Technical Efficiency and its Determinants in Tomato Production in Karnataka, India: Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) Approach

Low productivity in agriculture is mainly due to the inability of the farmers to exploit the available technologies fully, resulting in lower efficiencies of production. The present study has estimated the technical and scale efficiencies of tomato-producing farms in Karnataka, considering different production levels and has identified the determining factors of their technical efficiency. The study is based on the data collected from the major tomato-producing regions of Karnataka, viz. Kolar and Bangalore rural districts of Karnataka, under three-production situations, viz. small, medium and large farms. Data Envelopment analysis (DEA) and log linear regression models have been used for estimating the technical efficiency and its determining factors, respectively. The study has indicated that most of the farms irrespective of size of holding have shown technical inefficiency problems. The medium farmers have been observed with best measures of technical efficiency, which has been explained by factors such as the land and labour productivity and education. Though medium farmers have been found efficient, with higher yields, it is the small farmers who have emerged as price-efficient producers in terms of lower cost on production (Rs 1.72/kg compared to Rs 2.01 in medium farms and Rs 1.85 in large farms) and higher unit profit. Most of the farms have been observed to have potential to expand production and productivity, increasing technical efficiency as majority have been performing with increasing returns to scale.Agricultural and Food Policy,

Marketing Losses and Their Impact on Marketing Margins: A Case Study of Banana in Karnataka

The explicit evaluation of the post-harvest losses at different stages of marketing and their impact on farmers’ net price, marketing costs, margins and efficiency have been presented. It has been found that the existing methods tend to overstate the farmers’ net price and marketing margins of intermediaries. In fact, the margin of the retailers’ after taking into account the physical loss during retailing has been found to be negative (loss), which otherwise, was positive (profit) in the conventional estimation. Similarly, the producers’ net share and wholesalers’ margins also decrease substantially. It has been shown that marketing efficiency is inversely proportional to the marketing losses. The co-operative marketing has been found to be a more efficient system in terms of both operations and price. Marketing cost has been identified as the major constraint in the wholesale marketing channel and bringing down the costs, particularly the commission charges as demonstrated in the co-operative channel, will help in reducing the price-spread and increasing the producers’ margin. The need for specialized transport vehicles for perishable commodities has been highlighted.Crop Production/Industries, Marketing,

SIMULATION OF MPA USING PROBE, EDGE, AND INSET FEED FOR 2.4GHZ AND 5GHZ

In this paper we have reported design, simulation and analysis of Microstrip Patch Antenna (MPA) with two different geometries. The resonant frequencies considered for the design are 2.4GHz and 5GHz which are the operating frequencies of Global Positioning System Antenna (GPSA) design for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). In this work, simulation is carried out with different feed techniques to identify the best possible feed. Also, we have evaluated the HFSS ADK for MPA and calculated the percentage error

Optimized Parameter of Wavelet Neural Network (WNN) using INGA

Genetic algorithm has been one of the most popular methods for many challenging optimization problems. It is a critical problem in which the evacuation time is an important issues. The continuous air traffic growth and limits of resources, there is a need for reducing the congestion of the airspace system. The main objective of this work is to automatically adapt the airspace configurations, according to the evolution of traffic Niche genetic algorithm(INGA) was used in reliability optimization of software system. And also the searching performance of the genetic algorithm was improved by the stochastic tournament model. The multi-module complex software system reliability allocation effectively. Genetic algorithm (GA) and FGA are compared though seven benchmark function. It can be applied to a wider range of problem including multi-level problem. The uniform schema crossover operator and the non-uniform mutation in the genetic algorithm

Local Invariants and Pairwise Entanglement in Symmetric Multi-qubit System

Pairwise entanglement properties of a symmetric multi-qubit system are analyzed through a complete set of two-qubit local invariants. Collective features of entanglement, such as spin squeezing, are expressed in terms of invariants and a classifcation scheme for pairwise entanglement is proposed. The invariant criteria given here are shown to be related to the recently proposed (Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 120502 (2005)) generalized spin squeezing inequalities for pairwise entanglement in symmetric multi-qubit states.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, REVTEX, Replaced with a published versio

Development of herbal drug loaded antimicrobial silk suture

Drug loaded antimicrobial silk suture have been developed for use in both wound closure and wound healing with an intention to prevent surgical site infections. The material has been analyzed for various suture properties such as tensile strength, elongation, knot strength, bending properties and diameter. The suture material is coated with chitosan (biopolymer) and incorporated with herbal drug. Cold maceration technique is used to extract Cynodon dactylon drug for the study. SEM reveals the uniform deposition of chitosan on to the surface of the suture material. The polymer and drug coated samples are subjected to FTIR analysis. To optimize the process parameter, response surface method is adopted using Box-Behnken experimental design. The drug loaded samples are also subjected to antimicrobial study (AATCC 100) against S.aureus and E.coli and found to have effective bacterial reduction percentage. Thus, the natural drug loaded suture material would be a better alternative for synthetic drug loaded suture which is found to have some demerits

Introduction

Everything that we see on this earth is an imitation, be it a human being, animal, or plant; each of them is a memory of something/someone who already existed. Memory studies is a multidisciplinary field of knowledge that engages in understanding the ability to use memory as a tool in remembering/forgetting the past. Memory studies as a branch of knowledge began its presence by forging concepts of cultural memory to demand special focus from scholars of anthropology, education, literature, history, philosophy, psychology, and sociology, among others. Discussing the way memory studies began growing, Roediger and Wertsch  write that, “Over the past few decades, collective memory has become a topic of renewed interest in the humanities and social sciences and is now a key part of emerging interdisciplinary activity in ‘‘memory studies’’ (Roediger & Wertsch, 2008). French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1925, 1941) contributed immensely to this field of knowledge and his significant work “Social Frameworks of Memory” in 1925 holds great importance. For a long time until Maurice Halbwachs published his notable work "On Collective Memory" (1925), in which he analysed that ownership of memory need not be an individual but the individuals as a collective unit, be it family, society or community and the memory is operated thus by a community. He distinguished between autobiographical memory – memory of those events we ourselves experience; historical memory – memory that reaches us only through historical records; history – as the remembered past which is no longer important to our lives; and collective memory – the active past that forms our identities. Also, Halbwachs characterised shared memories as effective markers of social differentiation.  “Collective memory is not history, though it is sometimes made from similar material. It is a collective phenomenon but only manifests itself in the actions and statements of individuals […] it often privileges the interests of the contemporary” (Kansteiner 2002)). Cultural memory conserves the heritage that involves an act of remembering

Cyber Crime Detection and Prevention Techniques on Cyber Cased Objects Using SVM and Smote

Conventional cybersecurity employs crime prevention mechanisms over distributed networks. This demands crime event management at the network level where Detection and Prevention of cybercrimes is a must. A new Framework IDSEM has been introduced in this paper to handle the contemporary heterogeneous objects in cloud environment. This may aid for deployment of analytical tools over the network. A supervised machine learning algorithm like SVM has been implemented to support IDSEM. A machine learning technique Like SMOTE has been implemented to handle imbalanced classification of the sample data. This approach addresses imbalanced datasets by oversampling the minority classes. This will help to solve Social Engineering Attacks (SEA) like Phishing and Vishing. Classification mechanisms like decision trees and probability functions are used in this context. The IDSEM framework could minimize traffic across the cloud network and detect cybercrimes maximally. When results were compared with existing approaches, the results were found to be good, leading to the development of a unique SMOTE algorithm

3-Ethyl-9-phenyl-2-tosyl-2,3,3a,4,9,9a-hexahydro-1H-pyrrolo[3,4-b]quinoline

In the mol­ecule of the title compound, C26H28N2O2S, the pyrrolidine ring adopts an envelope conformation and the tetra­hydro­pyridine ring is in a half-chair conformation; these two rings are trans-fused. The dihedral angle between the pyridine- and sulfonyl-bound benzene rings is 36.15 (5)°. In the crystalline state, the mol­ecules are linked into a two-dimensional network parallel to the ab plane by C—H⋯O and C—H⋯π inter­actions

7-Bromo-3-ethyl-9-phenyl-2-tosyl­pyrrolo[3,4-b]quinoline

In the title compound, C26H27BrN2O2S, the pyrrolidine ring adopts a twist conformation, while the tetra­hydro­pyridine ring is in a half-chair conformation. The two rings are trans-fused. The dihedral angle between the phenyl ring and the sulfonyl-bound benzene ring is 22.83 (7)°. N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds link the mol­ecules into a chain along the b axis, and the chains are cross-linked into a three-dimensional network by a C—H⋯π inter­action and a weak π-π inter­action between the sulfonyl-bound benzene rings; the centroid–centroid distance is 3.6957 (8) Å