Benefits of Improved Groundnut Technologies to Resource-poor Farmers: A Participatory Approach

Considering that non-adoption of improved groundnut technologies by the small and resource-poor farmers is due to non-availability of quality seeds, poor knowledge, inappropriateness of technologies, etc., in the current study, improved groundnut technologies have been implemented through participatory mode so as to generate awareness about improved technologies among them. The participatory approach could make the farmers to learn, adopt and spread new technologies. The economic indicators have shown that a net return of Rs 7104 per ha was realized by adopting improved varieties and integrated crop management (ICM) package during kharif season, and it is higher than the returns realized by growing local variety (AK-12-24) with local practice (Rs 2010/ha). The cost of production has been found to be Rs 11.04/kg and 13.98/kg among the improved practice and farmers’ practice, respectively. A similar trend of higher net returns (Rs 13820/ha) and lower cost of production (Rs 8.86 per/kg) has been observed with improved practice during the rabi season, compared to the lower net returns (Rs 6309/ha) and higher cost of production (Rs 11.34 per/kg) with farmers’ practice. The informal seed supply system implemented through seed bank operation in a participatory mode has increased the improved groundnut seed availability at the village level. The seed multiplication programme could increase the spread of improved varieties from 32 ha to 69 ha in the adopted villages and from 15.9 ha to 85 ha in the neighbouring villages within a period of three years. It will help increase productivity levels of crops and income of farmers. The informal seed supply system implemented through seed bank operation has been found very successful in the faster technology spread. Hence, this model may be replicated in other areas to provide improved seeds to small and marginal farmers. It will also help in achieving self-sufficiency in improved varietal needs at the village level.Agricultural and Food Policy,

Simulation-based verification of EM side-channel attack resilience of embedded cryptographic systems

Electromagnetic (EM) fields emanated due to switching currents in crypto-blocks can be an effective non-invasive channel for extracting secret keys. Accurate design-time simulation tools are needed to predict vulnerabilities and improve resilience of embedded systems to EM side-channel analysis attacks. Modeling such attacks is challenging, however, as it requires a multitude of expensive simulations across multiple circuit abstraction levels together with EM simulations. In this work, a simulation ow is developed to study the differential EM analysis (DEMA) attack on the Advanced Encryption System (AES) block cipher. The proposed ow enables design-time evaluation of realistic DEMA attacks for the first time. The major challenge is accurately computing signals received by a nearby probe at various positions above the chip surface for a large number of AES encryptions. This requires rapidly generating spatial distribution and transient EM radiation of on-chip current waveforms. Commercial CAD tools are used to generate space-time samples of these waveforms and a custom EM simulator to radiate them. The computations are sped up by focusing on information-leaking time windows, performing hybrid gate- and transistor-level simulations, radiating only the currents on top metallization layers, and generating traces for different encryptions in parallel. These methods reduce simulation time to a manageable ~ 20 hrs wall-clock time/attack allowing a previously impossible level of vulnerability analysis. The proposed ow also allows pinpointing critical regions on the chip most susceptible to EM attacks. We demonstrate that exploiting the spatial profile of circuit elements can reveal cryptographic keys with significantly fewer number of traces than DPA , guiding designers to the most critical areas of the layout. This enables targeted deployment of counter-measures to the highest information-leaking design componentsElectrical and Computer Engineerin

A heuristic for placement of limited range wavelength converters in all-optical networks

Wavelength routed optical networks have emerged as a technology that can effectively utilize the enormous bandwidth of the optical fiber. Wavelength converters play an important role in enhancing the fiber utilization and reducing the overall call blocking probability of the network. As the distortion of the optical signal increases with the increase in the range of wavelength conversion in optical wavelength converters, limited range wavelength conversion assumes importance. Placement of wavelength converters is a NP complete problem [K.C. Lee, V.O.K. Li, IEEE J. Lightwave Technol. 11 (1993) 962-970] in an arbitrary mesh network. In this paper, we investigate heuristics for placing limited range wavelength converters in arbitrary mesh wavelength routed optical networks. The objective is to achieve near optimal placement of limited range wavelength converters resulting in reduced blocking probabilities and low distortion of the optical signal. The proposed heuristic is to place limited range wavelength converters at the most congested nodes, nodes which lie on the long lightpaths and nodes where conversion of optical signals is significantly high. We observe that limited range converters at few nodes can provide almost the entire improvement in the blocking probability as the full range wavelength converters placed at all the nodes. Congestion control in the network is brought about by dynamically adjusting the weights of the channels in the link thereby balancing the load and reducing the average delay of the traffic in the entire network. Simulations have been carried out on a 12-node ring network, 14-node NSFNET, 19-node European Optical Network (EON), 28-node US long haul network, hypothetical 30-node INET network and the results agree with the analysis. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V, All rights reserved

Explicit evaluations of Ramanujan's remarkable product of theta-function.

On Page 259 of his second notebook [3], Ramanujan recorded many cubic modular equations of degree 2. In this paper we establish several cubic modular equations of degree 2 akin to those in Ramanujan’s work.As an application of our results, we also establish some new P − Q etafunction identities

Root initiation in cuttings and in vitro raised shoots of Pinus roxburghii

Rooting of in vitro produced buds and shoots is often the limiting step during micropropagation. Therefore, a better understanding of the various stages before and during root formation is needed. Reviewing the work done so far on Pines the present investigation was carried out to study the factors that affect in vitro rooting. Different parameters that influence rooting viz. donor age, phytohormones, and substrate were investigated. Shoots taken from field, it was found that the juvenility of the explant and position on the mother plant greatly affects the in vitro responses. In vitro raised shoots and hypocotyl cuttings of Pinus roxburghii showed best response over the other explants on ½ x DCR medium. Among the various auxins used in present investigation, NAA at lower concentrations found best for root initiation. Agar at 0.6% concentrations resulted in more healthy roots. Further elongation was achieved on ½ x DCR medium supplemented with lower concentrations of NAA. Present investigation was an attempt to establish an operative micropropagation protocol by improving the rooting of ‘hard to root’ Pinus roxburghii. In vitro rooting studies on Pinus roxburghii will be vital for enhanced multiplication and genetic improvement of this economically important forest tree species

Antecedents and Effect of IT Usage on Performance: A Research Framework and Empirical Study

Information Technology (IT) Usage is an important construct in Information Systems research. While the relationshipbetween IT Usage and Performance is well studied along with the antecedents of IT Usage, extant research has not yet fullyexplored an integrated model of IT Usage, its antecedents and impact on performance. In this paper, we propose an integratedtheoretical framework for such an effort. We detail our preliminary results for a section of the theoretical model todemonstrate the viability of the research model. We find that for our research context, the preliminary results align well withtheoretical predictions. We show strong statistical relationships between actual IT Usage and performance at the business unitlevel in both cross sectional and panel data analysis. We conclude by discussing the proposed data collection and analysisapproach for testing the integrated theoretical framework for the relationship between IT Usage, its antecedents and impacton performance

APPLICATION OF GIS AND STATISTICAL METHODS TO SELECT OPTIMUM MODEL FOR MALARIA SUSCEPTIBILITY ZONATION: A CASE STUDY

The representation and analysis of maps of malaria-incidence data is a basic tool in the analysis of regional variation in public health. An attempt has been made for Varanasi district, India to develop malaria susceptibility model using different statistical methods, by which malaria prone zones could be predicted using five classes of malaria susceptibility and comparison of statistical methods to select optimum model for malaria susceptibility zone and verification of the susceptibility zone by area under curve (AUC) though Remote Sensing data and GIS. Multiple linear regression, Information value and heuristic methods are applied for malaria disease occurrence. Using the causal factors and indicators, malaria susceptibility index (MSI) and malaria susceptibility zones (MSZ) are developed. Malaria density ratio (Qs) is used to calculate optimum model for malaria susceptibility index and malaria susceptibility zones. The verification method is performed by comparison of existing malaria data and malaria analysis results by area under curve (AUC). It is found that the information value method having Qs=3.96 has been selected as an optimum model for malaria susceptibility zonation in the study area, whereas Qs value for Heuristics method and Multiple linear regression method are 1.67 and 1.43 respectively. Verification results show that in the information value case, the area under curve (AUC) is 0.696 and the prediction accuracy is 69.60%. In the heuristic and multiple linear regression case, the AUC is 0.603 and 0.484 and the prediction accuracy is 60.30% and 48.40% respectively

CONCEPT OF AHARA (DIET) IN AYURVEDA: A CRITICAL REVIEW

Ahara is first among the three significant pillars of Ayurveda. It means that it is one of the fundamental principles ahead which gives health, happiness and harmony along with the nature. One should regularly take such substances which are conductive to the preservation of good health and are able of avoid the attacks of sickness. Such type of diet is called naturally healthy diet. Ayurveda is science of life. Main aim of Ayurveda is to maintain health of a person. Ahara plays importance role to achieve this target. In the modern times, the ways in which the food is prepared and presented have changed drastically. Because of the rapid swiftness of life style towards urbanization, one can have less access to fresh food. Today, the dependency on packaged and processed food has also increased exceptionally. It definitely has some destructive effect on both mental and physical well-being. Today Due to consumption of unwholesome diet society facing so many types of disease. Here the concept of Ahara according to Ayurveda is described.

A Supervised Classification Approach for Detecting Hate Speech in English Tweets

As social concerns about threats of hatred and harassment have grown on the internet, there has been a lot of attention paid to detecting hate speech. This research looks at how well SGD classifiers with hyper-parameter tuning perform at detecting hate speech in tweets. It describes the categorization of English tweets with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) classifiers. The categorization of text documents depends on their content, which is divided into groups based on predefined categories. The Term-Frequency (TF) and Inverse-Document Frequency (IDF) parameters are implemented in the proposed system. A Stochastic Gradient Descent method (SGD) is used to generate classifiers that learn independent features, and performance is assessed using Accuracy and F1-score

Some Identities for Ramanujan-Göllnitz-Gordon Continued Fraction

In this paper, we obtain certain P--Q eta--function identities, using which we establish identities providing modular relations between Ramanujan-Göllnitz-Gordon continued fraction H(q) and H(q^n) for n= 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 23, 25, 29 and 55