Organic Amino Acids Chelates; Preparation, Spectroscopic Characterization and Applications as Foliar Fertilizers

Cu(II) complexes of amino acid hydrolyzate soya protein isolate have been prepared. In order to study the mode of coordination in the above chelates and their effect as foliar fertilizer, Mn(II), Co(II), Nil(II), Cu(II), Zn(II) and Cd(II) complexes of  L-mino acids have been prepared and characterized by elemental and spectral analyses,( IR, UV-VIS, mass spectra and ESR), electrical conductance, magnetic moments and thermal analyses (DTA and TGA). ESR spectra of copper (II) complexes show isotropic and anisotropic types d(x2-y2) with covalent bond character. The amino acids chelates were evaluated as foliar fertilizer by treating plants with micronutrient, amino acid solutions and varying concentrations of micronutrient amino acids chelats. It was found that spraying plant with 2.5% micronutrient amino acids chelats gives the best results regarding: plant height, stem diameter, leaves area, number of flowers, number of branches per plants and total yield per plant

Rotating Scheimpflug Imaging Indices in Different Grades of Keratoconus

Purpose. To evaluate accuracy of various Keratoconus (KC) screening indices, in relation to Topographic Keratoconus (TKC) grading. Setting. Al Watany Eye Hospital, Cairo, Egypt. Methods. Data of 103 normal (group 1) and 73 KC eyes (group 2), imaged by Pentacam (branded as Allegro Oculyzer), were analysed. Group 2 was divided into 2a: 14 eyes (TKC = 1, early KC), 2b: 25 eyes (TKC = 1 to 2 or 2, moderate KC), and 2c: 34 eyes (TKC = 2 to 3 up to 4, severe KC). Participants were followed up for six years to confirm diagnosis. Area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) was calculated for evaluated curvature, elevation, and pachymetry indices with various reference shapes at different diameters. Results. When comparing normal to KC eyes, ten indices had significantly higher AUROC. Only five of them had significantly higher AUROC in early KC compared to normal corneas: Pachymetry Progression Index- (PPI-) Maximum (Max), Ambrósio’s Relational Thickness- (ART-) Max, PPI-Max minus PPI-Minimum (Min), central corneal thickness (CCT), and diagonal decentration of thinnest point from the apex (AUROC = 0.690, 0.690, 0.687, 0.683, and 0.674, resp.). Conclusion. Generally, ten pachymetry and elevation-based indices had significantly higher AUROC. Five indices had statistically significant high AUROC when comparing early KC to normal corneas

Irrigation and drainage in the new millennium

Presented at the 2000 USCID international conference, Challenges facing irrigation and drainage in the new millennium on June 20-24 in Fort Collins, Colorado.Includes bibliographical references.Current global population growth rates require an increase in agricultural food production of about 40-50% over the next thirty to forty years, in order to maintain present levels of food intake. To meet the target, irrigated agriculture must play a vital role, in fact the FAO estimates that 60% of future gains will have to come from irrigation. The practice of controlling drainage involves the extension of on-farm water management to include drainage management. With the integration of irrigation and drainage management, the water balance can be managed to reduce excess water losses and increase irrigation efficiencies. Controlled drainage is relatively new and there are many theoretical and practical issues to be addressed. The technique involves maintaining high water table in the soil profile for extended periods of time, requiring careful management to ensure that crop growth is not affected by anaerobic conditions. A fieldwork programme has been investigated to test controlled drainage in the Nile Delta, where water resources are stretched to the limit. Water saving is essential in the next 20 years. Pressures from the fixed Nile water allocation, population growth, industry and other sectors and the horizontal expansion programme mean that this need is urgent. One crop season has been completed at a site in the Western Nile Delta using simple control devices in the subsurface drainage system. This paper discusses the potential benefits of controlled drainage to save water in agricultural areas such as the Nile Delta, and presents findings from the first crop season

Effectiveness of Green Roofs and Green Walls on Energy Consumption and Indoor Comfort in Arid Climates

Increased urbanization have many negative effects on human well-being, city infrastructure, electricity usage and the increase of indoor temperatures. A solution may be to retrofit existing buildings, with implementing a vegetated layer to roofs and walls, this may enhance building performance, reduce consumption and improve indoor comfort. Cities with tall buildings may be more adequate to implement a green-wall as it have more area to make impact. This paper examines the energy reduction advantages of adding greenery on buildings in the hot arid climate of Egypt by considering three typical types of residential buildings in the city of Cairo as a case study. Designbuilder software was selected to stimulate the buildings chosen in this research. The results shows that an extensive soil thickness of 15cm performs better in the arid climates. electricity consumption for the base case is 52 kWh/m2 annually when used a traditional external envelop and dropped to 43 kWh/m2 when a vegetated layer added to the whole building (roof & wall), annual electricity consumption reduced by 17% to 25% per annum when added a vegetated layer. In addition to enhancing the indoor thermal comfort by 3 PMV values and indoor air temperature by 5°C

Fast stable direct fitting and smoothness selection for Generalized Additive Models

Existing computationally efficient methods for penalized likelihood GAM fitting employ iterative smoothness selection on working linear models (or working mixed models). Such schemes fail to converge for a non-negligible proportion of models, with failure being particularly frequent in the presence of concurvity. If smoothness selection is performed by optimizing `whole model' criteria these problems disappear, but until now attempts to do this have employed finite difference based optimization schemes which are computationally inefficient, and can suffer from false convergence. This paper develops the first computationally efficient method for direct GAM smoothness selection. It is highly stable, but by careful structuring achieves a computational efficiency that leads, in simulations, to lower mean computation times than the schemes based on working-model smoothness selection. The method also offers a reliable way of fitting generalized additive mixed models

A novel optimized neutrosophic k-means using genetic algorithm for skin lesion detection in dermoscopy images

This paper implemented a new skin lesion detection method based on the genetic algorithm (GA) for optimizing the neutrosophic set (NS) operation to reduce the indeterminacy on the dermoscopy images. Then, k-means clustering is applied to segment the skin lesion regions

Splines and Wavelets on Geophysically Relevant Manifolds

Analysis on the unit sphere $\mathbb{S}^{2}$ found many applications in seismology, weather prediction, astrophysics, signal analysis, crystallography, computer vision, computerized tomography, neuroscience, and statistics. In the last two decades, the importance of these and other applications triggered the development of various tools such as splines and wavelet bases suitable for the unit spheres $\mathbb{S}^{2}$, $\>\>\mathbb{S}^{3}$ and the rotation group $SO(3)$. Present paper is a summary of some of results of the author and his collaborators on generalized (average) variational splines and localized frames (wavelets) on compact Riemannian manifolds. The results are illustrated by applications to Radon-type transforms on $\mathbb{S}^{d}$ and $SO(3)$.Comment: The final publication is available at http://www.springerlink.co

Polyharmonic approximation on the sphere

The purpose of this article is to provide new error estimates for a popular type of SBF approximation on the sphere: approximating by linear combinations of Green's functions of polyharmonic differential operators. We show that the $L_p$ approximation order for this kind of approximation is $\sigma$ for functions having $L_p$ smoothness $\sigma$ (for $\sigma$ up to the order of the underlying differential operator, just as in univariate spline theory). This is an improvement over previous error estimates, which penalized the approximation order when measuring error in $L_p$, p>2 and held only in a restrictive setting when measuring error in $L_p$, p<2.Comment: 16 pages; revised version; to appear in Constr. Appro

Probing magnetic fields with multi-frequency polarized synchrotron emission

We investigate the problem of probing the local spatial structure of the magnetic field of the interstellar medium using multi-frequency polarized maps of the synchrotron emission at radio wavelengths. We focus in this paper on the three-dimensional reconstruction of the largest scales of the magnetic field, relying on the internal depolarization (due to differential Faraday rotation) of the emitting medium as a function of electromagnetic frequency. We argue that multi-band spectroscopy in the radio wavelengths, developed in the context of high-redshift extragalactic HI lines, can be a very useful probe of the 3D magnetic field structure of our Galaxy when combined with a Maximum A Posteriori reconstruction technique. When starting from a fair approximation of the magnetic field, we are able to recover the true one by using a linearized version of the corresponding inverse problem. The spectral analysis of this problem allows us to specify the best sampling strategy in electromagnetic frequency and predicts a spatially anisotropic distribution of posterior errors. The reconstruction method is illustrated for reference fields extracted from realistic magneto-hydrodynamical simulations