Fuzzy logic approach in prioritization of crop growing parameters in protected farms: a case in North East India

 Global food demand is rising exponentially as the population is increasing.  Protected farming is becoming increasingly popular among the farming communities for fast growing vine crops round the year.  Consideration of crop growing parameters while designing and maintaining a protected farm is very important for optimal crop growth and profit.  Many farmers does not consider all the crop growing parameters and does not know the importance of all factors in the optimal crop growth.  In this paper, an attempt has been made to prioritize 12 crops growing parameters using fuzzy approach.  12 crop growing parameters were selected from the literature and scored by four different evaluation methods viz., food consumer importance, expert’s importance, farmer importance and food dealer importance.  The results revealed that the descending order of relative importance of the 12 crop factors are water quality, light intensity, nutrient availability, crop cultivar, substrate media, daylight length, moisture availability, crop spacing, temperature, air freshness, air circulation and relative humidity respectively.  Priority for crop growing factors must be considered while designing and maintaining a protected farm for optimal crop growth and net return

Performance Evaluation of a Hand pump with Provision of a Sealed Secondary Water Sump

Nowadays, a large number of water lifting devices and pumps are available for lifting water or other liquids from lower elevation to higher elevation. However, none of these hand pumps use a secondary water sump or any other such kind of device which increases efficiency of commonly used hand pumps. Also, measurement of operating forces for the performance evaluation of hand pumps is often missing. In this study, a commonly used hand pump was fitted with a 54-liter capacity sealed secondary water sump. The secondary water sump is again linked with the shallow well water or aquifer water. It was estimated that the provision of secondary water sump fitted with a hand pump results in significant reduction in the input power. The performance on a hand pump when fitted with a secondary water sump found that there is a significant reduction in the input power; thus it requires lesser operating force.  The experiments also revealed that use of larger the capacity of secondary water sump requires lesser operating force of the pump. The output powers in both the cases viz. with and without a secondary water sump are found to be approximately same. The provision of secondary water sump fitting with a hand pump thereby provides more comfort in operating the hand pumps

Do quarkonia thermalize at the LHC?

We analyze the relative yields of different bottomonia and charmonia states produced in Pb-Pb, p-Pb and high multiplicity p-p collisions at LHC, within a semi-classical grand canonical ensemble approach. The underlying assumption is the early thermalization and subsequent freezeout of these heavy hadrons resulting in their chemical freezeout at a temperature of approximately $230$~MeV, significantly higher than that of light and strange hadrons. The systematic dependence of the freezeout temperature on the collision centrality is also investigated in details.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures. Some typos correcte

Comparing novelty of designs from biological-inspiration with those from brainstorming

This research aims to understand the significance of biological-analogies in fostering novelty by comparing biological-analogies with other design methods for idea generation. Among other design methods, brainstorming was chosen here as benchmark. Four studies were conducted to compare: (i) the levels of abstraction at which concepts were ideated using biological inspiration (represented using biocards) with that using traditional brainstorming; and (ii) the novelty of concepts produced by using these two design methods. Concepts produced in these studies were evaluated for levels of abstraction at which they were ideated, average novelty, and proportion of high-novelty concepts. Results suggest that concepts generated using biocards were ideated at higher abstraction levels than those using brainstorming, but neither were at the highest abstraction levels. The average novelty of concepts produced using biocards was found to be greater than that using brainstorming; however, no statistically significant difference was found in the proportion of high-novelty concepts. We suspect the lack of biological knowledge and cultural difference among the subjects involved in our studies as the two reasons behind the results. The results demonstrate that the design methods substantially influence the novelty of concepts generated, while indicating the need for better training in effective use of biological-analogies

Genetic Improvement of Rice for Multiple Stress Tolerance in Unfavorable Rainfed Ecology

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Dynamics of Hot QCD Matter -- Current Status and Developments

The discovery and characterization of hot and dense QCD matter, known as Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP), remains the most international collaborative effort and synergy between theorists and experimentalists in modern nuclear physics to date. The experimentalists around the world not only collect an unprecedented amount of data in heavy-ion collisions, at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in New York, USA, and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland but also analyze these data to unravel the mystery of this new phase of matter that filled a few microseconds old universe, just after the Big Bang. In the meantime, advancements in theoretical works and computing capability extend our wisdom about the hot-dense QCD matter and its dynamics through mathematical equations. The exchange of ideas between experimentalists and theoreticians is crucial for the progress of our knowledge. The motivation of this first conference named "HOT QCD Matter 2022" is to bring the community together to have a discourse on this topic. In this article, there are 36 sections discussing various topics in the field of relativistic heavy-ion collisions and related phenomena that cover a snapshot of the current experimental observations and theoretical progress. This article begins with the theoretical overview of relativistic spin-hydrodynamics in the presence of the external magnetic field, followed by the Lattice QCD results on heavy quarks in QGP, and finally, it ends with an overview of experiment results.Comment: Compilation of the contributions (148 pages) as presented in the `Hot QCD Matter 2022 conference', held from May 12 to 14, 2022, jointly organized by IIT Goa & Goa University, Goa, Indi

Suitable Substrate for Crop Growth under Protected Farms – An Assessment

With the advent of civilization, open field agriculture is facing some major challenges; most importantly decrease in per capita land availability. In this paper, an attempt has been made to review crop growing substrates for protected farms. Substrate selection is a critical factor for optimal production of high-quality vegetables. Rooting depth determines the volume of substrate from. Consideration of optimal crop growing substrate and irrigation method while designing and maintaining a protected farm is very important for optimal crop growth and profit. Most farmers do not consider all the crop growing parameters for the optimal crop growth. &nbsp

Economic of cubical and semi-spherical shape stacked protected farms for marginal farmers

As the populating is increasing, the average land holding capacity is shrinking. Larger machineries are uneconomical in small and marginal lands. An attempt has been made in this paper for review of gravity drip irrigation system in a 3-layered stacked protected farm with. Gravity drip irrigation is a low tech and cheap irrigation system to provide water judiciously in protected farms for growing vegetable under limited land availability. The system does not require any external power for operation. The approximate construction cost of a 3-layered stacked protected farm of 6m height on land 10m length and 10m width is $ 2700. The average crops yield from a three-layer sacks protected farm on 10m x 10m area for spinach, tomato, pepper, cucumber and potato are 0.35, 1.55, 1.35, 1 and 1.5 ton respectively

Assessing design creativity

Creativity is crucial for designing products and enabling innovation. Assessing creativity can help identify innovative designers and products, and support improvement of both. The literature variously defines creativity as a function of degree of novelty, usefulness, or both. Most methods for assessing creativity, however, focus only on assessing novelty of products. This research proposes a new method for assessing the creativity of products as a function of their novelty and usefulness. We develop individual methods for assessing novelty and usefulness of products. and then combine these into a method for assessing creativity of products. The proposed methods have been evaluated by benchmarking them, and other methods available from literature, against the collective, intuitive assessment of product creativity of experienced designers. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved