INCOME INCREASING ON FARMERS INSOUTHSULAWESI: CASE STUDY OF RICE AND MAIZE FARMERS

This research aims: (i) to identify the problems faced by rice and maize farmers, (ii) to design a model for the development of food crops in South Sulawesi, and (iii) to know whether the model is effectively and appropriate implemented in the farmers. The data used are secondary and primary data which are analyzed using descriptive statistical analysis model. This research is conducted in Sidenreng Rappang, Pinrang, Bantaeng, and Jeneponto. The study found: (i) the problems face by rice and maize farmers includes high production costs, declining land productivity, price instability, low level of income, the lack of infrastructure (irrigation) and low farm management and farmer groups role; (ii) the appropriate model for food groups development is the one that focuses on strengthening farmer groups institution and improving sinergism among stakeholders, and (iii) the implementation of the model is effective and strong supported by the farmers. This is because the farmers can improve their capacity to solve their problems and to formulate program and activity planning which contributed to local/village planning mechanism

Impact of postpartum anxiety and depression on child’s mental development from two peri-urban communities of Karachi, Pakistan: a quasi-experimental study

Background Postpartum anxiety and depression has detrimental effects on the overall mental development of children. This study aims to assess the impact of postpartum anxiety and depression on children’s mental development on all sub-scales in a Pakistani population. Methods A quasi-experimental study was conducted in two peri-urban communities of Karachi, a mega city of Pakistan, to assess the impact of postpartum anxiety and depression on children’s growth and mental development. A total of 420 women were enrolled, who had given consent out of 651 pregnant women identified, during February 2004 to December 2005. Data for socio-demographic, home environment and family relationship variables were collected between 36 weeks of pregnancy and within 10 days of childbirth. Mother’s levels of anxiety and depression were assessed at 1, 2, 6, 12, 18, 24, and 30 months of childbirth. An indigenous, validated screening instrument- Aga Khan University Anxiety and Depression scale was used and diagnostic confirmation was done through a psychologist’s interview, based on DSM IV criteria. Children’s growth and development was monitored in the same sequence using an Early Childhood Development tool that consists of five subscales; socio emotional, language, cognitive, gross motor and fine motor development. Physical growth was monitored by measuring height and weight of the child. Data was analyzed using SAS 9.2. Multivariable Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE) logistic regression was conducted to identify association of postpartum anxiety and depression with each early childhood development indicator, adjusting for parental and child factors. Results A significant association of postpartum anxiety and depression with delayed development on all five subscales of children’s mental development was found in our study. Interestingly, our study found that higher maternal age had adverse effects on child’s emotional whereas positive impact on child’s cognitive development. Children’s stunting had an adverse impact on all five subscales of children’s development. Male children were at higher risk for delayed language and gross motor development relative to female children. Conclusions Our study found that postpartum anxiety and depression is associated with adverse outcomes regarding children’s mental development on all sub-scales. The impact was accentuated by low family income or child’s increasing age

Novel genetic algorithm towards implementing a lining-layout optimization strategy.

This paper presents the strategies for optimizing planting areas.The three strategies considered for preparing field lining; 1) 600 line-direction 2) selecting the best line-direction for single block and 3) selecting the best line-directions for many separate blocks,might lead to different numbers of trees. Thus, an application named Lining-Layout Planning by Intelligent Computerized System(LLP-ICS) is introduced to choose the best strategy. Because there are many possible solutions with ambiguous results, a novelty of Genetic Algorithm (GA) for lining-layout with focusing on the two approaches which are 1) assigning the determined random values to the genes of chromosome, 2)avoiding the same solution of optimal blocks occurs, was applied to suggest the optimal solution intelligently. The aim of this study was to suggest the best strategy among the various area coordinates tested. In addition, the capability of the application by novel GA was also examined. The results indicated that the LLP-ICS produces a consistent solution with feasible results and less number of repetition processes led to reduce the computation time

Fabrication of high-density single crystal Fe2O3 (hematite) nanostructures by two-step heating method for enhanced solar water splitting

doctoral thesi

In Vivo Quantitative MRI of Hemodynamics, Endothelial Function, and Metabolites

Magnetic resonance (MR) hemodynamic imaging involves the study of vascular blood circulation. The regulation of tissue oxygenation depends directly on the regulation of blood flow. Impaired blood flow, oxygen supply, oxygen consumption, and vascular integrity are major contributors to organ dysfunction as these can limit the supply of nutrients and clearance of toxic substrates. MR metabolite imaging, also known as MR spectroscopic imaging (MRSI), is the detection and quantification of in vivo chemical compounds (metabolites) by protons (1H), phosphorus (31P), or other atoms attached to the molecules. Changes in metabolite content are an early marker of diseases and in general, may precede anatomical/structural changes. Therefore, efficient techniques for robust measurement of blood flow, endothelial function, and metabolite content can be very beneficial to investigate pathology in various organs. The specific goals of this work were: (i) to determine the feasibility of a novel technique for real-time simultaneous measurement of arterial blood flow, perfusion, venous oxygen saturation, and bioenergetics (31P MRS) in the human skeletal muscle; (ii) to develop a novel technique to measure perfusion and blood-brain barrier (BBB) permeability using magnetization transfer (MT) and arterial spin labeling (ASL) in the human brain; (iii) to develop a robust technique for high-resolution fast 1H MRSI of the human brain using non-Cartesian (rosette) trajectory; and (iv) to demonstrate high-resolution human spinal cord imaging using motion-insensitive rosette trajectory with MT preparation and compressed sensing MRI. The overarching goal of the work presented here is to develop new non-invasive techniques that can provide novel information about pathology and help monitor disease progression and the efficacy of treatment

MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS FOR UNDERSTANDING COGNITIVE SPEECH PROCESSING

MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS FOR UNDERSTANDING COGNITIVE SPEECH PROCESSIN

Brain Connectivity Analysis of Normal Hearing and Hearing Impaired Participants Based on the Cortical Surface EEG Data

Hearing is an important sensory function of human communication and alerts people of dangerous conditions by detecting the emergency auditory alarm, sirens. We localized the source of EEG data (Hearing EEG data) into the cortical surface by solving the inverse problem and extracted the time series data from the 68 regions of Deskin-Killiany (DK) atlas. By using Granger Causality and Phase Transfer Entropy, we analyzed the brain connectivity of people experiencing normal hearing (NH) and hearing loss (HL). These results showed that NH and HL listeners’ connectivity levels are not the same. Moreover, we investigated which connectivities of the human brain are changed after hearing loss. We also performed a statistical analysis between eight regions of the brain; those are associated with the auditory and language processing tasks and significant changes were found in the primary Auditory and Broca’s areas. It is noticeable that HL listeners utilize the top-down modulation to perceive the sounds. Finally, we also found that neural and behavioral results are correlated

Two Phase Flow Distribution and Heat Transfer in Plate Heat Exchanger

佐賀大学博士（工学）application/pdfapplication/pdfapplication/pdf学位論文(Thesis)doctoral thesi

Prelimanary study on designing optimal lining layout by metaheuristic approaches for optimizing planting areas

This paper presents an investigation on application of metaheuristic approaches to handle the optimization of planting areas with regards to Lining Layout Planning (LLP). Metaheuristic is approximate solution that sacrifice the guarantee of finding an optimal solution. However, it is an appropriate approach to be employed in two basic situations: 1. a problem may not has an exact method because of ambiguities in the problem statement, 2. a problem may has an axact solution but computational cost of finding it may be prohibitive. The optimization startegy in LLP is to optimize a planting area by looking for the best line direction to be assigned into determining blocks with attention to minimize unused space and maximize number of tree. However, there are many possible solutions to be analyzed will eventually spend high time is a challenge. Therefore, the applicabilty of approaches to overcome this problem was investigated and simulated result was reported. We found that the exact solution methods are suitable for LLP with one block but many blocks with weighted consideration will increase time exponentially and metaheuristic approaches are considered as the appropriate technique

Expanding the Vibrating Sharp-Edge Spray Ionization Toolkit for Oligonucleotide Characterization

A gentle or soft Ionization process is a critical component in native mass spectrometry (MS) to lift the biomolecules from the bulk solution into the gas phase environment of the mass spectrometer preserving their shape, topology and non-covalent interactions. Electrospray ionization (ESI) facilitates structural preservation of proteins, nucleic acids and their complexes and as a result it has been extensively used in native MS. However, in negative ion mode, ESI is somewhat limited in sensitivity due to corona discharge effect resulting from the requirement of a high amount of voltage. This often disrupts the ESI process and may not preserve the native conformations. To overcome such limitations, a novel spray-based, soft ionization called capillary vibrating spray ionization has been introduced which is simple to operate, doesn’t require nebulization gas and offers superior sensitivity for oligonucleotide analysis in negative ion mode. cVSSI features a wider operational range of applied voltage to the sample solution which allows the observation of folding/unfolding/refolding transitions of proteins and DNA. Another groundbreaking feature of cVSSI is that it can be easily coupled with ultrafast, in droplet hydrogen-deuterium exchange mass spectrometry (HDX-MS) in a dual emitter tip fashion. This unique HDX-MS method can differentiate co-existing conformational states of different types of DNA and proteins in a robust fashion. Another key feature of in-droplet HDX is that it reveals structural flexibility. Additionally, when combined with techniques such as molecular dynamics (MD) simulations it can suggest individual exchange sites of the biopolymers. A remarkable finding of this study is the distinguishing of linear vs globular forms of folded DNA species. In general, most globular G-quadruplex DNA structures protect exchange sites to a greater degree than the linear duplex DNA. Comparatively, another complex form of linear structure such as triplex DNA exhibits greater protection than duplex DNA even rivaling that of the most stable G-quadruplex structures. More interestingly, this in-droplet cVSSI-HDX-MS technique can capture subtle structural differences between different topologies and sub-topologies of globular G-quadruplex DNA. Currently, the differentiation has been ascribed to differences in conformer flexibility. In separate studies, the structural compactness of these therapeutic target G-quadruplexes is also susceptible to droplet charge tuning in the VSSI system in a conformer stability manner. Overall, structures remain in more unfolded or partially folded states in the low to mid voltage regions while more folded states predominate under high voltage settings. Observation of this folding/unfolding transition led to the development of a new method to study the stability of G-quadruplex DNA structure by changing (tuning) droplet charge using cVSSI. The elucidated in-droplet structural stability displays the following order: 23TA