738 research outputs found
Supplemental material for Indian summer monsoon variability and vegetation changes in the core monsoon zone, India, during the Holocene: A multiproxy study
No full textSupplemental material, Supplemental_Material for Indian summer monsoon variability and vegetation changes in the core monsoon zone, India, during the Holocene: A multiproxy study by Kamlesh Kumar, Shailesh Agrawal, Anupam Sharma and Shilpa Pandey in The Holocene</p
Soil quality assessment across different stands in tropical moist deciduous forests of Nagaland, India
No full textTo analyze the relationship between the management of three forest stand plantations and soil quality in the Dimapur district of the Northeastern Himalayan region, India, three forest soil profiles, covered by different species stands, at three depths were tested for 13 physical and chemical variables. Only four of these variables (electric conductivity, bulk density exchangeable Mg and available P) were included in a minimum data set, after using a varimax rotation algorithm in a principal component analysis, and subsequently used to calculate a soil quality index (SQI). Results showed higher SQIs in the surface layers (0-20cm depth) than in the deeper ones. Average weighed SQI varied significantly (P<0.05) through the three considered forest sites, with the lowest value at site FS3. These findings reveal that the approach used here is suitable for preliminary screening of the impact of a forestry species on soil, to aid in species selection and improve soil health for afforestation and reforestation projects
Directive speech acts in the New Testament
No full textDanuta Pytel-Pandey, WrocławThis article discusses the directive speech acts in the New Testament. The
author presents examples of such acts from the New Testament Scriptures, and
then carries out their pragmalinguistic [email protected]
Macrolepiota procera (Scop.) Singer (Agaricomycetes) – a new generic record of edible mushroom for Nagaland, Northeast India
No full textKumar R, Pandey S, Rishi RR, Giri K. 2017. Macrolepiota procera (Scop.) Singer (Agaricomycetes) - a new generic record of edible mushroom for Nagaland, Northeast India. Asian J Agric 1: 6-8. In August 2013, an interesting mushroom was collected from the Puliebzie forest range in Kohima District of Nagaland state of India. The mushroom was identified as Macrolepiota procera (Scop.) Singer based on the macroscopic and microscopic characters.</jats:p
Similarities between 2D and 3D convection for large Prandtl number
No full textUsing direct numerical simulations of Rayleigh-B\'enard convection (RBC), we perform a comparative study of the spectra and fluxes of energy and entropy for large and infinite Prandtl numbers in two (2D) and three (3D) dimensions. We observe close similarities between the 2D and 3D RBC, in particular the kinetic energy spectrum , and the entropy spectrum exhibits a dual branch with a dominant spectrum. We showed that the dominant Fourier modes in the 2D and 3D flows are very close
Evaluation and analysis of impact of subsidies on small scale renewable energy technologies dissemination: a case study of Nepal
No full textThe report has analysed the status of rural electrification using renewable energy technologies (RETs) and the current subsidy delivery modality of RETs in Nepal. As the Government of Nepal is subsidizing small scale renewable energy projects, it is important to evaluate and analyse the programme to make sure that a programme is running in an effective and efficient way while reaching the target group.
During the course of the research, primary information collected from the field has been compiled using appropriate tools/software (such as MS Office) and analyzed. Different sets of questionnaires were prepared, targeting different personnel ranging from the users’ level to the government policy level. The field survey methods include field observations of RETs installations and operations along with interviews with selected users on a random sampling basis to identify barriers to subsidy delivery and possible measures to overcome these barriers; to determine user satisfaction level and time period for subsidy delivery mechanisms.
The report started with the country background information and the rationale behind the study. This is followed by the literature review and information on the current status of small scale RETs in the country. Next it deals with the organizational structure and current subsidy delivery modality of RETs in the country. The evaluation of the effectiveness of the subsidy with the current subsidy delivery modality has been analyzed based on six parameters; Targets and Achievements, Impact of RETs, Subsidy Delivery System Efficiency, Transparency, Sustainability and Effectiveness.
The research shows that the subsidized government program has been successful in achieving its goal to provide basic energy services in rural areas through RETs in terms of its quantitative target. Although the subsidized program is successful in electrifying the rural communities via RETs, the poorest of the poor families are still excluded from the subsidy. The program seems to benefit more the rich and upper middle class families rather than the poor families for which the subsidy was intended. The high capital cost and long subsidy delivery process are the main important reasons for this failure. The author has proposed a new modality which might overcome the time barriers and bureaucratic process in the subsidy delivery mechanism and will decrease the lead time. This will in turn help to reduce the operational cost of the private companies and will encourage more players to enter the market, increase competition and result in lower system costs.
After identifying gaps in the current subsidy delivery modality, the project report ends with the recommendation of a new modality improving the current modality and filling the gaps identified. As this study has some limitations, as described in chapter one, the scope of further works has been listed at the end
Vernacular construction and sustainability-in response to post-earthquake reconstruction in Nepal
No full textThe primary objective of this thesis was to promote the efficiency and sustainability of the traditional constructional practises in the hilly region of Nepal. Natural construction materials that are abundantly available were prioritised for economic and sustainable construction practices. Possible interventions in locally available materials and technologies were presented in this paper to provide an ultimate housing solution.
The models of houses proposed by the government of Nepal were presented, and a life cycle assessment of the buildings were calculated using one click LCA. Vernacular construction practices using regional building material incorporated with earthquake resistant construction techniques were studied for sustainable, economical and speedy reconstruction of post-earthquake dwellings.
This thesis can be used as a starting guide for the people affected by a natural catastrophe, such as an earthquake, to construct affordable and sustainable house with good building performance, and resilient to earthquake, so that possible damage in the future can be minimized.
This paper helps as an example for the people to construct affordable houses who have lost their homes. Furthermore, the thesis can be used if there is another catastrophe
Learning to Rank and Order Answers to Definition Questions
No full textThe task of ordering a set of ranked result returned by an online search engine or an offline information retrieval engine is termed as reranking. It is called reranking for the reason that the candidate answer snippets are extracted by the information retrieval systems using some strategy for scoring, for example, based on occurrence of query words. We therefore assume the results to be already ranked and therefore the subsequent ranking is termed as reranking. Ranking drastically reduces the number of documents that will be processed further. Reranking usually involves deeper linguistic analysis and use of expert knowledge resources to get an even better understanding. The first task this thesis explores is regarding reranking of answers to definition questions. The answers are sentences returned by the google search engine in response to the definition questions. This step is relevant to definition questions because the questions tend to be short and therefore the information need of the user is difficult to assess. This means the final result is not a single piece of information but a ordered set of relevant sentences. In this thesis we explore two approaches to reranking that uses dependency tree statistics in a probabilistic setting. One of them is based on calculating edit distance between trees and tree statistics from the corpus and other one uses a tree kernel function and involves using the output from trained classifiers directly.
The second task this thesis explores is the task of sentence ordering for definition questions. The reranking part of the definition question answering pipeline is able to identify the sentences that are relevant to a given question. However, answer to a definition question is a collection of sentences that has some coherent ordering between them. In a way this is not far away from the characteristics observed in a good summary. We believe that by moving sentences around to form a more coherent chunk we will be able to better meet the expectation of a user by improving his reading experience. We present an approach that finds an ordering for the sentences based on the knowledge extracted from observing the order of sentences in Wikipedia articles. Due to the popularity and acceptability of Wikipedia, proven by the fact that wikipedia results are ranked high by all major commercial search engines, it was chosen as the standard to be learnt from and compared against. We present a framework that uses the order of sentences extracted from Wikipedia articles to construct a single big graph of connected sentences. As a mechanism to select a node in the graph, we define a scoring function based on the relative position of candidate sentences
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