Sweet Corn Water Productivity under Several Deficit Irrigation Regimes Applied during Vegetative Growth Stage using Treated Wastewater as Water Irrigation Source

Yield and Crop Water Productivity are crucial issues in sustainable agriculture, especially in high-demand resource crops such as sweet corn. This study was conducted to investigate agronomic responses such as plant growth, yield and soil parameters (EC and Nitrate accumulation) to several deficit irrigation treatments (100, 75, 50, 25 and 0% of ETm) applied during vegetative growth stage, rainfed treatment was also tested. The finding of this research indicates that under deficit irrigation during vegetative growth stage applying 75% of ETm lead to increasing of 19.4% in terms of fresh ear yield, 9.4% in terms of dry grain yield, 10.5% in terms of number of ears per plant, 11.5% for the 1000 grains weight and 19% in terms of crop water productivity compared with fully irrigated treatment. While those parameters in addition to root, shoot and plant height has been affected by deficit irrigation during vegetative growth stage when increasing water stress degree more than 50% of ETm.

The Research of Fuzzy Classification Rules Applied to CRM

In the era of great competition, understanding and satisfying customers- requirements are the critical tasks for a company to make a profits. Customer relationship management (CRM) thus becomes an important business issue at present. With the help of the data mining techniques, the manager can explore and analyze from a large quantity of data to discover meaningful patterns and rules. Among all methods, well-known association rule is most commonly seen. This paper is based on Apriori algorithm and uses genetic algorithms combining a data mining method to discover fuzzy classification rules. The mined results can be applied in CRM to help decision marker make correct business decisions for marketing strategies.

Benchmarking: Performance on ALPS and Formosa Clusters

This paper presents the benchmarking results and performance evaluation of differentclustersbuilt atthe National Center for High-Performance Computingin Taiwan. Performance of processor, memory subsystem andinterconnect is a critical factor in the overall performance of high performance computing platforms. The evaluation compares different system architecture and software platforms. Most supercomputer used HPL to benchmark their system performance, in accordance with the requirement of the TOP500 List. In this paper we consider system memory access factors that affect benchmark performance, such as processor and memory performance.We hope these works will provide useful information for future development and construct cluster system.

Consensus on Climate Change Adaptation among Government and Populace

Observations and long-term trends indicate that climate change impacts would be significant and affects Taiwan directly and severely. Taiwan engages not only in mitigation, but also in adaptation. However, there are cognitive gaps on adaptation between government and populace. Besides, a vision of zero-carbon and renewable energy 100% will be adopted in future. Therefore, the objectives of this article are to 1) hold a National Forum for knowing differences between the strategies of zero-carbon and renewable energy 100% and cognitions of general populace, and 2) plan a clear roadmap for the vision, strategy, and measures. In this forum, we set 5 group topics, 5 presumed themes, and issues mentioned review for concluding the critical issues. Finally, there are 4 strategies and 14 critical issues which correlate with the vision and strategy of government and the cognition of the general populace.

LQR Based PID Controller Design for 3-DOF Helicopter System

In this article, LQR based PID controller design for 3DOF helicopter system is investigated. The 3-DOF helicopter system is a benchmark laboratory model having strongly nonlinear characteristics and unstable dynamics which make the control of such system a challenging task. This article first presents the mathematical model of the 3DOF helicopter system and then illustrates the basic idea and technical formulation for controller design. The paper explains the simple approach for the approximation of PID design parameters from the LQR controller gain matrix. The simulation results show that the investigated controller has both static and dynamic performance, therefore the stability and the quick control effect can be obtained simultaneously for the 3DOF helicopter system.

Oral Cancer Screening Intentions of Residents in Eastern Taiwan

The incidence of oral cancer in Taiwan increased year by year. It replaced the nasopharyngeal as the top incurrence among head and neck cancers since 1994. Early examination and earlier identification for earlier treatment is the most effective medical treatment for these cancers. Although the government fully subsidized the expenses with tremendous promotion program for oral cancer screening, the citizen-s participation remained low. Purpose of this study is to understand the factors affecting the citizens- behavior intensions of taking an oral cancer screening. Based on the Theory of Planned Behavior, this study adopted four distinctive variables in explaining the captioned behavior intentions.700 questionnaires were dispatched with 500 valid responses or 71.4% returned by the citizens with an age 30 or above from the eastern counties of Taiwan. Test results has shown that attitude toward, subjective norms of, and perceived behavioral control over the oral cancer screening varied from some demographic factors to another. The study proofed that attitude toward, subjective norms of, and perceived behavioral control over the oral cancer screening had positive impacts on the corresponding behavior intention. The test concluded that the theory of planned behavior was appropriate as a theoretical framework in explaining the influencing factors of intentions of taking oral cancer screening. This study suggested the healthcare professional should provide high accessibility of screening services other than just delivering knowledge on oral cancer to promote the citizens- intentions of taking the captioned screening. This research also provided a practical implication to the healthcare professionals when formulating and implementing promotion instruments for lifting the screening rate of oral cancer.

A Novel Genetic Algorithm Designed for Hardware Implementation

A new genetic algorithm, termed the 'optimum individual monogenetic genetic algorithm' (OIMGA), is presented whose properties have been deliberately designed to be well suited to hardware implementation. Specific design criteria were to ensure fast access to the individuals in the population, to keep the required silicon area for hardware implementation to a minimum and to incorporate flexibility in the structure for the targeting of a range of applications. The first two criteria are met by retaining only the current optimum individual, thereby guaranteeing a small memory requirement that can easily be stored in fast on-chip memory. Also, OIMGA can be easily reconfigured to allow the investigation of problems that normally warrant either large GA populations or individuals many genes in length. Local convergence is achieved in OIMGA by retaining elite individuals, while population diversity is ensured by continually searching for the best individuals in fresh regions of the search space. The results given in this paper demonstrate that both the performance of OIMGA and its convergence time are superior to those of a range of existing hardware GA implementations.

Classifying of Maize Inbred Lines into Heterotic Groups using Diallel Analysis

The selection of parents and breeding strategies for the successful maize hybrid production will be facilitated by heterotic groupings of parental lines and determination of combining abilities of them. Fourteen maize inbred lines, used in maize breeding programs in Iran, were crossed in a diallel mating design. The 91 F1 hybrids and the 14 parental lines were studied during two years at four locations of Iran for investigation of combining ability of gentypes for grain yield and to determine heterotic patterns among germplasm sources, using both, the Griffing-s method and the biplot approach for diallel analysis. The graphical representation offered by biplot analysis allowed a rapid and effective overview of general combining ability (GCA) and specific combining ability (SCA) effects of the inbred lines, their performance in crosses, as well as grouping patterns of similar genotypes. GCA and SCA effects were significant for grain yield (GY). Based on significant positive GCA effects, the lines derived from LSC could be used as parent in crosses to increase GY. The maximum best- parent heterosis values and highest SCA effects resulted from crosses B73 × MO17 and A679 × MO17 for GY. The best heterotic patterns were LSC × RYD, which would be potentially useful in maize breeding programs to obtain high-yielding hybrids in the same climate of Iran.

A Scenario-Based Approach for the Air Traffic Flow Management Problem with Stochastic Capacities

In this paper, we investigate the strategic stochastic air traffic flow management problem which seeks to balance airspace capacity and demand under weather disruptions. The goal is to reduce the need for myopic tactical decisions that do not account for probabilistic knowledge about the NAS near-future states. We present and discuss a scenario-based modeling approach based on a time-space stochastic process to depict weather disruption occurrences in the NAS. A solution framework is also proposed along with a distributed implementation aimed at overcoming scalability problems. Issues related to this implementation are also discussed.

A Frame Work for the Development of a Suitable Method to Find Shoot Length at Maturity of Mustard Plant Using Soft Computing Model

The production of a plant can be measured in terms of seeds. The generation of seeds plays a critical role in our social and daily life. The fruit production which generates seeds, depends on the various parameters of the plant, such as shoot length, leaf number, root length, root number, etc When the plant is growing, some leaves may be lost and some new leaves may appear. It is very difficult to use the number of leaves of the tree to calculate the growth of the plant.. It is also cumbersome to measure the number of roots and length of growth of root in several time instances continuously after certain initial period of time, because roots grow deeper and deeper under ground in course of time. On the contrary, the shoot length of the tree grows in course of time which can be measured in different time instances. So the growth of the plant can be measured using the data of shoot length which are measured at different time instances after plantation. The environmental parameters like temperature, rain fall, humidity and pollution are also play some role in production of yield. The soil, crop and distance management are taken care to produce maximum amount of yields of plant. The data of the growth of shoot length of some mustard plant at the initial stage (7,14,21 & 28 days after plantation) is available from the statistical survey by a group of scientists under the supervision of Prof. Dilip De. In this paper, initial shoot length of Ken( one type of mustard plant) has been used as an initial data. The statistical models, the methods of fuzzy logic and neural network have been tested on this mustard plant and based on error analysis (calculation of average error) that model with minimum error has been selected and can be used for the assessment of shoot length at maturity. Finally, all these methods have been tested with other type of mustard plants and the particular soft computing model with the minimum error of all types has been selected for calculating the predicted data of growth of shoot length. The shoot length at the stage of maturity of all types of mustard plants has been calculated using the statistical method on the predicted data of shoot length.