A Scale to Measure the Attitude of farmers towards Kisan Call Centre

Kisan call centre is one of the active services provided by the Government of India exploiting the area of ICT to support the farmers in their day to day farming activities. Since the service is free of cost and can be accessed from any part of the state from 6 AM to 10 PM, it is assumed to be utilized by majority of the farmers in India. Hence the present study was undertaken to develop a scale that would help to measure the attitude of farmers towards Kisan call centre.  Thirty statements expressing the attitude of farmers towards KCC to be included in the scale reflecting both favourable and unfavourable attitude towards KCC was collected through review of literature and discussion with experts in the field of extension and was carefully edited using the criteria suggested by Edwards (1957). S-value and Q- value for the statements were found and that statement whose S-value was spread throughout the continuum and had small Q- value was selected. Finally twenty three statements were selected to form Thurston and Chaves (1928) equal appearing scale to measure the attitude of farmers on KCC. The reliability and validity of the scale was also found in order to ensure the scales usability.

Attitude of Farmers towards Kisan Call Centres

The present study was conducted to measure the attitude of farmers in Kerala, India towards Kisan Call Centre (KCC). Kisan Call Centre provides free agricultural advisory services to every citizen involved in agriculture through a toll free number. One hundred and fifty farmers who have utilized the Kisan Call Centre service were selected from the database of KCC. The results showed that the respondents had moderately favourable attitude towards KCC followed by highly favourable attitude. The variables digital divide, temporal awareness on KCC, satisfaction towards KCC and utilization of KCC were found to have a positive correlation with the attitude of respondents towards KCC

Carbothermal Upgrading of the Awaso Bauxite Ore using Waste Pure Water Sachets as Reductant*

Waste Pure Water Sachets (PWS) are currently among the fastest growing solid wastes generated in Ghana. Government’s attempt at banning its production and usage has been thwarted by the realisation that such a measure will increase the unemployment rate since the sachet water business employs a significant proportion of people. Meanwhile, the country currently exports its bauxite raw, without any value addition. Gradual depletion of high grade bauxite (with high alumina content) and the emergence of low grade bauxite with high iron oxide content calls for novel and inexpensive ways to upgrade these low ores. This project investigates a simple way of generating carbonaceous materials from PWS and their subsequent utilisation as reductants in the carbothermal upgrading of the Ghana Awaso bauxite. Samples of PWS were heat-treated in the temperature range 130-180 °C and the resulting molten material was cooled to render it brittle. The brittle mass was then pulverised and characterised by XRD and SEM. Composite pellets of bauxite sample and pulverised PWS were then formed, oven dried, placed in a fireclay crucible and heated in a gas-fired furnace. The magnetic fraction after reduction was separated by a Low Intensity Magnet and weighed. XRD analyses of the pulverised PWS showed peaks identical to those of high density polyethylene (HDPE). It was further observed that after about 30 min of firing, a large portion of the sample could be attracted by the magnet, indicating the suitability of the waste polymer as an important carbonaceous material for bauxite upgrading. The use of PWS as reductant prevented the formation of hercynite (FeAl2O4).Keywords: Pure water sachets, Bauxite, Gas-fired furnace, Magnetic fraction, High density polyethylen

Intrahepatic Portal Vein Aneurysm with Concurrent Hepatocellular Carcinoma

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High Confidence Testing for Instrumentation System-on-Chip with Unknown-Good-Yield

SoCs are in general built with embedded IP cores, each of which is procured from different IP providers with no prior information on known-good-yield (KGY). In practice, partial testing is a practical choice for assuring the yield of the product under the stringent time-to-market requirements. Therefore, a proper sampling technique is a key to high confidence testing and cost effectiveness. Based on previous research, this paper proposes a novel statistical testing technique for increasingly hybrid integrated systems fabricated on a single silicon die with no a-priori empirical yield data. This problem is referred to as the unknown-good-yield (UKGY) problem. The proposed testing method, referred to as regressive testing (RegT) in this paper, exploits another way around by using parameters (referred to as assistant variables (AV)) that are employed to evaluate the yields of randomly sampled SoCs and thereby estimating the good yield by using a regression analysis method with regard to confidence intervals. Numerous simulations are conducted to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed RegT in comparison to characterization-based testing methods

Normal Form and Nekhoroshev stability for nearly-integrable Hamiltonian systems with unconditionally slow aperiodic time dependence

The aim of this paper is to extend the results of Giorgilli and Zehnder for aperiodic time dependent systems to a case of general nearly-integrable convex analytic Hamiltonians. The existence of a normal form and then a stability result are shown in the case of a slow aperiodic time dependence that, under some smallness conditions, is independent on the size of the perturbation.Comment: Corrected typo in the title and statement of Lemma 3.

GASP XVIII: Star formation quenching due to AGN feedback in the central region of a jellyfish galaxy

We report evidence for star formation quenching in the central 8.6 kpc region of the jellyfish galaxy JO201 which hosts an active galactic nucleus, while undergoing strong ram pressure stripping. The ultraviolet imaging data of the galaxy disk reveal a region with reduced flux around the center of the galaxy and a horse shoe shaped region with enhanced flux in the outer disk. The characterization of the ionization regions based on emission line diagnostic diagrams shows that the region of reduced flux seen in the ultraviolet is within the AGN-dominated area. The CO J$_{2-1}$ map of the galaxy disk reveals a cavity in the central region. The image of the galaxy disk at redder wavelengths (9050-9250 \overset{\lower.5em\circ}{\mathrm{A}}) reveals the presence of a stellar bar. The star formation rate map of the galaxy disk shows that the star formation suppression in the cavity occurred in the last few 10$^8$ yr. We present several lines of evidence supporting the scenario that suppression of star formation in the central region of the disk is most likely due to the feedback from the AGN. The observations reported here make JO201 a unique case of AGN feedback and environmental effects suppressing star formation in a spiral galaxy.Comment: Author's accepted manuscrip

Environmental-Based Characterization of SoC-Based Instrumentation Systems for Stratified Testing

This paper proposes a novel environmental-based method for evaluating the good yield rate (GYR) of systems-on-chip (SoC) during fabrication. Testing and yield evaluation at high confidence are two of the most critical issues for the success of SoC as a viable technology. The proposed method relies on different features of fabrication, which are quantified by the so-called Fabrication environmental parameters (EPs). EPs can be highly correlated to the yield, so they are analyzed using statistical methods to improve its accuracy and ultimately direct the test process to an efficient execution. The novel contributions of the proposed method are: 1) to establish an adequate theoretical foundation for understanding the fabrication process of SoCs together with an assurance of the yield at a high confidence level and 2) to ultimately provide a realistic approach to SoC testing with an accurate yield evaluation. Simulations are provided to demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the confidence interval of the estimated yield as compared with existing testing methodologies such as random testing (RT)