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Turmeric cultivation primarily thrives in India, with significant presence in Bangladesh, Thailand, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Philippines, and Malaysia. India leads globally in both area (0.19 Mha) and production (0.844 MT) of turmeric. Despite this, there's a recognized gap in research regarding the combined effects of mulching and drip fertigation on turmeric growth in Tamil Nadu conditions. Therefore, this study aims to assess how mulching and drip fertigation impact water usage, turmeric growth, productivity, and post-harvest soil health via field experiments. The treatments comprise of different mulching techniques (M1-25 μm Plastic Mulching, M2-50 μm Plastic Mulching, M3- Organic Mulching, M4-No Mulching) as the main plot, coupled with various irrigation regimes as the sub plot (S1-100% of pan evaporation, S2- 80% of pan evaporation, S3- 60% of pan evaporation), in a split plot design. Findings show that 50-μm Plastic Mulching (M2) notably enhances turmeric growth parameters, including plant height, biomass, leaf count, and yield attributes such as tillers and rhizomes, compared to no mulch. Significantly, when 80% of pan evaporation is utilized in drip irrigation, it showcases the most pronounced plant growth and yield characteristics, with plastic mulch at this level significantly improving water and nutrient use efficiency while increasing beneficial compounds like Curcumin and oleoresin. The highest fresh rhizome yield is observed with 50-μm plastic mulch and 80% pan evaporation (M2S2), displaying a 39.79% increase compared to the control. Additionally, the study notes effects on microbial populations and mulch degradation. Economically, M2S2 exhibits the highest profitability with a benefit-cost ratio of 3.23 compared to other treatments. Implementing these practices not only enhances yields but also conserves water (estimated at 9.15 mm3) while emphasizing the importance of drip irrigation, fertilizer application, and mulching in boosting turmeric productivity, optimizing resource efficiency, and ensuring economic and environmental sustainability.

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.

This paper presents the design details of an integrated 4x4 element dual feed dual circularly polarized microstrip antenna array in the S-band. The dual circular polarization is achieved by the use of quadrature hybrids. Power division for the dual input array is achieved through two 1x16 equal split equal phase corporate feed networks. The quadrature hybrids and corporate feeds for the proposed array are designed in multilayer printed circuit boards (PCB) in stripline configuration. This antenna can be used to transmit or receive both right-handed circularly polarized (RHCP) waves or left-handed circularly polarized (LHCP) waves simultaneously or one at a time by terminating the other port with 50Ω resistance. The proposed antenna has 700MHz of 10 dB impedance bandwidth (27%), 400MHz of 3dB axial ratio bandwidth and 300MHz of 3dB gain bandwidth centred at 2.5GHz with a peak gain of 15.5dB in both polarizations. It has a 3dB beam width of 26° and cross-polarization levels below 20dB in both the polarizations. Design and simulation of patch array, quadrature hybrids and 1x16 corporate feeds in multilayer configuration, PCB stack-ups, fabrication, integration and testing processes are discussed in detail. The effect of thermal protection system (TPS) of the re-entry vehicle on antenna performance parameters was studied and presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although several learning theories ranging from behaviourism to cognitive to humanism have been proposed to choose the appropriate effective teaching models, none can be applied across the broad to all learners in all situations, nevertheless some commonalities emerge. A combination of pedagogical and andragogical, "middle of the road" approach meets the need of a larger segment of the audience. Our experiences and many surveys confirmed that the theory of behaviourism may be well suitable to first and second year students and cognitive approach may be well fit to third and forth year students. Only for supervising final year project work, the theory of teachers and students work together, humanism may be adoptable. The survey was conducted among the students enrolled for engineering courses in Curtin University, Sarawak to assess the grade of importance on twelve basic aspects of knowledge, skill and planning expected from the teachers. This paper describes the analysis of the action survey results and summaries of the recommendations for the effective teaching. The survey concludes that each well defined lecture arranged in right sequences should be orally presented in a simple constructive language with the consistent flow speed optimum suitable to majority of the audience for better learning outcomes. Language proficiency and fluency are not the barriers for the successful teaching to multicultural class room in tertiary education. It concludes that "Teachers of student choice" are not born and they are trained by acquiring required relevant knowledge and sincere practice of delivering the lectures in an optimum suitable way to the audience for effective learning.

Aim: Diabetic nephropathy (DN) is one of the major life-threatening complications of diabetes and it leads to end-stage renal disease. Altered angiotension converting enzyme and nitric oxide synthase are probably the cause of initiation and the progression of diabetic nephropathy. The present study aims to investigate the effect of ACE ID and NOS3 VNTR gene polymorphisms on the progression of chronic kidney disease among diabetic nephropathy. Methods: 253 DN patients and 104 controls were genotyped for ACE ID and NOS3 VNTR polymorphisms by following PCR-RFLP method. The diabetic nephropathy cases were divided into two groups based on CKD stages: 138 DN cases were at early stage (CKD1 to CKD3) and 115 DN cases were at advanced stage (CKD4 and CKD5). Association χ2 and univariate analysis were performed. Results: A significant difference was found in genotype frequencies of ACE ID and NOS3 VNTR polymorphisms between the DN patients and the controls. On univariate analysis, the DD genotype of ACE gene was found to have a significant association with the advancement of CKD in DN (OR=0.37; 95 % CI=0.14–0.94; p=0.033). Conclusions: The results suggest the association of ACE ID and NOS3 VNTR polymorphism with diabetic nephropathy in South Indian population. Furthermore, the present study evidences the association between DD genotype of ACE gene and advancement of CKD progression in DN.