Gender Equality in Agricultural Education

Women play an important role in Agriculture, especially in developing countries. Promoting gender equality is crucial for agricultural development and food security. Agricultural extension services have a long tradition of working predominantly with men and only 15 percent of the world’s extension agents are women. World Bank has suggested“Increased women’s enrollment in agricultural courses” as one among the strategies when addressing gender issues in the education and training components of agricultural development projects. In this context the study was carried out to ascertain the representation of women and their academic achievement in agricultural education. The study revealed that almost equal representation was found for women in agricultural course and they were also provided better quality education in their schooling, in the form of English medium education and education in private schools. Recent trends for the past four years showed a higher percentage of enrollments of women in agricultural course than men. The growth rate was also higher for the female students. Women also showed a significantly higher percentage of academic achievement than men. These positive indicators provide sufficient signals for equality of women in agricultural course and have positive implications for development of the agricultural sector in future

Management Characteristics and Adoption Index of Indigenous Agricultural Practices by Rice Farmers

The study was conducted in Vellore district of Tamil Nadu, to assess the relationship between Management characteristics of farmers and their adoption of Indigenous Agricultural Practices (IAPs) in Rice cultivation. One hundred and twenty Rice growing farmers were purposively selected from five blocks of Vellore district for the study. Thirty eight IAPs for Rice cultivation as listed in Tamil Nadu Agricultural University Agritech portal were selected for the study and the adoption index regarding these technologies revealed that majority (65%) of the respondents had ‘medium’ adoption index. With regard to the management characteristics studied, majority of the respondents had medium level of management orientation (75.00%), coordination ability (70.80%), risk orientation (75.80%), self-confidence (69.20%) and self-reliability (56.70%). The study also revealed that therewas a positive and significant relationship with regard to self-confidence and self-reliance of the farmers with the extent of adoption of Indigenous Agricultural Practices. Risk orientation had a negative but significant relationship with extent of adoption. Training the farmers to improve their management skills could lead to better adoption of the indigenous practices

Understanding Learning Style Variations among Undergraduate Students

A study was conducted in Vellore district of Tamil Nadu state to understand the learning styles of students. The term learning style refers to the way or method or approach by which a student learns. The study explored the possible learning style variations among agricultural, horticultural, engineering and arts & science students and their association with academic achievement. One hundred and twelve students were randomly selected from the four streams and their learning styles were analyzed. In the agricultural and horticultural streams, a majority of the students were auditory learners. They were also found to be predominantly unimodal learners. Overall, it was found that majority of the students were visual learners followed by auditory and kinesthetic style. The highest percentage of kinesthetic learners was found among engineering students. Trimodal learners scored the highest mean percentage of marks. The influence of learning styles on the academic achievements of the students did not show a significant relationship

Compliant Materials for Drag Reduction of High-speed Submerged Bodies

This paper briefly discusses the possibility of employing the compliant materials on underwater bodies for the drag reduction. Recent studies in the area of hydrobionics all-over the world have drawn the attention of hydrodynamicists for using the compliant materials on underwater body surfaces, similar to that found in fast aquatic animals like dolphins, towards achieving drag reduction and increased speeds of underwater vehicles and weapons'. Some basic principles of hydrohionics in drag reduction have been presented with special emphasis on the control of turbulent boundary layer characteristics of flow over the compliant material surfaces and induce delay in transition. Various researchers have estimated that the use of such compliantmaterial surfaces can lead to an overall drag reductton of the order of 10-12 per cent over drag of the rigid surface. This is a considerable drag reduction and should arouse keen interest among the underwater weapon and vehicle designers as the next stage of technological advancement in underwater hydrodynamic technology

Lightweight PUF-Based Gate Replacement Technique to Reduce Leakage of Information through Power Profile Analysis

The major challenge faced by electronic device designers is to defend the system from attackers and malicious modules called Hardware Trojans and to deliver a secured design. Although there are many cryptographic preventive measures in place adversaries find different ways to attack the device. Differential Power Analysis (DPA) attack is a type of Side Channel Attacks, used by an attacker to analyze the power leakage in the circuit, through which the functionality of the circuit is extracted. To overcome this, a lightweight approach is proposed in this paper using, Wave Dynamic Differential Logic (WDDL) technique, without incurring any additional resource cost and power. The primary objective of WDDL is to make the power consumption constant of an entire circuit by restricting the leakage power. The alternate strategy used by an adversary is to leak the information through reverse engineering. The proposed work avoids this by using a bit sequencer and a modified butterfly PUF based randomizing architecture. A modified version of butterfly PUF is also proposed in this paper, and from various qualitative tests performed it is evident that this PUF can prevent information leakage. This work is validated on ISCAS 85, ISCAS 89 benchmark circuits and the results obtained indicate that the difference in leakage power is found to be very marginal

Audiologic monitoring and renal function monitoring for DR-TB patients under PMDT for six to nine months period in Tirunelveli Medical College Hospital DR-TB Unit

Audiologic monitoring and renal function monitoring for Drug Resistant patients under programmatic management of drug resistant tuberculosis reatment for six to nine months period in Tirunelveli Medical College Hospital DR-TB UNIT, from January 2014 to December 2014. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Total of 152 newly diagnosed DR-TB patients those registered in DR-TB centre , Tirunelveli medical college hospital from January 2014 to December 2014 were screened. INCLUSION CRITERIA: All newly diagnosed (n- 51) DR-TB patients with normal baseline audiometry and normal serum urea and creatinine levels were included in this study RESULTS: 1. In this prospective observational study, during the intensive phase of CATEGORY IV regimen 43.3% patients developed statistically significant OTOTOXICITY , 2% patients developed NEPHROTOXICITY and 2% of patients developed BOTH OTOTOXICITY AND NEPHROTOXICITY. 2. OTOTOXICITY- 63.63% patients developed bilateral hearing loss and 36.36% patients developed unilateral hearing loss. among the patients with ototoxicity 75% patients had mild hearing loss, and mostly during first three months period of the intensive phase. 3. In our study 64% patients with hearing loss are asymptomatic and 36% patients noticed symptoms associated with hearing loss. CONCLUSION: In our study 64 % of asymptomatic hearing loss cases were picked up by using pure tone audiometry. Early detection of the hearing loss among these patients shall improve adherence to the treatment

The effectiveness of antibiotics against a major uropathogen- Escherichia coli and its biofilm assay by phenotypic methods

Background: Urinary tract infection (UTI), an inflammatory disease occurs to a high multiplication of pathogenic microbes in the urinary system. Escherichia coli, a major uropathogen accounting for up to 80% UTI. Activity of antibiotics against E.coli is decreasing due to enzymatic, genetic and various other factors resulting in multidrug resistance. Biofilm is a great threat as it interferes antibiotic therapy, undergoes gene transformation, making the bacteria more virulent. Objectives of the study were to isolate the E. coli from the urine sample of symptomatic UTI patients, to study the effectiveness of antibiotics against E.coli by antibiotic susceptibility pattern, ESBL detection and to biofilm phenotype assay by four different methods.Methods: A total of 400 urine samples from symptomatic UTI patients, October 2015 to March 2016 and processed. E.coli was isolated and antibiotic susceptibility was done as per CLSI guidelines. Biofilm detection by a) Congo red agar (CRA), b) Modified Congo red agar (MCRA), c) Tube adherence assay, d) Microtitre plate method.Results: A total of 100 E. coli (69%) was obtained from 400 samples, 49% were ESBL producers and 84% shows multi drug resistant. Biofilm positive isolates shows 70% positivity by CRA, 91% by MCRA, 57% in tube adherence assay and 99% via microtitre plate method.Conclusions: Resistance to antibiotics ladder is increasing and it’s necessary to take actions to reduce its hindrance in the future. Advanced studies in biofilm will help to prevent the more virulence without any critical complications in therapy.