Size composition and morphometry of incidentally captured sea turtles at Vizhinjam, south-west coast of India

The paper deals with the size composition of incidentally captured sea turtles in different fishing gear

Role of marine macrophytes as feed for green turtle Chelonia mydas

This paper deals with the food and feeding habits of the green turtle Chelonia mydas caught incidentally in different fishing gears during 1998 – 2000 at Tuticorin and Pamban areas. The seaweeds and seagrasses observed in their gut contents are Gelidiella acerosa, Hypnea valentiae, Solieria robusta, Sargassum spp, Pocockiella variegata, Dictyota dichotoma,Halimeda macroloba, Caulerpa fergusonii, Ulva reticulata and Chaetomorpha sp (seaweeds), Halophila ovalis, Thalassia hemprichii and Cymodocea serrulata (seagrasses). The marine macrophytes play the major role in the survival of adult animals since they are purely herbivores

Bioaccumulation of heavy metals in sea turtles from the west coast of India

Sea turtles are widely distributed in the tropical, sub-tropical and temperate waters. Recent reports have indicated that their populations are threatened by the problem of marine pollution . (Stroelli et al., 1998). Heavy metals are one of the major pollutants and have the nature to concentrate in the tissues of animals and their concentrations vary according to biological process such as age, sex, reproduction and migratio

Investigation on the Flexural Behaviour of Steel Cold Formed Built up Sections

For the past few decades, substantial progress has been made in material properties and construction methodology, which demands in need of development of stronger and lighter members in structural steel applications. The demands of increase in strength and reduction in weight of sections leads to development of structures which are slender and also stability plays a major role in design. The main goal of this study is to develop and investigate the performance of build-up steel I beam sections with corrugated webs. This study focuses on analysis of flexural behaviour and failure modes of plain web, rectangular, trapezoidal web and triangular web in beams by experimental investigations using three point load test and analytical investigations using ANSYS software. From experimental and analytical analysis, triangular corrugated web beam perform better compared to all section. The experimental results obtained are more similar to analytical results obtained by ANSYS software with only slight deviations. The failure modes in both experimental investigation and analytical analysis are similar

Effect of organic fortified zinc on growth and yield of green gram (Vigna radiata (L). Wilczek) in typic chromustert

Zinc is a crucial micronutrient for crop growth and enzymatic regulations. The present study was formulated to reveal the effect of organic fortified Zn composite on growth and yield parameters of green gram in Typic chromustert at Vellakulam village, Kalligudi block, Madurai district of Tamil Nadu. A total of eight treatments with three replications were designed to grow in Randomized Block Design (RBD). The treatments consisted of recommend dose fertilizers (25:50:25 Kg ha-1 N: P2O5: K2O) + various sources organics applied such as vermicompost (1:5), poultry manure (1:5), biochar (1:5), FYM (1:10) incubated with ZnSO4 @ 25 kg ha-1 and Tamil Nadu Agricultural University micronutrient mixture enriched with FYM (1:10) for 30 days. Among the treatments, application of RDF (25:50:25 Kg ha-1 N: P2O5: K2O) + soil application of ZnSO4 @ 25 kg ha-1 incubated with 125 kg Vermicompost (1:5) recorded maximum plant height (64 cm), leaf area index (LAI) (3.11), dry matter production (16.33 g plant-1), pods plant-1 (28.46), grains pod-1 (13.5), test weight (3.48 g), seed yield (950 kg ha-1) and haulm yield (1520 kg ha-1) followed by biochar and TNAU MNM shown on par results with each other. The lowest yield parameters were spotted in absolute control. A considerable increase in yield (25 %) was detected when the crop was supplemented with organically fortified Zinc than the commercial ZnSO4. The study concluded that the application of biofortified Zn will deliver higher growth and yield in green gram

Decomposing generalized measurements into continuous stochastic processes

One of the broadest concepts of measurement in quantum theory is the generalized measurement. Another paradigm of measurement--arising naturally in quantum optics, among other fields--is that of continuous-time measurements, which can be seen as the limit of a consecutive sequence of weak measurements. They are naturally described in terms of stochastic processes, or time-dependent random variables. We show that any generalized measurement can be decomposed as a sequence of weak measurements with a mathematical limit as a continuous stochastic process. We give an explicit construction for any generalized measurement, and prove that the resulting continuous evolution, in the long-time limit, collapses the state of the quantum system to one of the final states generated by the generalized measurement, being decomposed, with the correct probabilities. A prominent feature of the construction is the presence of a feedback mechanism--the instantaneous choice weak measurement at a given time depends on the outcomes of earlier measurements. For a generalized measurement with $n$ outcomes, this information is captured by a real $n$-vector on an $n$-simplex, which obeys a simple classical stochastic evolution.Comment: 9 pages, LaTeX, name changed, typos correcte

Patient centred diagnosis: sharing diagnostic decisions with patients in clinical practice.

Patient centred diagnosis is best practised through shared decision making; an iterative dialogue between doctor and patient, whichrespects a patient’s needs, values, preferences, and circumstances. Shared decision making for diagnostic situations differs fundamentally from that for treatment decisions. This has important implications when considering its practical application. The nature of dialogue should be tailored to the specific diagnostic decision; scenarios with higher stakes or uncertainty usually require more detailed conversation

Fourier PCA and Robust Tensor Decomposition

Fourier PCA is Principal Component Analysis of a matrix obtained from higher order derivatives of the logarithm of the Fourier transform of a distribution.We make this method algorithmic by developing a tensor decomposition method for a pair of tensors sharing the same vectors in rank-$1$ decompositions. Our main application is the first provably polynomial-time algorithm for underdetermined ICA, i.e., learning an $n \times m$ matrix $A$ from observations $y=Ax$ where $x$ is drawn from an unknown product distribution with arbitrary non-Gaussian components. The number of component distributions $m$ can be arbitrarily higher than the dimension $n$ and the columns of $A$ only need to satisfy a natural and efficiently verifiable nondegeneracy condition. As a second application, we give an alternative algorithm for learning mixtures of spherical Gaussians with linearly independent means. These results also hold in the presence of Gaussian noise.Comment: Extensively revised; details added; minor errors corrected; exposition improve