. In most agricultural crops the rapid genetic erosion due to several reasons is a common phenomenon. Thus, considering the importance of agricultural biodiversity declared by Convention on Biological Diversity for sustainable food production, National Agriculture Genetic Resources Center (NAGRC) has been established for conservation and sustainable utilization of agricultural biodiversity. This paper thus delineates the application of biotechnological tools adopted by NAGRC for effective and efficient conservation and use of agricultural plant genetic resources (APGRs). Among the adopted technologies, tissue bank using shoot tip culture of vegetatively propagating and recalcitrant crops eg potato, sugarcane, banana, sweet potato, etc are in function. Under the molecular marker technology, currently random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) and simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers have been used for developing DNA profiles, identifying duplicates in the collections, assessing genetic diversity and screening accessions against economic traits. DNA bank has also been created for storing DNA of indigenous crops and these DNA can be accessed for research and study. Genotypic database has been developed for chayote, finger millet, wheat and maize for identification and selection of the accessions.Journal of Nepal Agricultural Research Council Vol.3 2017: 49-5

Two-Layered Model of Blood Flow through Composite Stenosed Artery

In this paper a steady, axisymmetric flow, with a constricted tube has been studied. The artery has been represented by a two-layered model consisting of a core layer and a peripheral layer. It has been shown that the resistance to flow and wall shear stress increases as the peripheral layer viscosity increases. The results are compared graphically with those of previous investigators. It has been observed that the existence of peripheral layer is useful in representation of diseased arterial system

PONDER - A Real time software backend for pulsar and IPS observations at the Ooty Radio Telescope

This paper describes a new real-time versatile backend, the Pulsar Ooty Radio Telescope New Digital Efficient Receiver (PONDER), which has been designed to operate along with the legacy analog system of the Ooty Radio Telescope (ORT). PONDER makes use of the current state of the art computing hardware, a Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) and sufficiently large disk storage to support high time resolution real-time data of pulsar observations, obtained by coherent dedispersion over a bandpass of 16 MHz. Four different modes for pulsar observations are implemented in PONDER to provide standard reduced data products, such as time-stamped integrated profiles and dedispersed time series, allowing faster avenues to scientific results for a variety of pulsar studies. Additionally, PONDER also supports general modes of interplanetary scintillation (IPS) measurements and very long baseline interferometry data recording. The IPS mode yields a single polarisation correlated time series of solar wind scintillation over a bandwidth of about four times larger (16 MHz) than that of the legacy system as well as its fluctuation spectrum with high temporal and frequency resolutions. The key point is that all the above modes operate in real time. This paper presents the design aspects of PONDER and outlines the design methodology for future similar backends. It also explains the principal operations of PONDER, illustrates its capabilities for a variety of pulsar and IPS observations and demonstrates its usefulness for a variety of astrophysical studies using the high sensitivity of the ORT.Comment: 25 pages, 14 figures, Accepted by Experimental Astronom