ONION PRODUCTION AND MARKETING SYSTEM IN BALOCHISTAN PROVINCE

In Pakistan, onion is one of the most grown commercial crops in the various parts of the country. The study was carried out through a primary data collection from various stakeholders to examine the status of onion production in Balochistan province. The average per acre cost of production, productivity, profitability, input output ratio were analyzed. Furthermore, find out the issues and constraints faced by onion growers and recommend policy guidelines for sustainable onion production and marketing in the study area. Costs have been broken down in a variable, fixed and opportunity costs (depreciation and opportunity) costs for production factors that are owned by the onion growers. While the variable cost was high from other costs, among them seed rate cost was high in the variable cost and in the lowest costs was recorded in chemical weedicide from other variable costs and fixed cost was nil due to relief from Balochistan government, whereas total cost of production and net income was Rs.82737 and Rs.75665 per acre respectively found in the study area. Majority 67% seed dealers were reported that due to high ratio of population, more consumable, good seed quality, more benefit, short duration of time and more production of onion as the principal reason for increase seed suppliers over the past 5 years. Onion farmers must follow best methods in management and strive to adopt scientific guidance from local and other available sources, for example research stations, progressive producers and extension workers.

Humidification-Dehumidification Desalination System Powered by Simultaneous Air-Water Solar Heater

A humidification–dehumidification (HDH) desalination system requires thermal energy to desalt seawater. An environmentally friendly approach to obtain thermal energy is to utilize solar energy using solar collectors. Either seawater or air (or both) are typically preheated by HDH desalination systems before these fluids are conveyed to the humidifier column. Compared with preheating only air or water, preheating both is preferred because improved performance and higher productivity are achieved. Many researchers have proposed dual preheated HDH systems utilizing two separate solar heaters/collectors for simultaneous air–seawater preheating. In this study, dual-fluid preheating is achieved using a single solar collector. The proposed simultaneous air–water solar heater (SAWSH) is a modified flat-plate collector designed for simultaneously preheating air and seawater before the fluids reach the humidifier. A thermodynamic study was conducted using formulated mathematical models based on energy and mass conservation principles. Then, the dual-fluid heating HDH system is compared with HDH systems in which only air or only water is heated. This work found that the former outperformed the latter. The daily and monthly performance levels of the system in terms of the outlet temperatures of air and water, distillate rate, and gain output ratio were calculated using the weather data of the hot and humid climate of Jeddah City, Saudi Arabia.

Stigmergic electronic gates and networks

Stigmergy is a communication method based on changing the surrounding environment according to reference feedbacks. It is typical within animal colonies that are able to process even complex information by releasing signals into the environment, which are subsequently received and processed by other elements of the colony. For example, ants searching for food leave traces of a pheromone, like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs, along the way. When food is found, they return to the anthill reinforcing this pheromone trace as a signal and reminder to all the others. Similar techniques are used in routing software even if stigmergic hardware might be even more efficient, fast, and energy saving. Recently, a stigmergic photonic gate based on soliton waveguides has been proposed; this particular stigmergic hardware can switch the output ratio of the channels as a result of optical feedback. Based on these results, in this study, we analyze stigmergic electronic gates that can be addressed through external feedback, as the photonic ones do. We show that the nonlinear response of such gates must be based on quadratic saturating conductances driven by feedback signals. For this purpose, networks of stigmergic gates require two parallel and communicating current circuits: one to transmit information, and another for feedback signals to control the gate switching. We also show that by increasing the number of terminals per single gate, from 2 × 2 to 3 × 3 or higher, the overall power consumption can be reduced by a few orders of magnitude.

Adaptive Network Detector for Radar Target in Changing Scenes

Data-driven deep learning has been well applied in radar target detection. However, the performance of the detection network is severely degraded when the detection scene changes, since the trained network with the data from one scene is not suitable for another scene with different data distribution. In order to address this problem, an adaptive network detector combined with scene classification is proposed in this paper. Aiming at maximizing the posterior probability of the feature vectors, the scene classification network is arranged to control the output ratio of a group of detection sub-networks. Due to the uncertainty of classification error rate in traditional machine learning, the classifier with a controllable false alarm rate is constructed. In addition, a new network training strategy, which freezes the parameters of the scene classification network and selectively fine-tunes the parameters of detection sub-networks, is proposed for the adaptive network structure. Comprehensive experiments are carried out to demonstrate that the proposed method guarantees a high detection probability when the detection scene changes. Compared with some classical detectors, the adaptive network detector shows better performance.

Driving Factors for the Change of Fertilizer Use Intensity in China and Its Six Major Regions

China has invested excessive amounts of fertilizer on limited farmland, which poses a threat to human health and agro-ecological environment. While a plethora of studies have explored how to reduce the total amount of chemical fertilizer, and scant attention has been paid to how to reduce the chemical fertilizer use intensity (FUI). This paper aims to explore the driving factors for the change of FUI to answer this question. It uses the official statistics of China from 1997 to 2017, as well as index decomposition analysis (IDA) and Laspeyres index decomposition method to obtain the following results. The change of fertilizer use intensity can be affected by three factors: input-output ratio of fertilizer (IOR), unit labor output (ULO) and labor input per unit sown area (LIU). At the national level, IOR is the most important factor in reducing the use of chemical fertilizers, while ULO is the most important factor in increasing. The factor of LIU can not only reduce the intensity of fertilizer use, but also increase the intensity.  On a regional level, the fertilizer use intensity in Central-South China is the strongest, while that in the Southwest China is the smallest. Compared with other regions, the factors of ULO in Northwest China and IOR in East China have the greatest impact on fertilizer use intensity. In addition, LIU mainly reduces the intensity of fertilizer use in Northeast China, while this factor in North China is to increase the intensity. Our findings suggest that farmers should not increase labor productivity by investing chemical fertilizer. Improving the efficiency of fertilizer use and transferring rural labor force can reduce the fertilizer use intensity in China.

Research on clothing patterns generation based on multi-scales self-attention improved generative adversarial network

PurposeClothing patterns play a dominant role in costume design and have become an important link in the perception of costume art. Conventional clothing patterns design relies on experienced designers. Although the quality of clothing patterns is very high on conventional design, the input time and output amount ratio is relative low for conventional design. In order to break through the bottleneck of conventional clothing patterns design, this paper proposes a novel way based on generative adversarial network (GAN) model for automatic clothing patterns generation, which not only reduces the dependence of experienced designer, but also improve the input-output ratio.Design/methodology/approachIn view of the fact that clothing patterns have high requirements for global artistic perception and local texture details, this paper improves the conventional GAN model from two aspects: a multi-scales discriminators strategy is introduced to deal with the local texture details; and the self-attention mechanism is introduced to improve the global artistic perception. Therefore, the improved GAN called multi-scales self-attention improved generative adversarial network (MS-SA-GAN) model, which is used for high resolution clothing patterns generation.FindingsTo verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed MS-SA-GAN model, a crawler is designed to acquire standard clothing patterns dataset from Baidu pictures, and a comparative experiment is conducted on our designed clothing patterns dataset. In experiments, we have adjusted different parameters of the proposed MS-SA-GAN model, and compared the global artistic perception and local texture details of the generated clothing patterns.Originality/valueExperimental results have shown that the clothing patterns generated by the proposed MS-SA-GAN model are superior to the conventional algorithms in some local texture detail indexes. In addition, a group of clothing design professionals is invited to evaluate the global artistic perception through a valence-arousal scale. The scale results have shown that the proposed MS-SA-GAN model achieves a better global art perception.

Efficiency-effectiveness assessment of national innovation systems: comparative analysis

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present and evaluate the performance of innovation systems by considering two indicators of efficiency and effectiveness. The scope of the evaluation is globally and due to the situation of each country, the suggested strategies are proposed to maintain the status quo or move toward the desired situation for countries. Design/methodology/approach The approach is to compare and benchmark the countries in terms of the efficiency and effectiveness of their innovation system. The Global Innovation Index report’s input-to-output ratio and the global competitiveness report are used for the assessment. Findings The findings indicate that countries such as China, Switzerland and the USA have an efficient and effective innovation system. However, the innovation systems in countries such as Brazil and Zimbabwe are not only inefficient but also ineffective. The findings also indicate that the innovation systems of countries such as Iran, Armenia and Egypt are efficient but ineffective. Finally, the authors can name Australia, Qatar and Russia as countries with effective but inefficient innovation systems. Originality/value Assessment of national innovation system using efficiency and effectiveness performances is done for the first time at the global stage.

Bispacer Multi-Stage Direct Contact Membrane Distillation System: Analytical and Experimental Study

A multi-staged direct contact membrane distillation (MDCMD) system is designed considering a novel bispacer configuration in the present study. The proposed bispacer DCMD, which has not been addressed in the literature to best of our knowledge, is considered with two purposes, including increasing mechanical stability and turbulence. As increasing turbulence leads to increasing Nusselt number, the bispacer MDCMD provides higher permeate flux. An analytical approach is considered using energy and mass balance correlation. The effect of bispacer and feed operating conditions, including feed temperature, feed flow rate, feed salinity, and the number of stages on permeate flux and salt rejection of the developed MDCMD, are examined both analytically and experimentally. The performance and sustainability of the developed system were investigated by analyzing the parameters, including thermal efficiency (η), gained output ratio (GOR), and temperature polarization coefficient (TPC).

ON MOLDOVA’S INCREMENTAL CAPITAL-OUTPUT RATIO AND THE DESIGN OF ECONOMIC POLICY

The paper analyses the notion of an economy’s Incremental Capital‐Output Ratio and proceeds to provide estimates of the Incremental Capital‐Output Ratio for the Moldovan economy utilising National Accounts data. The purpose of the study is to calculate estimates of the Incremental Capital‐Output Ratio for the Moldovan economy’s transition period to date, utilise the derived estimates to analyse aspects of economic growth in Moldova over its transition period and use the average value of the Incremental Capital‐Output Ratio over the recent period for simulation and forecasting purposes. On the whole the reported empirical estimates of the Incremental Capital‐Output Ratio for the Moldovan economy lie within the range of values reported in the economic literature. Furthermore, the evolution of the Incremental Capital‐Output Ratio in the first few years of sustainable growth in Moldova reflects the wide availability of unemployed or underemployed resources in the economy at the time thus allowing the achievement significant economic growth which was associated with low values of the Incremental Capital‐Output Ratio over the period. The paper proceeds to utilise the recent Incremental Capital‐Output Ratio estimates for the Moldovan economy over the period 2015 to 2019 inclusive to calculate an average estimate of the Incremental Capital‐Output Ratio and use this average estimate to generate estimates of the Gross Fixed Capital Formation ratios as a share of GDP required to reach a number of indicative growth paths in the medium to long term. It is notable that the growth path which is attainable given current conditions in the economy is close to the latest medium term forecasts by International Financial Institutions and the Ministry of Economy and Infrastructure. The paper concludes by discussing the design of economic policy and development planning in Moldova and suggesting areas for further work.