A Comparison of Water Policies for Sustainable Irrigation Management: The Case of India and Australia

A comparative analysis of irrigation related issues and effectiveness of water policies in India and Australia is conducted to help share the learning from each other’s experience in sustainable irrigation management. Keeping in pace with the global trend of implementing a sustainable water management program, India has adopted the concept of participatory irrigation management (PIM) while Australia has adopted irrigation management transfer (IMT) program. PIM in India is regarded as experimentation in diverse socio-economic settings with mixed results while IMT in Australia has achieved a high level of water use efficiency. Australian irrigation industry is currently driven by market mechanisms where water trading is expected to lead to greater efficiency. However, there are concerns that sole reliance on water use (or economic) efficiency objective may conflict with the objectives of social equity and ecological sustainability. Similar to Australia, there is an opportunity for water markets in India. However, conflict in the objectives of efficiency, equity and sustainability constrain the debate of establishing water markets in India. The comparative analysis indicates that despite both countries have a common goal of sustainable water management, their strategies differ. Nevertheless, India can emulate many of the Australian experiences in water policy reforms, entitlements, institutional arrangements, and corporate style of management while Australia can adopt the best Indian traditions of decentralized participatory and community management for sustainable irrigation water management.     

A multi-instance cancelable fingerprint biometric based secure session key agreement protocol employing elliptic curve cryptography and a double hash function

Multimedia Tools and Applications - The generation of cryptographic keys using the biometric features of both communicating parties throughout the sessions of communication avoids the process of...     

Ultrasound–assisted synthesis and characterization of polymethyl methacrylate/reduced graphene oxide nanocomposites

This article reports ultrasound–assisted synthesis of polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA)/reduced graphene oxide (RGO) nanocomposites by in situ emulsion polymerization coupled with in situ reduction of graphene oxide. The thermal degradation kinetics of the nanocomposites was also assessed with Criado and Coats‐Redfern methods. Intense microconvection generated by ultrasound and cavitation results in uniform dispersion of RGO in the polymer matrix, which imparts markedly higher physical properties to resulting nanocomposites at low (≤1.0 wt %) RGO loadings, as compared to nanocomposites synthesized with mechanical stirring. Some important properties of the PMMA/RGO nanocomposites synthesized with sonication (with various RGO loadings) are: glass transition temperature (0.4 wt %) = 124.5°C, tensile strength (0.4 wt %) = 40.4 MPa, electrical conductivity (1.0 wt %) = 2 × 10^?7 S/cm, electromagnetic interference shielding effectiveness (1.0 wt %) = 3.3 dB. Predominant thermal degradation mechanism of nanocomposites (1.0 wt % RGO) is 1D diffusion with activation energy of 111.3 kJ/mol. © 2017 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 64: 673–687, 2018     

Design of Sierpinski gasket fractal microstrip antenna using real coded genetic algorithm

A novel technique for designing Sierpinski gasket fractal microstrip antenna is proposed. In the absence of any available closed-form formulae, this scheme uses an evolutionary method, based on real coded genetic algorithm (RCGA) in conjunction with electromagnetic simulations. This method determines the side-length and the fractal iteration number of the antenna, for operation at 4.56, 7.51 and 11.78 GHz. The design simulation of the antenna uses two different RCGA implementation strategies. The Adewuya mating with Gaussian mutation is the basis for the first one, whereas the second one uses heuristic crossover in conjunction with non-uniform mutation. Converging results, from these two strategies to those obtained from experiments on fabricated prototypes, validate the proposed method.     

Stress-intensity factors for a cruciform crack with equal arm in an infinite elastic strip of finite thickness

The stress-intensity factors and the crack energy for a cruciform crack with equal arm, in an infinite elastic strip of finite thickness have been determined by solving the corresponding boundary value problem by using the Fourier Transform technique. The dual integral equations generated by using the necessary boundary conditions have been reduced to solving a pair of integral equations of Fredholm type involving two unknown functions. The integral equations have been solved by a numerical technique and the formulae for determining the quantities of physical interest have been expressed in terms of the solutions of the integral equations. Numerical results for these physical quantities have been furnished at the end for different values of the thickness of the strip.     

A novel DNA-inspired encryption strategy for concealing cloud storage

Over the last few years, the need of a cloud environment with the ability to detect illegal behaviours along with a secured data storage capability has increased largely. This study presents such a secured cloud storage framework comprising of a deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) based encryption key which has been generated to make the framework unbreakable, thus ensuring a better and secured distributed cloud storage environment. Furthermore, this work proposes a novel DNAbased encryption technique inspired by the biological characteristics of DNA and the protein synthesis mechanism. The introduced DNA based model also has an additional advantage of being able to decide on selecting suitable storage servers from an existing pool of storage servers on which the data must be stored. A fuzzy-based technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) multi-criteria decisionmaking (MCDM) model has been employed to achieve the above-mentioned goal. This can decide the set of suitable storage servers and also results in a reduction in execution time by keeping up the level of security to an improved grade. This study also investigates and analyzes the strength of the proposed S-Box and encryption technique against some standard criteria and benchmarks, such as avalanche effect, correlation coefficient, information entropy, linear probability, and differential probability etc. After the avalanche effect analysis, the average change in cipher-text has been found to be 51.85%. Moreover, thorough security, sensitivity and functionality analysis show that the proposed scheme guarantees high security with robustness.     

A unique coordination chemistry of sodium

A new coordination chemistry of sodium has been developed by complexing it with a non-chelating neutral nitrogen donor ligand hexamethylenetetramine (urotropine) in presence of cadmium(II) iodide and the new coordination compound has been characterized by X-ray single crystal structural analysis.     

Electrostatic charge distribution and capacitance of isolatedcylinders and truncated cones in free space

The capacitance and charge distribution of an isolated hollow conducting cylinder of finite length are evaluated. The analysis is based on replacing the charged cylinder by a charged filament along its axis and on the moment method formulation. The numerical results are compared with those determined from the evaluation of the integral for the potential and data of R.F. Harrington (see Field Computation by Moment Method, Krieger Publishing Company, 1985). The method is used to evaluate the variation of capacitance and charge distribution of a hollow conducting truncated cone with its smaller radius. The validity of the analysis is established from a comparison of data for the smaller radius approaching the large radius when the truncated cone becomes a cylinder