Smart Monitoring IoT-Based System for Hydroponic Agriculture

In India, the land of farmers, where agriculture has always been the primary occupation of the people, more than 50% of the population is still engaged in agriculture and its allied sectors. However, over the years, a significant decline has been observed in the contribution by the agriculture sector towards India's GDP. This chapter aimed towards identifying the gap between the ratio of high inputs and low yields by portraying the various limitations in traditional Indian agriculture methods and how hydroponic agriculture is the need of the hour for the growth of Indian agriculture. Hydroponic agriculture or hydroponics, around the world, has proved to be an efficient and more productive method of agriculture than geoponics (i.e., the traditional agriculture practice carried out in the soil). Although bearing a large bouquet of advantages, there are some limitations associated with it as well. This chapter aimed at overcoming these limitations to enhance this novel approach of agriculture even further.

Multi-word term variation

Complex nominals (CNs) are frequently found in specialized discourse in all languages, since they are a productive method of creating terms by combining existing lexical units. In Spanish, a conceptual combination may often be rendered with a prepositional CN (PCN) or an equivalent adjectival CN (ACN), e.g., demanda de electricidad vs. demanda eléctrica [electricity demand]. Adjectives in ACNs – usually derived from nouns – are known as ‘relational adjectives’ because they encode semantic relations with other concepts. With recent exceptions, research has focused on the underlying semantic relations in CNs. In natural language processing, several works have dealt with the automatic detection of relation adjectives in Romance and Germanic languages. However, there is no discourse studies of these CNs, to our knowledge, for the goal of establishing writer recommendations. This study analyzed the co-text of equivalent PCNs and ACNs to identify factors governing the use of a certain form. EcoLexicon ES, a corpus of Spanish environmental specialized texts, was used to extract 6 relational adjectives and, subsequently, a set of 12 pairs of equivalent CNs. Their behavior in co-text was analyzed by querying EcoLexicon ES and a general language corpus with 20 expressions in CQP-syntax. Our results showed that immediate linguistic co-text determined the preference for a particular structure. Based on these findings, we provide writing guidelines to assist in the production of CNs.

Zweifel, Skeptizismus und das Dilemma der Wahrheitsfindung in der höfischen Epik des Mittelalters

Doubt, Scepticism, and the Dilemma of Establishing the Truth in Middle High German Epic. An Outline of a Research Field The article reflects on the specific uses of doubt as a productive method of ascertaining truth in Middle High German Epic (12th to 14th centuries). Intra-tex­tual debates on the correct interpretation of alternative claims to truth and the presentation of opposing points of view trigger a cognitive and emotional effect of doubt which strongly resonates in metaphors, images and rhetorical figures. Additionally, doubt inspires poetic (and narrative) techniques, motifs and character types which extant research has failed to recognise as interconnected. The purpose of this article is to introduce a research field that is concerned with the analysis of courtly scepticism in secular traditions of literature.

Productive Method as the Basis for Soft Skills Development in Engineering Foreign Language Education

The modern world requires engineering specialists with excellent hard skills as well as soft skills that contribute to better communication, creativity, and self-realisation of a person. The authors discovered that modern educational standards are starting to focus on soft skills development, proposing requirements for educational programs that contain competencies covering soft skills. To fulfil such needs, there is the productive method of foreign language teaching that implies interactive technologies and masters foreign language communicative competence and soft skills at once. Therefore, the study aimed at developing a technology of soft skills development in engineering foreign language education using the productive method and checking its effectiveness. The authors designed a questionnaire and investigated engineering students’ opinions on a need to develop soft skills, which revealed high relevance of the topic, and the possibility of their development while studying a foreign language, which proved the productive method’s prospects. Based on findings received and literature analysed, we implemented case studies, problem-based learning, and essay writing in the technology and designed assessment criteria. Testing of the technology was performed by a pedagogical experiment, where qualitative and quantitative methods were applied. To critically analyse the results, we used Cronbach’s alpha, which revealed good reliability of the questionnaire, and t-test showed high efficiency of the technology that improved students’ soft skills.

Toward an Affective Sense of Life: Artificial Intelligence, Animacy, and Amusement at a Robot Pet Memorial Service in Japan

This essay analyzes the organization of Buddhist memorial services for robot pets in Japan against the backdrop of emerging markets for robots equipped with artificial emotional intelligence. It demonstrates how an evocative “sense of life” (seimeikan) becomes both a target of design for robotics engineers and an affective capacity of robot users who care for and through companion robots. Documenting how users cultivate a sense of amusement toward robots that neither neglects nor negates analytical distinctions between the artificial and the living but rather playfully holds them together in the figure of a living robot, the article illustrates how practices of care become affective tools for understanding life altered by developments in AI. Such findings render animacy as an open and exercisable capacity, responsive to technoscientific change, and generative of theoretical inspiration for how anthropologists might similarly exercise affect as a particularly productive method of fieldwork within machine-inclusive multispecies societies. 抄録 本論文は 感情認識AI（人工知能）を搭載した一般消費者向けロボットの登場を背景に営まれるようになった日本におけるペットロボットの法要について考察するものである。特に「生命感」の喚起がいかにロボット開発におけるデザインのターゲットになると同時に、ユーザーがロボットとケアを介した関係性を結ぶ際の情動的能力の所産の対象にもなっているかということを明らかにする。ロボットと接するなかでユーザー達は分析的に対置される人工物と生命体との違いを無視したり否定したりするのではなく、むしろそれらを享楽的に結合させてロボットの存在を捉えるアミューズメントの心を高めている。この記述を通して、本論文はロボットへのケアの実践が人工知能の発展によって変わりつつある生命のあり方を理解する情動的手段になっていることを描き出す。このような知見は、対象物に生物性や生物らしさを感じるアニマシーの知覚が柔軟で状況に応じて発揮することが可能な能力であり、科学技術の変化にも応じることが出来るということを表しているだけでなく、機械を含むマルチ・スピーシーズ社会における有益なフィールドワークの手法として人類学者自身もどのように情動をうまく取り込むことができるかという理論的な閃きを生成する契機にもなったのである。

Isolation of Extracellular Vesicles from Biological Fluids via the Aggregation–Precipitation Approach for Downstream miRNAs Detection

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) have high potential as sources of biomarkers for non-invasive diagnostics. Thus, a simple and productive method of EV isolation is demanded for certain scientific and medical applications of EVs. Here we aim to develop a simple and effective method of EV isolation from different biofluids, suitable for both scientific, and clinical analyses of miRNAs transported by EVs. The proposed aggregation–precipitation method is based on the aggregation of EVs using dextran blue and the subsequent precipitation of EVs using 1.5% polyethylene glycol solutions. The developed method allows the effective isolation of EVs from plasma and urine. As shown using TEM, dynamic light scattering, and miRNA analyses, this method is not inferior to ultracentrifugation-based EV isolation in terms of its efficacy, lack of inhibitors for polymerase reactions and applicable for both healthy donors and cancer patients. This method is fast, simple, does not need complicated equipment, can be adapted for different biofluids, and has a low cost. The aggregation–precipitation method of EV isolation accessible and suitable for both research and clinical laboratories. This method has the potential to increase the diagnostic and prognostic utilization of EVs and miRNA-based diagnostics of urogenital pathologies.

Valuing what happens: a biogenic approach to valence and (potentially) affect

Valence is half of the pair of properties that constitute core affect, the foundation of emotion. But what is valence, and where is it found in the natural world? Currently, this question cannot be answered. The idea that emotion is the body's way of driving the organism to secure its survival, thriving and reproduction runs like a leitmotif from the pathfinding work of Antonio Damasio through four book-length neuroscientific accounts of emotion recently published by the field's leading practitioners. Yet while Damasio concluded 20 years ago that the homeostasis–affect linkage is rooted in unicellular life, no agreement exists about whether even non-human animals with brains experience emotions. Simple neural animals—those less brainy than bees, fruit flies and other charismatic invertebrates—are not even on the radar of contemporary affective research, to say nothing of aneural organisms. This near-sightedness has effectively denied the most productive method available for getting a grip on highly complex biological processes to a scientific domain whose importance for understanding biological decision-making cannot be underestimated. Valence arguably is the fulcrum around which the dance of life revolves. Without the ability to discriminate advantage from harm, life very quickly comes to an end. In this paper, we review the concept of valence, where it came from, the work it does in current leading theories of emotion, and some of the odd features revealed via experiment. We present a biologically grounded framework for investigating valence in any organism and sketch a preliminary pathway to a computational model. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Basal cognition: conceptual tools and the view from the single cell’.

‘Verses on Russian Poetry’

The chapter considers Mandelstam’s 1932 ‘Verses on Russian Poetry’ as an act of engagement with Soviet critical debates on poetry and ideology, and on the nature of the poetic canon. The cycle has been deemed to illustrate Mandelstam at his most hermetic and even backward-looking, read as poems that put up a verbal screen. In fact, it is highly topical and draws heavily on contemporary newspaper material about literary groups and reviews of his own work. A new, productive method of reading such difficult texts is proposed here by showing how closely the cycle assimilates its horizon of expectation, using the language of parable, allegory, visual emblem, and political quotation. Flowing out of the events described in Chapter 1, the cycle asks whether there are limits to the evolutionary model of survival of the fittest that operates in an age of class warfare, and whether in a poetic world that formerly cultivated dialogue the poet still has a place.

FORMULATION AND EVALUATION OF GREWIATENAX FRUITS AS EFFERVESCENT TABLETS FOR TREATMENT OF IRON DEFICIENCY ANEMIA

Grewiatenax fruits as nutritional supplement are being widely used in traditional medicine in most parts of Sudan to treat anemic patients. This study was conducted to specify the most productive method for extractingG. tenax fruits and to standardize and formulate the extract into effervescent tablets. The fruits were extracted by hot and cold extraction with maceration using 80%, 65%, and 50% ethanol strength and the extracts were standardized. Two formulae (F1 and F2) were prepared from the extract and compressed into tablets. The formulated tablets were subjected for quality control tests. The 80% ethanol extract showed the highest extract yield and iron contents comparing to other extracts. The formulated tablets of both formulae showed good quality and pass all quality control tests.G. tenax fruitsextract could be pharmaceutically formulated into tablets which exhibited good quality control.To maximize yield value ofG. tenax fruitsextract, maceration method using 80% ethanol strength is of paramount importance.