This book provides a blueprint for the allocation of public expenditures "in" and "for" agriculture at the dis-aggregated state level and suggests a reorientation in favour of disadvantaged regions where the marginal returns on additional investments would be higher. It provides insights into the inter-linkages between public expenditures, private investment, rural poverty, and agriculture productivity from a regional perspective to reflect upon spatial differences in the welfare effects of various investments, subsidies, and policies. The book focuses on agricultural growth and rural poverty reduction through public and private investments, non-farm employment, and other pathways to the formulation of appropriate policies at the dis-aggregated state level. It presents new evidence based on advanced econometric tools for analysing and understanding the relationship between public and private investments in agriculture and input subsidies (fertilizer, power, irrigation, and credit) together with their impacts at the dis-aggregated state level. The book also deliberates on an income based direct support system for farmers as an alternative to the existing input price subsidy regime. Accordingly, the book offers valuable insights not only for researchers working on poverty alleviation, rural economy, and agricultural growth, but also for policymakers.

This book presents a concept for implementing a mass balance approach toward developing an effective eco-friendly, livestock farming system independent of external energy input. In this context it describes a modern, integrated farming system, and includes comprehensive technical information explaining the design and evaluation of manure management systems, and modeling and operational tools. It first discusses the mass balance operating process, highlighting the difference between imported and exported mass across the farm boundary. Estimating mass balance can provide critical information for (comprehensive) nutrient management planning and for managing the movement of nutrients and manure. It then explains the estimation of whole-farm P mass balance using a suitable model system. The subsequent chapters provide updated information on management aspects of livestock-farming and generation of multiple job opportunities, and also explore various aspects of livestock farming operational protocols like housing and management; nurture of rams, ewes and lambs, new born calves and heifers; care of buck, doe and kid- nutrition flushing; concept zero grazing-systems; disease control and management; integrated goat farming; and crop-livestock integration. Further, the book addresses crop-livestock integration; energy autonomy in cattle farming; value added biopharmaceuticals from cattle farming; CAPEX for cattle farming; concepts of cattle farming; detrimental effects of the industry; topographic and edaphic factors, and thermal stress on livestock growth and development; socioeconomic development; and water requirements for livestock. The book concludes with the most important issue in the field of agriculture and veterinary science: "Livestock Farming with Care," describing sustainable, eco-friendly livestock farming by highlighting issues like animal feed vs. human food; agricultural GDP vs livestock, and factors affecting the sustainability of livestock farming. Given its scope, this book is a valuable resource for researchers and students alike, and will also appeal to practitioners in the field of livestock.

This book covers all aspects of deficiency of essential elements and excess of toxic ones in crop plants. The metal deficiency and toxicity are the two sides of same problem that are threatening to sustainable agricultural growth. The book presents prospective strategies for the management of elemental nutrition of crop plants. Chapters are arranged in a manner so as to develop a lucid picture of the topic beginning from basics to advanced research. The content is supplemented with flow charts and figures to make it convenient for readers to holistically grasp the concepts. It will be a value addition for students, research scholars and professionals in understanding the basics as well latest developments in the area of metal deficiency and excess in crop plants.

This book is a delight for academics, researchers and professionals working in evolutionary and swarm computing, computational intelligence, machine learning and engineering design, as well as search and optimization in general. It provides an introduction to the design and development of a number of popular and recent swarm and evolutionary algorithms with a focus on their applications in engineering problems in diverse domains. The topics discussed include particle swarm optimization, the artificial bee colony algorithm, Spider Monkey optimization algorithm, genetic algorithms, constrained multi-objective evolutionary algorithms, genetic programming, and evolutionary fuzzy systems. A friendly and informative treatment of the topics makes this book an ideal reference for beginners and those with experience alike.

This book presents a collection of computational intelligence algorithms that addresses issues in visual pattern recognition such as high computational complexity, abundance of pattern features, sensitivity to size and shape variations and poor performance against complex backgrounds. The book has 3 parts. Part 1 describes various research issues in the field with a survey of the related literature. Part 2 presents computational intelligence based algorithms for feature selection and classification. The algorithms are discriminative and fast. The main application area considered is hand posture recognition. The book also discusses utility of these algorithms in other visual as well as non-visual pattern recognition tasks including face recognition, general object recognition and cancer / tumor classification. Part 3 presents biologically inspired algorithms for feature extraction. The visual cortex model based features discussed have invariance with respect to appearance and size of the hand, and provide good inter class discrimination. A Bayesian model of visual attention is described which is effective in handling complex background problem in hand posture recognition. The book provides qualitative and quantitative performance comparisons for the algorithms outlined, with other standard methods in machine learning and computer vision. The book is self-contained with several figures, charts, tables and equations helping the reader to understand the material presented without instruction.

The book covers various biotechnological research efforts and their applications in fisheries and aquaculture, especially in the area of fish breeding, health management, nutrition and culture. Application of the recent biotechnological tools, like Transcriptomics, Transgenesis, Nanotechnology, Metabolomics, RNAi and CRISPRi Technologies in the field of fisheries research are included in the book. Topics like conservation genetics for management of fishery resources are also covered in the book. It aims at addressing the growing need of the biotechnology in advancing the cause of aquaculture with a view to provide food and nutritional security to the world. This book will be of immense use to teachers, researchers, academicians, development officials and policymakers, involved in R&D of fisheries and aquaculture sectors. Also, the book serves as an additional reading material for undergraduate and graduate students of fisheries, marine sciences, ecology, aquaculture, and environmental sciences. The research in aquaculture biotechnology is likely to have significant impact on aquaculture and fisheries by way of supporting nutritional food security to the growing population.

"Energy Efficient Thermal Management of Data Centers" examines energy flow in today's data centers. Particular focus is given to the state-of-the-art thermal management and thermal design approaches now being implemented across the multiple length scales involved. The impact of future trends in information technology hardware, and emerging software paradigms such as cloud computing and virtualization, on thermal management are also addressed. The book explores computational and experimental characterization approaches for determining temperature and air flow patterns within data centers. Thermodynamic analyses using the second law to improve energy efficiency are introduced and used in proposing improvements in cooling methodologies. Reduced-order modeling and robust multi-objective design of next generation data centers are discussed.

This edited book covers the major aspects of plant growth promoting bacteria and mechanisms underlining the phenotype in rhizobacteria. This book guides the researchers about the potential of plant growth promoting bacteria to be used as biofertilizers. The process of biofertilizer development and the process of testing its efficacy for commercial use and the potency is elaborated in this volume using suitable figures. The information in this book regarding the secretion of various secondary metabolites responsible for nutrient management is helpful for designing bioformulations that assist plant growth. This book provides substantial number of evidences that underlines the genomic basis of nutrient management by microbes. Essential information is provided regarding the genomic and proteomic background of the biofertilizers. The chapters in the book are divided into three sections. The first section of the book includes chapter 1-5 outlining the importance of rhizobacteria in elevating the nutrient levels in soil and augmenting the biotic and abiotic stress. Second section of the book includes chapter 6-11 elaborating the details about the biofertilizer, types of biofertilizer available and techniques involved in mass production of biofertilizers. Section third covers chapters from 12-15 providing the explicit information about metabolomics and proteomics basis of plant growth development. This collective work is distinct as it has focus on diverse emerging technologies which are high-throughput, scalable and applicable to different countries regardless of their socio-economic conditions. This book can improve the current state of knowledge and invoke researchers and innovators to take ahead the current inter-disciplinary knowledge into technologies that are readily available and effectively minimize hazards associated with chemical fertilizer.

Damping in Fiber Reinforced Composite Materials starts with an introduction to the basic concepts of damping in composite materials. Methods of modeling damping are then covered, along with recent developments in measuring techniques, both local, like polar scanning and global techniques like the Resonalyser method (based on measuring modal damping ratios of composite material plates). The effect of other factors, such as stress, strain-level, stiffness and frequency that need to be considered when determining damping behavior in composite materials are also discussed in detail. Other chapters present a parametric study of a two-phase composite material using different micromechanical models such as Unified micromechanics, and Hashin and Eshelby's to predict elastic moduli and loss factors. A bridging model that incorporates the effect of fiber packaging factors is then compared to FEM results. Final sections cover the effect of the interphase on the mechanical properties of the composite, present a nonlinear model for the prediction of damping in viscoelastic materials, and provide practical examples of damping and principles of vibration control.

This reference book collates traditional and modern applications of remote sensing in aquatic ecosystem monitoring. It covers conventional assessment methods like sampling, surveying, and chlorophyll estimation. Advanced remote sensing technology provides timely spectral information for quantitative and qualitative assessment of water changes, volume, and vegetation. The book discusses space-borne, airborne, and drone geospatial data. The five sections broadly cover aquatic ecosystem monitoring, vegetation management, advanced modelling practices, and challenges. Key features – Covers different types of aquatic ecosystems like wetlands, rivers, lakes, saline, and brackish Reviews the latest applications of remote sensing in the monitoring and assessment of aquatic ecosystems Includes traditional methods like cartography, sampling, surveying, phytoplankton assessment and chlorophyll estimation Discusses the application of artificial intelligence, machine learning, data fusion in monitoring aquatic systems Explores the prospects of future Earth Observation space missions for aquatic ecosystem monitoring The book is meant for scientists, professionals, and policymakers working in environmental sciences, remote sensing, and geology.

We have seen a sharp increase in the development of data transfer techniques in the networking industry during the last few years. We can see that the photos are assisting clinicians in detecting Covid-19 infection in patients even in the current Covid-19 pandemic condition. With the aid of ML/AI, medical imaging, such as lung X-rays for Covid-19 infection, is crucial in the early detection of many diseases. We also learned that in the Covid-19 scenario, wired and wireless networking are improved for data transfer but have network congestion. An intriguing concept that has the ability to reduce spectrum congestion and continuously offer new network services is providing wireless network virtualization. The degree of virtualization and resource sharing varies between the paradigms. Each paradigm has both technical and non-technical issues that need to be handled before wireless virtualization becomes a common technology. For wireless network virtualization to be successful, these issues need careful design and evaluation. Future wireless network architecture must adhere to a number of Quality of Service requirements (QoS). Virtualization has been extended to wireless networks as well as conventional ones. By enabling multi-tenancy and tailored service with a wider range of carrier frequencies, it improves efficiency and utilization. In the IoT environment, wireless users are heterogeneous, and the network state is dynamic, making network control problems extremely difficult to solve as dimensionality and computational complexity keep rising quickly. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has been developed by the use of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) as a potential approach to solve high-dimensional and continuous control issues effectively. Deep Reinforcement Learning techniques provide great potential in IoT, edge and SDN scenarios and are used in heterogeneous networks for IoT-based management on the QoS required by each Software Defined Network (SDN) service. While DRL has shown great potential to solve emerging problems in complex wireless network virtualization, there are still domain-specific challenges that require further study, including the design of adequate DNN architectures with 5G network optimization issues, resource discovery and allocation, developing intelligent mechanisms that allow the automated and dynamic management of the virtual communications established in the SDNs which is considered as research perspective

This book deals with recent and upcoming technologies of breeding freshwater ornamental fish. It covers in detail areas such as status, breeding techniques, food and health management and marketing of freshwater ornamental fishes. There is a separate chapter on breeding of indigenous freshwater ornamental fishes. Emphasis is given on national and international legislation related to ornamental fish export and import. The book contains a useful chapter on the importance and role of ornamental plants and accessories. Aquarium making, decoration, water quality management and maintenance have also been well explained for hobbyists. This title has been co-published with NIPA. Not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan)

This book gathers selected papers presented at International Conference on Machine Learning, Advances in Computing, Renewable Energy and Communication (MARC 2020), held in Krishna Engineering College, Ghaziabad, India, during December 17-18, 2020. This book discusses key concepts, challenges, and potential solutions in connection with established and emerging topics in advanced computing, renewable energy, and network communications.

This book discusses various climate smart agro-technologies, their technical and economic feasibility across heterogeneous agro-climatic conditions, assessing farmers' willingness to adopt those technologies, impact of climate smart technology in agricultural production and possible policy and investment opportunities to upscale it. Containing eight chapters, the book starts with a discussion about the methodological aspects of priority setting of the farm technologies across various regions of South Asia including Eastern Indo-Gangetic plain, Western Indo-Gangetic Plain and arid regions. Using data from field based trials and expert solicitations, the book next deliberates on a list of feasible technologies, assessed by constructing climate smart Feasibility Index. Further on, there is an analysis, using stated preference method, of the behaviour of farmers in adopting climate smart technologies. Preference of women farmers has been given a special focus in this book. After discussing the method priority setting of the farm technologies, impact of climate smart technologies has been analysed using real time data. Government policies have been reviewed with the view of achieving climate smart agriculture in South Asia. The book also describes the optimization modelling framework for investment allocation and technology prioritization. The model integrates both the bio-physical and the economic optimization model to capture the agro-climatic heterogeneity within the region and the variability of technical feasibility across regions and crops. Results of this model will help policy makers to identify how much to invest, where to invest and what technologies to prioritize for investments.

The book examines the market reaction to mergers and acquisitions (M&A) announcements over a period from 2003 to 2015. Mergers and acquisitions continue to be amongst the preferred competitive options available to the companies seeking to grow fast in the rapidly changing global business scenario. M&A as a growth strategy has received attention from developed as well as emerging economies. It has been extensively used by managers as an expansion strategy and also serves as an important instrument for increasing corporate efficiency. Recently, M&A has grown at a rapid pace, creating a need for research to analyze what drives this phenomenon and how it affects firms and markets. As such, this book evaluates the impact of M&A on short-term abnormal returns as well long-term financial performance. It also assesses the management view concerning the motives for undertaking M&A. In addition, the book investigates the corporate governance practices of the acquiring firms and their impact on the short- term as well as long- term performance of those firms.

Nowadays, raw biological data can be easily stored as databases in computers but extracting the required information is the real challenge for researchers. For this reason, bioinformatics tools perform a vital role in extracting and analyzing information from databases. Bioinformatics Tools and Big Data Analytics for Patient describes the applications of bioinformatics, data management, and computational techniques in clinical studies and drug discovery for patient care. The book gives details about the recent developments in the fields of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and data analytics. It highlights the advances in computational techniques used to perform intelligent medical tasks. Features: Presents recent developments in the fields of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and data analytics for improved patient care. Describes the applications of bioinformatics, data management, and computational techniques in clinical studies and drug discovery. Summarizes several strategies, analyses, and optimization methods for patient healthcare. Focuses on drug discovery and development by cloud computing and data-driven research The targeted audience comprises academics, research scholars, healthcare professionals, hospital managers, pharmaceutical chemists, the biomedical industry, software engineers, and IT professionals.

The volume addresses a selection of diverse topics in such areas as: machine learning based intelligent systems for healthcare applications of artificial intelligence the Internet of Things, intelligent data analytics techniques, intelligent network systems and applications, and inequalities and process control systems.

includes high-quality research work by academics and industrial experts in the field of computing. includes case studies related to Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Internet of Things, Multimedia Big data, Blockchain, Augmented reality, Data Science, Robotics, Cybersecurity, 3D printing, Voice Assistants and Chat bots, and future communication networks. serves as a valuable reference guide for anyone seeking knowledge about the future of computing.

The idea of 'New India' has acquired a new currency. The dominant grammar of politics dilutes the critical impulse and deters the expression of alternate politics. The interpretive possibilities have been replaced by a reactive exchange. Technology is presented as a panacea, rather than just a facilitator. Legitimacy and normative dignity for these ideas is acquired by redefining the role of the institutions and also through constitutional amendments. A major intellectual effort is required to reformulate public policy, governance systems and social relations to balance the opposite claims of market efficiency and economic growth with social equity and justice. This book is co-published with Aakar Books, New Delhi. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the print versions of this book in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Composite Materials: Properties, Characterisation, and Applications provides an in-depth description of the synthesis, properties, and various characterisation techniques used for the study of composite materials. Covers applications and simulation tests of these advanced materials Presents real-world examples for demonstration Discusses surface, thermal, and electrical characterisation techniques Covers composites for use as sensors Aimed at industry professionals and researchers, this book offers readers thorough knowledge of the fundamentals as well as advanced level techniques involved in composite material characterisation, development, and applications.

This book gathers selected papers presented at International Conference on Machine Learning, Advances in Computing, Renewable Energy and Communication (MARC 2020), held in Krishna Engineering College, Ghaziabad, India, during December 17-18, 2020. This book discusses key concepts, challenges, and potential solutions in connection with established and emerging topics in advanced computing, renewable energy, and network communications.

The word doyennes signifies the various expressions of female, feminine, and feminist aspects of contemporary literature in India, through multiple theoretical frameworks. Contemporary Women's Writing in India is an edited collection dealing with a range of these issues set in the society of Indian culture. Indian women's literature is still a fertile ground for critical enquiry. There are three sections in the collection: Section I deals with specific instances in history, historical constructions, and representations of gender. Section II offers a varied spectrum of feminist critical discourse on contemporary Indian women's writing, intersecting with the frameworks of post-colonial theory, deconstruction, perspectives on race and ethnicity, and eco-feminism. Section III touches upon the notion of the woman's body and psyche through the varied perspectives of psychoanalysis, feminism, and post-feminism. By thoroughly exploring a range of issues, Contemporary Women's Writing promises to take the reader by the hand, and journey through the unfamiliar but refreshing landscape of women's literature in India.

This new book discusses the concepts while also highlighting the challenges in the field of quantum cryptography and also covering cryptographic techniques and cyber security techniques, in a single volume. It comprehensively covers important topics in the field of quantum cryptography with applications, including quantum key distribution, position-based quantum cryptography, quantum teleportation, quantum e-commerce, quantum cloning, cyber security techniques' architectures and design, cyber security techniques management, software-defined networks, and cyber security techniques for 5G communication. The text also discusses the security of practical quantum key distribution systems, applications and algorithms developed for quantum cryptography, as well as cyber security through quantum computing and quantum cryptography. The text will be beneficial for graduate students, academic researchers, and professionals working in the fields of electrical engineering, electronics and communications engineering, computer science, and information technology.

This book includes state-of-the-art discussions on various issues and aspects of the implementation, testing, validation, and application of big data in the context of healthcare. The concept of big data is revolutionary, both from a technological and societal well-being standpoint. This book provides a comprehensive reference guide for engineers, scientists, and students studying/involved in the development of big data tools in the areas of healthcare and medicine. It also features a multifaceted and state-of-the-art literature review on healthcare data, its modalities, complexities, and methodologies, along with mathematical formulations. The book is divided into two main sections, the first of which discusses the challenges and opportunities associated with the implementation of big data in the healthcare sector. In turn, the second addresses the mathematical modeling of healthcare problems, as well as current and potential future big data applications and platforms.