Contract Farming: Problems, Prospects and its Effect on Income and Employment

This farm-level study conducted in the Tumkur district of Karnataka state has reported the effect of contract farming on income and employment generation and has identified constraints in and prospects of contract farming. Both income and employment generation have been found higher, almost double, on contract than non-contract farms. The study has observed dominance of female labour on both types of farms. Delayed payment for crop produce, lack of credit for crop production, scarcity of water for irrigation, erratic power supply and difficulty in meeting quality requirements have been found to be the major constraints faced by contract farmers. The scarcity of water for irrigation, erratic power supply, lack of credit for crop production, and lower price for crop produce have been identified as major constraints of non-contract farmers. The major constraints expressed by the contracting agencies in expanding contract farming include violation of terms and conditions by farmers, lack of proper management by the company, frequent price fluctuations in international markets, and scarcity of transport vehicles during peak periods.Farm Management,

Post curing of Hansa-3 (VT- HNW) Components

This report contains the detads of post curing of Hansa-3 (VT- HNW) all composite airframe components provided byC-CADD, carried out using an in-house designed and fabricated large hot air oven (17mts x 2.0mts x 2.0mts). It details an optimum post cure cycle implemented, the temperature accuracy's, the various innovative approaches adapted to ensure the safety of the full scale components undergoing post cure in the oven. All the Hansa-3 (VT-HNW) airframe composite components post cured as per the standard optimum post cure cycle and the oven temperature monitored throughout around f 3degree C to ensure uniform post curing of components

Basis Pursuit Receiver Function

Receiver functions (RFs) are derived by deconvolution of the horizontal (radial or transverse) component of ground motion from the vertical component, which segregates the PS phases. Many methods have been proposed to employ deconvolution in frequency as well as in time domain. These methods vary in their approaches to impose regularization that addresses the stability problem. Here, we present application of a new time-domain deconvolution technique called basis pursuit deconvolution (BPD) that has recently been applied to seismic exploration data. Unlike conventional deconvolution methods, the BPD uses an L1 norm constraint on model reflectivity to impose sparsity. In addition, it uses an overcomplete wedge dictionary based on a dipole reflectivity series to define model constraints, which can achieve higher resolution than that obtained by the traditional methods. We demonstrate successful application of BPD based RF estimation from synthetic data for a crustal model with a near-surface thin layer of thickness 5, 7, 10, and 15 km. The BPD can resolve these thin layers better with much improved signal-to-noise ratio than the conventional methods. Finally, we demonstrate application of the BPD receiver function (BPRF) method to a field dataset from Kutch, India, where near-surface sedimentary layers are known to be present. The BPRFs are able to resolve reflections from these layers very well.Jackson Chair funds at the Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas, AustinCouncil of Scientific and Industrial Research twelfth five year plan project at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research National Geophysical Research Institute (CSIR-NGRI), HyderabadInstitute for Geophysic

Model checking Branching-Time Properties of Multi-Pushdown Systems is Hard

We address the model checking problem for shared memory concurrent programs modeled as multi-pushdown systems. We consider here boolean programs with a finite number of threads and recursive procedures. It is well-known that the model checking problem is undecidable for this class of programs. In this paper, we investigate the decidability and the complexity of this problem under the assumption of bounded context-switching defined by Qadeer and Rehof, and of phase-boundedness proposed by La Torre et al. On the model checking of such systems against temporal logics and in particular branching time logics such as the modal $\mu$-calculus or CTL has received little attention. It is known that parity games, which are closely related to the modal $\mu$-calculus, are decidable for the class of bounded-phase systems (and hence for bounded-context switching as well), but with non-elementary complexity (Seth). A natural question is whether this high complexity is inevitable and what are the ways to get around it. This paper addresses these questions and unfortunately, and somewhat surprisingly, it shows that branching model checking for MPDSs is inherently an hard problem with no easy solution. We show that parity games on MPDS under phase-bounding restriction is non-elementary. Our main result shows that model checking a $k$ context bounded MPDS against a simple fragment of CTL, consisting of formulas that whose temporal operators come from the set {\EF, \EX}, has a non-elementary lower bound