Archives-J 

Good agricultural practices (GAP) are Practices that address environmental, economic and social sustainability for on-farm processes and result in safe and quality food and non-food agricultural products. In simple language, GAP stands on four pillars (economic viability, environmental sustainability, social acceptability and food safety and quality). In recent years, the concept of GAP has evolved to address the concerns of different stakeholders about food production and security, food safety and quality, and the environmental sustainability of agriculture. These stakeholders include governments, food retailing industries, farmers and consumers who seek to meet specific objectives of food safety, food production, production efficiency, livelihood and environmental benefits. Adoption of a sustainable practice means that the farmer has accepted the idea as good and that he intends to include it in the ongoing program of land preparation, planting, and harvesting. In other words, adoption is the implementation and continued use of an agriculture practice. This is an important difference from trial or experimentation, because a farmer might try a sustainable practice and abandon that practice. Adoption of sustainable practices by farmers is the key to transforming agriculture into a long-term, sustainable system. How far sustainability can be achieved in a democracy depends greatly on farmers’ voluntary acceptance of sound land use practices. Individual decisions are shaped by the availability of technical information and the appropriate machinery, seeds, and other inputs necessary to implement sustainable agricultural practices. This paper reviews literature on the good agricultural practices that promote sustainable food security.

This article (who's most parts are taken from Mr. Md. Baharuddin Bin Abdul Rahman PhD thesis proposal U.S.M, 2007-2014) to discuss about an introduction of Project Based Learning (PjBL) process. This paper also focuses for the development of engineering product by implementation of PjBL module (prefer to PjBL model & theory). This pilot testing of Project-Based Learning (PjBL) module that was significant with research proved of success in the engineering products/projects development and typical of socio-constructivist with positive impact in student approaches.

Population based stochastic search techniques inspired by nature has attracted much attention recently as an effective approach for solving numerical optimization problems. Two of the most commonly used population-based global optimization algorithms are PSO and DE. Although both have been successfully applied to a wide range of test and real life problems but they have certain shortcomings associated with them. Since DE utilizes the differential information to get the new candidate solution, sometimes it results in instability of performance. Again DE has no mechanism to memory the previous process and use the global information about the search space, so it results in a waste of computing power and may get trapped in local optima. Although PSO converges quickly but, easily gets stuck in local optima because of loss of diversity of swarm. In this paper a simple hybrid version of DEPSO has proposed. DEPSO combines the differential information obtained by DE with six mutation policies and the memory information extracted by PSO to create the promising solutions. Again a time decreasing parameter tuning has been proposed which brings in a significant improvement of the performance of DEPSO. Performances are presented through the tests of four complex benchmark functions with three different dimensionalities. The experimental results show that the convergence rates and qualities of solutions are greatly improved.

Investigation of the sandwich structures under bending has an important role to understanding the composite structures stability. Bending behavior of sandwich structures has a wide range of applications in science, engineering and technology. In this study the effects of core shape, cell wall height, wall thickness and skin thickness on critical bending load of honeycomb sandwich panels have been investigated. The other parameters of sandwich panel supposed constant during all analyses. The finite element simulation has been carried out with using of ABAQUS software and results were compared with experimental results. After that design of experiment based on Taguchi method has been carried out for understanding the effect of investigated parameters on maximizing the critical bending load. Eventually, the effect of parameters has been investigated with using of ANOVA.

Despite the increasing attention of organizational commitment in the management literature, most studies predominantly focus on full-time workers in traditional work settings. The results of this study highlight important directions for implementing strategies to increase casual academic’s organizational commitment. Organization commitment is important because it is known association with other important organizational variables such as turnover, absenteeism and work effort. This study provides the first step in better understanding the factors that affect the organization commitment

The principal objective of this paper is to investigate the behavior and load carrying capacity of reinforced concrete (indirectly loaded flanged deep beams) strengthened with carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) strips in shear. Using three types of concrete (normal strength concrete, high strength concrete, light weight concrete) group three consists of five indirectly loaded flanged deep beams (with light weight concrete) to investigate the effect of different strengthening case on the behavior and load carrying capacity of the deep beam like, three sides strengthening with CFRP (V shape), and strengthening the two opposite sides of deep beam, one side strengthening of deep beam, (L shape) strengthening.

In this paper, a tuberculosis disease population model with time delays is investigated. The linear stability of the equilibrium and the existence of Hopf bifurcation with delay is investigated. Numerical simulations for justifying the theoretical results are illustrated. Finally, main conclusions are given.

With increasing demand for steel and depletion of high-grade iron ore deposits, more research efforts are being directed toward extending the life of existing ore reserves and developing technology to treat low-grade iron ore resources. Interaction between Bacillus subtilis and iron ore minerals such iron oxide and, quartz brought about significant surface chemical changes. Quartz was rendered more hydrophilic, while iron oxide became more hydrophobic mineral after bacterial interaction. The surface properties were studied using zeta potential, SEM, adhesion of strains to the minerals’ surface and contact angle. In this work Bacillus subtilis was isolated from Egyptian iron ore surface. The results revealed that a strong interaction was occurred. A concentrate contains 90.88% Fe2O3 [64 % Fe (total)] and 4.46% SiO2 was obtained through bio-flotation from a feed contains 70.04% Fe2O3 [49.33% Fe (total)] and 21.18% SiO2.

Thambraparani River empties in Arabian Sea at Punnakayal area and forms the Punnakayal estuary and it is situated in Tuticorin, South east coast of India. Mangroves are abundant in this area especially Avicennia sp. Diversity of marine fungi colonizing the drift wood samples collected from the intertidal regions at different season of the Punnakayal mangrove environment was studied. They are categorized into rare (0-25% frequency), occasional (26-50% frequency), frequent (51-75% frequency) and common (76-100% frequency) species. A total number of 62 species of fungi under 33 genera were recorded from the drift wood samples. They were assigned to Deuteromycetes (46 species), Ascomycetes (14 species), Trichomycetes (1 species) and Basidiomycetes (1 species).

Environmental pollution has been a major irritant to industrial development. Chemical and chemical based industries are prime targets of the environmentalists for their crusade against pollution. Leather industry contributes to one of the major industrial pollution with the generation of pollutants causing chemicals namely lime, sodium sulphide, salts, organic solvents and phenolic compound. Leather industry has faced serious challenges on phenolic compounds. Thus this work focused on evaluation of biodegradation of phenol by using microaerophilic bacterial consortium to overcome the deleterious effect of chemical effluents to the environment. This biodegradation process will be ecofriendly and cost effective. This could be one of the ways of solving the industrial pollution resulting from tannery effluent. Tannery effluent with high phenol level fed in both batch reactor and continuous reactor by using sustainable Microaerophilic Bacterial consortia to degrade the phenolic compounds.