Effect of High Temperature and Low Rainfall on Quantity and Quality of Sri Lanka Dwarf Green Female Flowers That Are Used for Controlled Hybridization in Coconut (Cocos nucifera L.)

Development of climate resilient hybrid coconut cultivars is an important strategy to increase the coconut yield in changing climate. To accomplish this, understanding the impacts of heat and drought stress (HTDS) on reproductive organs of coconut plays a vital role. Accordingly, this study was conducted to assess the impact of HTDS on the quantity and quality (weight and carbohydrate accumulation) of female flowers in Sri Lanka Green Dwarf (SLGD) palms that are used as female parent of hybrids CRIC65 and Kapruwana. The study mainly focused, HTDS during the four month period prior to inflorescence opening (0 stage; month of inflorescence opening, -1; 1st (embryo sac formation), -2; 2nd (meiosis) and -3; 3rd (ovule development) month prior to inflorescence opening) on quantity and quality of the female flowers. The experiment was conducted in Ambakelle and Pallama seed gardens of Coconut Research Institute of Sri Lanka from September 2013 to June 2015. The study revealed that water stress prevailed at -2 stage reduced female flower production by 33% - 45% compared to non- stressed flowers, irrespective of the heat and/or water stress prevailed in other development stages (p<0.05). Further, weight of the female flowers reduced by about 50% when they experienced continuous water stress during -3, -2 and -1 stages compared to non-stressed flowers. The water stress combined with heat stress at -3 stage, reduced starch content by 90% and total soluble sugars (TSS) by 33% compared to non stressed flowers. However, inflorescences experienced HTDS at 0 stage depleted starch by 65% whilst increased TSS by 26% compared to non stressed flowers. Carbohydrate content in female reproductive tissues at the receptive stage is important for growth of pollen tube after pollination. Fluctuation of the carbohydrates may impair the fertilization process. Therefore, knowledge on sensitivity of female flowers to stress is important to develop pollination strategies to minimize drought induced fruit set failures in hybrid seed production.Keywords: Coconut inflorescence, Flower carbohydrates, Heat, Water stres

One-step adaptive Markov random field for structured compressive sensing

Recently, Markov random fields (MRFs) have gained much success in sparse signal recovery. One of the challenges is to adaptively estimate the MRF parameters from a few compressed measurements in compressive sensing (CS). To address this problem, a recently developed method proposes to estimate the MRF parameters based on the point estimation of sparse signals. However, the point estimation cannot depict the statistical uncertainty of the latent sparse signal, which can result in inaccurate parameters estimation; thus, limiting the ultimate performance. In this study, we propose a one-step MRF based CS that estimates the MRF parameters from the given measurements through solving a maximum marginal likelihood (MML) problem. Since the marginal likelihood is obtained from averaging over the latent sparse signal population, it offers better generalization over all the latent sparse signals than the point estimation. To solve the MML problem effectively, we approximate the MRF distribution by the product of two simpler distributions, which enables to produce closed-form solutions for all unknown variables with low computational cost. Extensive experiments on a synthetic and three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in recovery accuracy, noise tolerance, and runtime.Suwichaya Suwanwimolkul, Lei Zhang, Damith C. Ranasinghe, Qinfeng Sh

Knowledge Management in Sri Lankan Indigenous Organizations: A Case Study on Mask Carving Industry

AbstractKnowledge management is recognized as a prerequisite for the survival and progression of a society. Mainstream research is too focused on studying knowledge management practices in private and public sector organizations. It signifies a significant gap in the literature, in relation to knowledge management research in indigenous organizations especially in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is a country rich in diversified indigenous organizations which satisfy the economic and societal needs of local people since ancient times. Knowledge management practices of indigenous organizations were shaped and reshaped by the changes of Sri Lankan society. The purpose of this paper is to uncover knowledge management practices in the indigenous mask carving industry and examine the urgent need to build and preserve the indigenous intellectual capital of Sri Lanka to participate effectively in the knowledge economy. Consequently, the paper specifically examines knowledge creation, knowledge codification, knowledge sharing and knowledge forgetting of a well-known mask carving generation in Sri Lanka. Case study approach was employed to understand knowledge management practices where observation, semi-structured interviews, and visual methods were used to gather the required data. Folklore and traditional ceremonial chanting were interpreted. The case study reveals that, the tacit knowledge is the predominant form of knowledge in indigenous organizations therefore the effort taken to codify knowledge was limited. It further reveals knowledge sharing was restricted within the industry, leading to knowledge forgetting, which is the key barrier for the survival of indigenous organizations in the present volatile and turbulent environment. Finally, the paper suggests the urgent requirement to build, store and preserve indigenous knowledge for the survival and progression of Sri Lanka, before important elements in indigenous knowledge is irretrievably lost.Keywords: Knowledge management, Indigenous organizations, Mask carving, Sri Lank

Knowledge Management in Sri Lankan Indigenous Organizations: A Case Study on Mask Carving Industry

AbstractKnowledge management is recognized as a prerequisite for the survival and progression of a society. Mainstream research is too focused on studying knowledge management practices in private and public sector organizations. It signifies a significant gap in the literature, in relation to knowledge management research in indigenous organizations especially in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is a country rich in diversified indigenous organizations which satisfy the economic and societal needs of local people since ancient times. Knowledge management practices of indigenous organizations were shaped and reshaped by the changes of Sri Lankan society. The purpose of this paper is to uncover knowledge management practices in the indigenous mask carving industry and examine the urgent need to build and preserve the indigenous intellectual capital of Sri Lanka to participate effectively in the knowledge economy. Consequently, the paper specifically examines knowledge creation, knowledge codification, knowledge sharing and knowledge forgetting of a well-known mask carving generation in Sri Lanka. Case study approach was employed to understand knowledge management practices where observation, semi-structured interviews, and visual methods were used to gather the required data. Folklore and traditional ceremonial chanting were interpreted. The case study reveals that, the tacit knowledge is the predominant form of knowledge in indigenous organizations therefore the effort taken to codify knowledge was limited. It further reveals knowledge sharing was restricted within the industry, leading to knowledge forgetting, which is the key barrier for the survival of indigenous organizations in the present volatile and turbulent environment. Finally, the paper suggests the urgent requirement to build, store and preserve indigenous knowledge for the survival and progression of Sri Lanka, before important elements in indigenous knowledge is irretrievably lost.Keywords: Knowledge management, Indigenous organizations, Mask carving, Sri Lank

Emerging physical unclonable functions with nanotechnology

Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are increasingly used for authentication and identification applications as well as the cryptographic key generation. An important feature of a PUF is the reliance on minute random variations in the fabricated hardware to derive a trusted random key. Currently, most PUF designs focus on exploiting process variations intrinsic to the CMOS technology. In recent years, progress in emerging nanoelectronic devices has demonstrated an increase in variation as a consequence of scaling down to the nanoregion. To date, emerging PUFs with nanotechnology have not been fully established, but they are expected to emerge. Initial research in this area aims to provide security primitives for emerging integrated circuits with nanotechnology. In this paper, we review emerging nanotechnology-based PUFs

Findings from three methods to identify falls in hospitals: Results from the Ambient Intelligent Geriatric Management system fall prevention trial

OnlinePublObjective: To (a) compare characteristics of patients who fall with those of patients who did not fall; and (b) characterise falls (time, injury severity and location) through three fall reporting methods (incident system reports, medical notes and clinician reports). Methods: A substudy design within a stepped-wedge clinical trial was used: 3239 trial participants were recruited from two inpatient Geriatric Evaluation and Management Units and one general medicine ward in two Australian states. To compare the characteristics of patients who had fallen with those who had not, descriptive tests were used. To characterise falls through three reporting methods, bivariate logistic regressions were used. Results: Patients who had fallen were more likely than patients who had not fallen to be cognitively impaired (51% vs. 29%, p<0.01), admitted with falls (38% vs. 28%, p=0.01) and have poor health outcomes such as prolonged length of stay (24 [16–34] vs. 12 [8–19] days [IQR], p<0.01) and less likely to be discharged directly to the community (62% vs. 47%, p<0.01). Most falls were captured from medical notes (93%), with clinician (71%) and incident reports (68%) missing 21%–25% of falls. The proportion of injurious falls identified through incident reports was higher than medical records or clinician reports (40% vs. 34% vs. 37%). Conclusions: This study reaffirms the need to improve reporting falls in incident systems and at clinical handover to the team leader. Research should continue to use more than one method of identifying falls, but include data from medical records. Many falls cause injury, resulting in poor health outcomes.R. Visvanathan, K. Lange, J. Selvam, J. Dollard, E. Boyle, K. Jones, K. Ingram, P. Shibu, A. Wilson, D. C. Ranasinghe, J. Karnon, K. D Hil

Effectiveness of the wearable sensor based ambient intelligent geriatric management system (AmbIGeM) in preventing falls in older people in hospitals

Background: The Ambient Intelligent Geriatric Management (AmbIGeM) system augments best practice and involves a novel wearable sensor (accelerometer and gyroscope) worn by patients where the data captured by the sensor are interpreted by algorithms to trigger alerts on clinician handheld mobile devices when risk movements are detected. Methods: A 3-cluster stepped-wedge pragmatic trial investigating the effect on the primary outcome of falls rate and secondary outcome of injurious fall and proportion of fallers. Three wards across 2 states were included. Patients aged ≥65 years were eligible. Patients requiring palliative care were excluded. The trial was registered with the Australia and New Zealand Clinical Trials registry, number 12617000981325. Results: A total of 4924 older patients were admitted to the study wards with 1076 excluded and 3240 (1995 control, 1245 intervention) enrolled. The median proportion of study duration with valid readings per patient was 49% ((interquartile range [IQR] 25%-67%)). There was no significant difference between intervention and control relating to the falls rate (adjusted rate ratio = 1.41, 95% confidence interval [0.85, 2.34]; p = .192), proportion of fallers (odds ratio = 1.54, 95% confidence interval [0.91, 2.61]; p = .105), and injurious falls rate (adjusted rate ratio = 0.90, 95% confidence interval [0.38, 2.14]; p = .807). In a post hoc analysis, falls and injurious falls rate were reduced in the Geriatric Evaluation and Management Unit wards when the intervention period was compared to the control period. Conclusions: The AmbIGeM system did not reduce the rate of falls, rate of injurious falls, or proportion of fallers. There remains a case for further exploration and refinement of this technology given the post hoc analysis findings with the Geriatric Evaluation and Management Unit wards.Renuka Visvanathan, Damith C Ranasinghe, Kylie Lange, Anne Wilson, Joanne Dollard, Eileen Boyle ... et al

ReaDmE: Read-rate based dynamic execution scheduling for intermittent RF-Powered devices

This paper presents a method for remotely and dynamically determining the execution schedule of long-running tasks on intermittently powered devices such as computational RFID. Our objective is to prevent brown-out events caused by sudden power-loss due to the intermittent nature of the powering channel. We formulate, validate and demonstrate that the readrate measured from an RFID reader (number of successful interrogations per second) can provide an adequate means of estimating the powering channel condition for passively powered CRFID devices. This method is attractive because it can be implemented without imposing an added burden on the device or requiring additional hardware. We further propose ReaDmE, a dynamic execution scheduling scheme to mitigate brownout events to support long-run execution of complex tasks, such as cryptographic algorithms, on CRFID. Experimental results demonstrate that the ReaDmE method can improve CRFID’s long-run execution success rate by 20% at the critical operational range or reduce time overhead by up to 23% compared to previous execution scheduling methods.Yang Su, Damith C. Ranasingh