Credibility of Different Agricultural Information Sources Utilized by Farm Women of Uttarakhand

Credibility of agricultural information sources affects the adoption of new or improved agricultural practices by farmers. Credibility refers to perceived trustworthiness accorded to a source by its audience at any given time and situation. Therefore, Credible sources of agriculture information play major role in diffusion of agriculture innovations. This study was carried out in Nainital district of Uttarakhand state with specific objective to explore the relative credibility of information sources as accorded by the farm women of the region. A sample of 120 farm women was selected by PPS (Probability proportional to size) sampling method. The agriculture information sources were categorized into three broad heads namely personal localite, personal cosmopolite and mass media. It was found that majority (62.5%) of respondents had „medium‟ credibility towards agriculture information sources followed by 20 per cent having low credibility and only 17.5 per cent had high credibility to different agriculture information sources. It was further found that family members, KVK officials and newspaper were considered as the most credible sources of agricultural information among personal localite, personal cosmopolite and mass media sources. View Article DOI: 10.47856/ijaast.2021.v08i7.00

An Unsupervised Approach for Sentiment Analysis on Social Media Short Text Classification in Roman Urdu

During the last two decades, sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining, has become one of the most explored research areas in Natural Language Processing (NIP) and data mining. Sentiment analysis focuses on the sentiments or opinions of consumers expressed over social media or different web sites. Due to exposure on the Internet, sentiment analysis has attracted vast numbers of researchers over the globe. A large amount of research has been conducted in English, Chinese, and other languages used worldwide. However, Roman Urdu has been neglected despite being the third most used language for communication in the world, covering millions of users around the globe. Although some techniques have been proposed for sentiment analysis in Roman Urdu, these techniques are limited to a specific domain or developed incorrectly due to the unavailability of language resources available for Roman Urdu. Therefore, in this article, we are proposing an unsupervised approach for sentiment analysis in Roman Urdu. First, the proposed model normalizes the text to overcome spelling variations of different words. After normalizing text, we have used Roman Urdu and English opinion lexicons to correctly identify users\u27 opinions from the text. We have also incorporated negation terms and stemming to assign polarities to each extracted opinion. Furthermore, our model assigns a score to each sentence on the basis of the polarities of extracted opinions and classifies each sentence as positive, negative, or neutral. In order to verify our approach, we have conducted experiments on two publicly available datasets for Roman Urdu and compared our approach with the existing model. Results have demonstrated that our approach outperforms existing models for sentiment analysis tasks in Roman Urdu. Furthermore, our approach does not suffer from domain dependency

DEPRESSIVE SYMPTOMS AMONG PATIENTS WITH ACUTE EXACERBATIONS OF CHRONIC OBSTRUCTIVE PULMONARY DISEASE

Background; chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) leads to significant morbidity and poor quality of life among patients. This study was conducted to evaluate depression among patients with COPD as there is no such study done in our population. Objective: To determine the frequency of depression among the patients with COPD presenting at a tertiary care hospital. Material and methods; A total of 196 patients with COPD were enrolled from department of Medicine, Nishtar Hospital, Multan, Pakistan in this cross-sectional study. The purpose of the study was explained to each patient and informed consent was obtained. Patient’s basic data and demography was noted. All patients were interviewed for depression using HADS scale. Data were entered and analyzed using SPSS. Results; Of these 196 study cases, 124 (63.3 %) were male patients while 72 (36.7%) were female patients. Mean age of our study cases was 53.89 ± 10.01 years (with minimum age of our study cases was 32 years while maximum age was 70 years). Mean age of the male patients was noted to be 56.82 ± 9.74 years while that female patients was 48.83 ± 8.37 years (p=0.000). Our study results have indicated that majority of our study cases i.e. 116 (59.2 %) were aged more than 50 years. Of these 196 study cases, 94 (48 %) belonged to rural areas and 102 (52 %) belonged to urban areas. Monthly family income up to 35000 rupees was noted in 123 (62.8%) and 73 (37.2%) had monthly family income more than 35000 rupees. Diabetes was presented in 51 (26.0 %) of our study cases. Hypertension was present in 87 (44.4 %) of our study cases. History of smoking was noted in 66 (33.7%) of our study cases. Mean disease duration was 19.68 ± 8.36 months and 129 (65.8%) had duration of illness more than 1 year. Mean HADS score was 10.51 ± 2.41 and depression was present in 131 (66.8%) of our study cases. Conclusion; High frequency of depression was noted in our study among patients having chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Depression was significantly associated with gender, hypertension, smoking and prolonged disease duration. All clinicians treating such patients should check such patients for depression. Early diagnosis of depression followed by early treatment can help to improve clinical outcome and decrease disease related morbidity. Keywords; Frequency, depression, Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

Mobile Computing: Fundamentals

No Abstrac

Effect of seed treatment, soil application and foliar spray of some insecticides on seed quality of bell pepper (Capsicum annuum L.)

Studies were carried out to evaluate the efficacy of some insecticides as seed treatment, soil application and foliar sprays on seed quality characters of bell pepper (Capsicum annuumL.) cultivar Solan Bharpur during Kha-rif season 2013. The treatments comprised of seed application of imidacloprid (Gaucho 600FS) and thiamethox-am (Cruiser 70WS), soil application of neem cake@ 2 q/acre and carbofuran @ 6 kg/acre and foliar sprays of im-idacloprid (Confidor 200 SL), thiamethoxam (Actara 25 WS), indoxacarb14.5 SC @ 0.5ml/l, NSKE (neem seed ker-nel extract) @ 5%, Neem Raj 500ppm @ 2.5ml/l and control. The observations regarding quality parameters record-ed were germination percentage, seedling length, seeding dry weight, seed vigour index-I, seed vigour index-II and electrical conductivity. The results revealed that treatment combination viz., seed treatment and foliar spray with thiamethoxam (S2F2) recorded significantly higher germination percentage (96.33%), seed vigour index-I (934.10), seed vigour index-II (245.02) and minimum electrical conductivity (216.67dSm-1) at 0.05 level of significance. Therefore, seed treatment and foliar spray of thiamethoxam may be recommended for quality seed production of bell pepper

THE STRUCTURAL MODIFICATION CAUSES THE ENHANCEMENT OF ANALGESIC ACTIVITY OF 4-(4′ CHLORO –PHENYL)-4- HYDROXY PIPERIDINE

Objective- The outstanding  position of piperidine analogues  has proven them an important core in the structures of pharmaceutically active molecules, naturally occurring alkaloids, pharmaceuticals and as synthetic intermediates with interesting biological, physical and pharmacological behaviors. The  piperidine ring containing compound like pethidine having strong opiod analgesic activity, more potent than codein and controls the pain of smooth muscle spasm. Because of having similarity in structure the present study was aimed to estimate the analgesic activity of synthesized derivatives of 4-(4′-Chlorophenyl)-4-hydroxy piperidine.Method- The present study was conducted in animal model, mice by using Pethidine as standard drug. For which the Eddy's hot plate method was adopted and analgesia ( mean increase in latency)  was observed.Result- The result showed the more prominent response of substituted compound than the parent one 4-(4′-Chlorophenyl)-4-hydroxy piperidine†and it was studied that alteration in the molecule structure is accountable for  a better analgesic response.Conclusion- The studies proved the positive pharmacological responsiveness of the combination of 4-(4′-Chlorophenyl)-4-hydroxy piperidine with phencyl halides. These synthesized derivatives will establish as potent analgesics.KEY WORDS:AlkaloidsOpiodAnalgesicPiperidin

Combination therapy with ampicillin and azithromycin in an experimental pneumococcal pneumonia is bactericidal and effective in down regulating inflammation in mice

OBJECTIVES: Emergence of multidrug resistance among Streptococcus pneumoniae (SP), has limited the available options used to treat infections caused by this organism. The objective of this study was to compare the role of monotherapy and combination therapy with ampicillin (AMP) and azithromycin (AZM) in eradicating bacterial burden and down regulating lung inflammation in a murine experimental pneumococcal infection model. METHODS: Balb/C mice were infected with 10(6) CFU of SP. Treatments with intravenous ampicillin (200 mg/kg) and azithromycin (50 mg/kg) either alone or in combination was initiated 18 h post infection, animals were sacrificed from 0 – 6 h after initiation of treatment. AMP and AZM were quantified in serum by microbiological assay. Levels of TNF-α, IFN-γ IL-6, and IL-10 in serum and in lungs, along with myeloperoxidase, inflammatory cell count in broncho alveolar lavage fluid, COX-2 and histopathological changes in lungs were estimated. RESULTS: Combination therapy down regulated lung inflammation and accelerated bacterial clearance. This approach also significantly decreased TNF-α, IFN-γ, IL-6 and increased IL-10 level in serum and lungs along with decreased myeloperoxidase, pulmonary vascular permeability, inflammatory cell numbers and COX-2 levels in lungs. CONCLUSIONS: Combinatorial therapy resulted in comparable bactericidal activity against the multi-drug resistant isolate and may represent an alternative dosing strategy, which may help to alleviate problems with pneumococcal pneumonia

Wheat in the Era of Genomics and Transgenics

Wheat, as one of the most important cereal crops in the world and second major caloric source in the world after rice, is the major staple food in South Asia and many other countries of the world. Prior to onset of “Green Revolution,” South Asian countries were facing the threat of severe famine. Green Revolution wheat genotypes brought out these countries from the crisis they were facing and has helped them to sustain their productions for more than half a century. With the emergence of molecular biology and biotechnology, another window of opportunity is opened to sustain wheat yields by using modern techniques of genes identification and utilization. Through this chapter, we have tried to gather information that was generated for wheat improvement in last 3 decades. These afforest included the development of molecular markers, mapping of genes, sequencing of markers genes, and their utilization through marker-assisted selection. The other part recorded various efforts to genetically transform wheat for traits improvements and/or to study their molecular control

Biochar: A Sustainable Approach for Improving Soil Health and Environment

Current agriculture faces multiple challenges due to boom in food demand and environmental concerns. Biochar is increasingly being recognized by scientists and policy makers for its potential role in carbon sequestration, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, renewable energy, waste mitigation and as a soil amendment. The purpose of this review is to provide a balanced perspective on the agronomic and environmental impacts of biochar amendment to soil. Application of biochar to soil can play a significant role in the alteration of nutrients dynamics, soil contaminants as well as microbial functions. Therefore, strategic biochar application to soil may provide agronomic, environmental and economic benefits. Recent findings also supported that in order to enhance crop yield, improve soil quality and soil health, biochar has proven significant role as fertilizer and soil conditioner respectively