Producing more rice with less water from irrigated systems

Irrigation management / Water use efficiency / Crop production / Water requirements / Water balance / Rice / Water distribution / Irrigated farming / Productivity / On-farm research / Irrigation scheduling / Groundwater / Conjunctive use / Rehabilitation / Modernization / Farmer participation / Farming systems / Irrigation systems / Crop-based irrigation / Asia / Philippines / Sri Lanka / Bangladesh / China / Malaysia / USA

Effects of Position of Rainfed Rice Field in a Toposequence on Water Availability and Rice Yield in Central Java, Indonesia

The productivity of rainfed rice needs to be increased in order to support the Indonesian Food Security programs, especially rice. Rainfall is one of the main sources of the water availability on the rainfed rice field. This research was conducted from October 2000 to February 2001 at four sites in Central Java Province. The objectives of this research were to study thevariability of water availability that influenced by toposequen's position and to analyze the rice yields due to treatments on toposequence. This experiment was carried out in the farmers' field using “Group Balanced Block in Split-Split Plot Design” and Inceptisols soil order. Mainplots were the four positions in toposequence (top, upper middle, lower middle, and bottom), and the four villages were used as replication. The sub-plot wastreatments group and sub-sub-plot consists of group-1: farmer's practice and without weeding; group-2: farmer's practice without fertilizer and added recommended fertilizer. The research showed that rainfall affected the fluctuation of ground water table and standing water periods. The straw and unhulled rice/grain yields at the bottom position was the highest, and was significantly different from the top position of the toposequence, namely 7.1 and 5.6 t ha-1 for straw yield while 5.2 and 4.0 t ha-1 for grainyield. Without weeding, the straw and grain yields decreased by 1.0 t ha-1 (6.1 to 5.1 t ha-1) and 0.8 t ha-1 (4.6 to 3.8 t ha-1). While, without fertilization, the straw and grain yields were produced only 4.4 and 3.8 t ha-1. Straw and grain yields increased up to 7.0 and 5.1 t ha-1, respectively, when recommended fertilizers were applied

Exact inversion of a compound conical Radon transform and a novel nuclear imaging principle

International audienc

Impact of alternate wetting and drying irrigation on rice growth and resource-use efficiency

Crop-based irrigationRiceFertilizersNitrogenRainCrop yieldPercolationSeepagePaddy fieldsExperiments

A Multiple Choices Reading Comprehension Corpus for Vietnamese Language Education

Machine reading comprehension has been an interesting and challenging task in recent years, with the purpose of extracting useful information from texts. To attain the computer ability to understand the reading text and answer relevant information, we introduce ViMMRC 2.0 - an extension of the previous ViMMRC for the task of multiple-choice reading comprehension in Vietnamese Textbooks which contain the reading articles for students from Grade 1 to Grade 12. This dataset has 699 reading passages which are prose and poems, and 5,273 questions. The questions in the new dataset are not fixed with four options as in the previous version. Moreover, the difficulty of questions is increased, which challenges the models to find the correct choice. The computer must understand the whole context of the reading passage, the question, and the content of each choice to extract the right answers. Hence, we propose the multi-stage approach that combines the multi-step attention network (MAN) with the natural language inference (NLI) task to enhance the performance of the reading comprehension model. Then, we compare the proposed methodology with the baseline BERTology models on the new dataset and the ViMMRC 1.0. Our multi-stage models achieved 58.81% by Accuracy on the test set, which is 5.34% better than the highest BERTology models. From the results of the error analysis, we found the challenge of the reading comprehension models is understanding the implicit context in texts and linking them together in order to find the correct answers. Finally, we hope our new dataset will motivate further research in enhancing the language understanding ability of computers in the Vietnamese language

Bone marrow recovery by morphometry during induction chemotherapy for acute lymphoblastic leukemia in children

Bone marrow architecture is grossly distorted at the diagnosis of ALL and details of the morphological changes that accompany response to Induction chemotherapy have not been reported before. While marrow aspirates are widely used to assess initial response to ALL therapy and provide some indications, we have enumerated marrow components using morphometric analysis of trephine samples with the aim of achieving a greater understanding of changes in bone marrow niches. Morphometric analyses were carried out in the bone marrow trephine samples of 44 children with ALL, using a NanoZoomer HT digital scanner. Diagnostic samples were compared to those of 32 control patients with solid tumors but without marrow involvement. Samples from patients with ALL had significantly increased fibrosis and the area occupied by bony trabeculae was lower than in controls. Cellularity was higher in ALL samples due to leukemic infiltration while the percentage of normal elements such as megakaryocytes, adipocytes, osteoblasts and osteoclasts were all significantly lower. During the course of Induction therapy, there was a decrease in the cellularity of ALL samples at day 15 of therapy with a further decrease at the end of Induction and an increase in the area occupied by adipocytes and the width of sinusoids. Reticulin fibrosis decreased throughout Induction. Megakaryocytes increased, osteoblasts and osteoclasts remained unchanged. No correlation was found between clinical presentation, early response to treatment and morphological changes. Our results provide a morphological background to further studies of bone marrow stroma in ALL