Evaluating the Effectiveness of Alternative Extension Methods: Triple-Bag Storage of Cowpeas by Small-Scale Farmers in West Africa

This study examined two questions related to the adoption of triple-bag storage technology for farmers storing cowpeas in West Africa. First the effect of an extension program, focused on village demonstrations, on adoption was considered. Second, the effect of radio messages to augment this extension program was analyzed. The results indicate that adoption was positively affected by the extension program and radio messages do augment the effectiveness.Effective extension methods, cowpeas, hermetic storage, Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Synthesis of CoAl2O4 by double decomposition reaction between LiAlO2 and molten KCoCl3

Submicronic CoAl2O4 powders were prepared by double decomposition reaction between solid LiAlO2 and molten KCoCl3 at 500 ◦C for 24 h. The reaction mechanism involves the dissolution of LiAlO2 shifted by the precipitation of CoAl2O4 until complete transformation and the reaction leads to powders with a very homogeneous chemical composition. The powders obtained were mainly characterized by XRD, FTIR, ICP, X.EDS, electron microscopy and diffraction and diffuse reflexion. The blue pigments obtained exhibit a high thermic stability allowing their use for the colouring of ceramic tiles

Dynamical invariants and nonadiabatic geometric phases in open quantum systems

We introduce an operational framework to analyze non-adiabatic Abelian and non-Abelian, cyclic and non-cyclic, geometric phases in open quantum systems. In order to remove the adiabaticity condition, we generalize the theory of dynamical invariants to the context of open systems evolving under arbitrary convolutionless master equations. Geometric phases are then defined through the Jordan canonical form of the dynamical invariant associated with the super-operator that governs the master equation. As a by-product, we provide a sufficient condition for the robustness of the phase against a given decohering process. We illustrate our results by considering a two-level system in a Markovian interaction with the environment, where we show that the non-adiabatic geometric phase acquired by the system can be constructed in such a way that it is robust against both dephasing and spontaneous emission.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures. v2: minor corrections and subsection IV.D added. Published versio

Experimental approximation of the Jones polynomial with DQC1

We present experimental results approximating the Jones polynomial using 4 qubits in a liquid state nuclear magnetic resonance quantum information processor. This is the first experimental implementation of a complete problem for the deterministic quantum computation with one quantum bit model of quantum computation, which uses a single qubit accompanied by a register of completely random states. The Jones polynomial is a knot invariant that is important not only to knot theory, but also to statistical mechanics and quantum field theory. The implemented algorithm is a modification of the algorithm developed by Shor and Jordan suitable for implementation in NMR. These experimental results show that for the restricted case of knots whose braid representations have four strands and exactly three crossings, identifying distinct knots is possible 91% of the time.Comment: 5 figures. Version 2 changes: published version, minor errors corrected, slight changes to improve readabilit

Agile Effort Estimation: Have We Solved the Problem Yet? Insights from the Replication of the GPT2SP Study

Replication studies in Software Engineering are indispensable for ensuring the reliability, generalizability, and transparency of research findings. They contribute to the cumulative growth of knowledge in the field and promote a scientific approach that benefits both researchers and practitioners. In this article, we report our experience replicating a recently published work proposing a Transformer-based approach for Agile Story Point Estimation' dubbed GPT2SP. GPT2SP was proposed with the intent of addressing the three limitations of a previous Deep Learning-based approach dubbed Deep-SE, and the results reported in the original study set GPT2SP as the new state-of-the-art. However, when we used the GPT2SP source code made publicly available by the authors of the original study, we found a bug in the computation of the evaluation measure and the reuse of erroneous results from previous work, which had unintentionally introduced biases in the GPT2SP's performance evaluation. In this study, we report on the results we obtained after fixing the issues present in the original study, which reveal that their results were in fact unintentionally inflated due to these issues and that despite advancements, challenges remain in providing accurate effort estimations for agile software projects

Frequency up- and down-conversions in two-mode cavity quantum electrodynamics

In this letter we present a scheme for the implementation of frequency up- and down-conversion operations in two-mode cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED). This protocol for engineering bilinear two-mode interactions could enlarge perspectives for quantum information manipulation and also be employed for fundamental tests of quantum theory in cavity QED. As an application we show how to generate a two-mode squeezed state in cavity QED (the original entangled state of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen)