Studies on the effectiveness of various insecticides and drying in controlling granary weevil (Sitophilus granarius L.) in stored wheat seed : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Master in Agricultural Science (Seed Technology) at Massey University, New Zealand

This study was designed to examine the effects of various insecticidal materials and of repeated seed drying during storage on the population dynamics and survival of Granary Wevil (Sitophilus granarious L.) in wheat. The study was conducted in three parts. The first experiment examined the immediate and longer term effectiveness of the contact insecticide malathion and the fumigant phosphine along with influence of repeated drying to safe moisture contents on granary weevil infestation. Wheat seed was stored for 165 days at 25 C and 80% R.H. Treatments were examined every 30 days to study the developrrent of Sitophilus granarius populations and associated damage to wheat seed and evaluation made of the effects of drying, malathion and phosphine on the established infestation and on seed quality. Granary weevils increased by about a factor of X 10 every 60 days and did extensive damage to chemically untreated seed. Repeated drying reduced the rate of increase but did not eliminate the insect population. Malathion dust added to infested seed severely checked insect development and when combined with drying destroyed the infestation completely. Malathion also displayed considerable residual effect and had no adverse effect on seed viability. Phosphine was found to be totally effective in eradicating an established population of granary weevils from seed without affecting seed quality. In a second experiment malathion was sprayed onto jute squares at 2.5% and at one half and one quarter of this rate. Treated squares were stored for 90 days at 20 C, ambient RH of 70 - 90% or 30 C, ambient RH of 60 - 80% and the residual toxicity of the deposit was assayed with live insects at intervals after treatment. Malathion was also applied at 2.5% concentration to the outside of grain filled sacks which were then placed individually into large plastic bags into which adult granary weevils were introduced at 7 day intervals. After 56 days storage, counts were made of live and dead insects inside the sacks to assess protective effect of the malathion treatment. On jute squares malathion was completely effective at all concentrations and at both storage temperatures (20 C and 30 C) immediately after application and also after 7 days. Thereafter, it lost its effectiveness slowly over the next 90 days storage. In whole sack treatment malathion was found to provide only immediate protection at both temperatures and was inadequate after only a few days. In the third experiment wheat seeds, uninfested and infested with Sitophilus granarius, were mixed with ground neem seed of each of two species of neem ( Azadirachta indica and Melia azaderach) at 1 g per 20 g wheat and were stored at 25 C and 80% R.H. Seeds were examined for live and dead insects and germination assessed after 90 days storage. Little or no direct mortality of adults was recorded but there was indirect evidence of suppression of egg laying particularly with Azadirachta indica. Neem seed powder did not affect the viability of the wheat seed. This study has clearly shown the short term residual effectiveness of malathion, the immediate eradicant action of phosphine and the poor performance of the natural insecticidal chemical in neem seed on granary weevil infestation in wheat. The results also show the maintenance of low seed moisture contents in wheat to be a practical method of reducing insect populations. The role of granary weevil in damaging seed was clearly seen by X-ray photography and by the extent of types of abnormal seedlings found in positional germination tests. In the absence of effective control Sitophilus granarius has the potential to devastate wheat seed quality in terms of both purity and germination in as little as 90 days

バングラデシュにおける製薬産業の急速な発展に関する研究

政策分析プログラム / Policy Analysis Program政策研究大学院大学 / National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies論文審査委員: 園部 哲史（主査）, 大山 達雄, Jonna P. Estudillo, 大塚 啓二郎, 岡田 羊祐（一橋大学

Learners' Problem in Phonetics with the Intelligibility at Segmental and Supra-segmental Level

Bengali, though not much discussed, is one of the most resourceful Indo-Aryan languages. Its forty-nine letters allow its speakers utmost flexibility to diphthongize and to form wide ranges of consonant cluster in accordance with the demand of spelling and meaning. Remarkably enough, Bengali has more sounds than needed to facilitate any English sounds without making any distortions to them. But, in fact, there are very many pronunciation varieties people are used to pronouncing Bengali words: most sounds they may bring into their English often can be variably  attributed to their own regional dialects rather than the standard CholitaBhasha . However, apart from the local dialects, Cholita Bhasha speakers are likely to make distortions in the production of certain English sounds, but incontestably not in too many. This paper looks into the similarities and dissimilarities between English and Bengali at segmental and supra-segmental level and attempts to pinpoint the influences behind these distortions to rectify learners' errors init

The Impact of Board Composition and Activity on Non-Performing Loans

This paper examines the impact of board composition and activity on bank non-performing loans (NPLs). The empirical evidence suggests that NPLs are negatively related to board independence, separation between the CEO and chairman roles, directors with financial expertise, and the frequency of committee meetings. Additionally, we find that, during the financial crisis period (2008–2009), a large board size and the presence of female directors may also help lower NPLs. The results support the hypothesis that shareholder-friendly bank boards and active boards are more effective monitors, and thus help lower bank’s NPLs.https://thekeep.eiu.edu/lib_awards_2020_docs/1002/thumbnail.jp

Removal Of Blocking Artifacts From JPEG-Compressed Images Using Neural Network

The goal of this research was to develop a neural network that will produce considerable improvement in the quality of JPEG compressed images, irrespective of compression level present in the images. In order to develop a computationally efficient algorithm for reducing blocky and Gibbs oscillation artifacts from JPEG compressed images, we integrated artificial intelligence to remove blocky and Gibbs oscillation artifacts. In this approach, alpha blend filter [7] was used to post process JPEG compressed images to reduce noise and artifacts without losing image details. Here alpha blending was controlled by a limit factor that considers the amount of compression present, and any local information derived from Prewitt filter application in the input JPEG image. The outcome of modified alpha blend was improved by a trained neural network and compared with various other published works [7][9][11][14][20][23][30][32][33][35][37] where authors used post compression filtering methods

Near-Optimal Fidelity in Quantum Circuits through Incorporating Efficient Real-time Error Based Heuristics in Compiler Mappings

To run a quantum program in the real device, the compiler maps the logical qubits to physical qubits. This is the most crucial step of compiling a quantum circuit. Because the fidelity of a quantum circuit depends heavily on this mapping process. However, this qubit mapping problem is NP-complete. Therefore, we should resort to heuristics to find high-fidelity mappings. In this paper, we focused on finding efficient heuristic techniques to incorporate real-time error feedback and device connectivity information in order to achieve high fidelity mapping of the quantum circuits. We performed extensive analysis and experimental study based on two baseline algorithms. We performed our experimentation on various combinations of different error rates and heuristic techniques. Consequently, we designed very elegant techniques to consider both all types of real-time error feedback and connectivity information. We showed that our best heuristic approach performs \textbf{1.62x} ( on average) better than one baseline and \textbf{1.934x} ( on average ) better than the other baseline on random benchmarks. Finally, we compared our best heuristic ( CAES ) with the state-of-the-art heuristic-based mapping algorithm on representative benchmarks. We found that CAES performed \textbf{1.7x} ( on average ) better than the state of the art in terms of success rate

Influence of Political Parties in Elections: Evidence from Nepal

This article measures the influence of political party variables on the electoral process in Nepal. In the findings, in general, the research found that a free and fair election in Nepal does not perform at par with their counterparts in the Western world. In Nepal, it is the confrontational political culture among the political parties which is challenging to ensure free and fair elections

PSYCHOMETRIC PROPERTIES OF THE BANGLA VERSION OF PSS-10: IS IT A SINGLE-FACTOR MEASURE OR NOT?

The Bangla version of the Perceived Stress Scale(PSS-B) is a popular and widely used measure in Bangladesh. Despite its popularity, it has never been validated among nonclinical samples in the country.The present study examined the psychometric properties of the PSS-B in a sample of 300 respondents. A two-factor structure was found in EFA performed on half of the sample (Sample 1, n = 150), explaining 53.41% of the total variance. The CFA performed on the second half of the sample (Sample 2, n = 150), showed that the two-factor model had acceptable fit. A one-factor and a bifactormodel were also tested. Good Cronbach’s alphas and significant test-retest reliability were observed in the scale. Concurrent validity of the scale was established through the correlation PSS-B with PSQ-B. Convergent and discriminant validities were established through inter-factor correlations as well as the scores of composite reliability, average variance extraction, average shared variance, and maximum shared variance. The results support the use of PSS-B with a two-factor structure as a reliable and valid measure to assess perceived stress of Bangladeshi people