Factors affecting the early production of processing tomatoes : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Applied Science in Plant Science at Massey University

A field experiment was conducted on the Karapoti brown sandy loam soil during the 1995-96 season on the Horticultural Field Plots at the Plant Growth Unit, Massey University. The objective of the research was to study the effect of black plastic mulch with fertigation and fabric row covers on crop growth, yield, quality and maturity of processing tomatoes (Lycopersicon esculentum Mill. cv. Cleo). The rowcover (RC) treatment advanced by 2 days both the date of first flowering and 50% flower opening compared with no RC. There were no RC effects on growth during the first 8 weeks in the field. RC reduced the yield and number of factory grade fruit at optimum harvest. Thus the treatment was detrimental. These results suggested that the use of floating covers during early summer in New Zealand will cause fruit setting to be reduced by high temperatures (>30°C). Bad weather delayed planting and resulted in relatively short use of the RC. If planting had taken place three weeks earlier, as planned, then RC may have improved earliness and not had a detrimental effect on yield. These results confirmed that the timing of rowcover application is critical for its successful use. The nutrient concentrations in leaves of mulched plants maintained higher levels of N P K during establishment. During the period of the fruit swelling (28-91 days after transplanting) the nutrient levels in the leaves fell markedly. The leaf analysis data in this experiment suggests that N and P had an important role in improving early growth and fruit set and as a result increased fruit number and yield. The results of this study showed that black plastic mulch plus fertigation provided for improvements in the early growth (relative growth rate) and development (number of flower clusters) and yield of total, red and factory grade fruit for the processing tomato cv Cleo. The optimum harvest time occurred 114 days after transplanting. Fertigation made a major contribution to the increase in yield. With cultivar Cleo the number and yield of factory grade and red fruit followed a normal distribution curve. This showed that advancing or delaying harvest by one week significantly reduced yield and it is suggested that the timing of harvest of processing tomatoes is more crucial than is commonly believed. A technique to predict the optimum harvest date for processing tomatoes should be developed

Blind Demixing for Low-Latency Communication

In the next generation wireless networks, lowlatency communication is critical to support emerging diversified applications, e.g., Tactile Internet and Virtual Reality. In this paper, a novel blind demixing approach is developed to reduce the channel signaling overhead, thereby supporting low-latency communication. Specifically, we develop a low-rank approach to recover the original information only based on a single observed vector without any channel estimation. Unfortunately, this problem turns out to be a highly intractable non-convex optimization problem due to the multiple non-convex rankone constraints. To address the unique challenges, the quotient manifold geometry of product of complex asymmetric rankone matrices is exploited by equivalently reformulating original complex asymmetric matrices to the Hermitian positive semidefinite matrices. We further generalize the geometric concepts of the complex product manifolds via element-wise extension of the geometric concepts of the individual manifolds. A scalable Riemannian trust-region algorithm is then developed to solve the blind demixing problem efficiently with fast convergence rates and low iteration cost. Numerical results will demonstrate the algorithmic advantages and admirable performance of the proposed algorithm compared with the state-of-art methods.Comment: 14 pages, accepted by IEEE Transaction on Wireless Communicatio

Current Chinese bryological literature (4)

According to our collections of literature, about 400 scientific papers dealing with Chinese bryophytes have been published in China and abroad during 1990’s. Among these, more than 50 % were published in different scientific journals in China and often written in Chinese with English abstract, which are not well known and assessable for foreign bryologists. Therefore, in addition to previous Chinese literature I-III (Cao et al. 1990, Li et Zhang 1993, 1994), we present the fourth part of Chinese literature herewith. It is hoped that this up-dated list will provide useful information for all people who are interested in bryological research