In semi-arid areas, high climatic variability induce a major risk on food security. Therefore an operational forecasting system for the grain yields is required and could help decisionmakers to make early decisions and plan annual imports. It can be challenging to monitor the crop canopy and production capacity of plants, especially cereals. In this context, the aim of the present study is to a...

We extend the common theme of random Apollonian packing of circles to consider orientable grains with a noncircular shape. Systems of up to 10(6) grains are examined for a range of polygonal and elliptical shapes using both the random Apollonian packing model and the new rotational random Apollonian packing model which takes into account the extra rotational degree of freedom of noncircular gra...

Ductile compaction is common in many natural systems, but the temporal evolution of such systems is rarely studied. We observe surprising oscillations in the weight measured at the bottom of a self-compacting ensemble of ductile grains. The oscillations develop during the first ten hours of the experiment, and usually persist through the length of an experiment (one week). The weight oscillatio...

Over-exploitation of groundwater resources for irrigated grain production in Hebei province threatens national grain food security. The objective of this study was to quantify agricultural water consumption (AWC) and irrigation water consumption in this region. A methodology to estimate AWC was developed based on Penman-Monteith method using meteorological station data (1984-2008) and existing ...

Reducing water requirements and lowering environmental footprints require attention to minimize risks to food security. The present study was conducted with the aim to identify appropriate root traits enhancing rice grain yield under alternate wetting and drying conditions (AWD) and identify stable, high-yielding genotypes better suited to the AWD across variable ecosystems. Advanced breeding l...

Time-memory-data (TMD) tradeoff attacks limit the security level of many classical stream ciphers (like E0, A5/1, Trivium, Grain) to 2 n, where n denotes the inner state length of the underlying keystream generator. This implies that to withstand TMD tradeoff attacks, the state size should be at least double the key size. In 2015, Armknecht and Mikhalev introduced a new line of research, which ...

Quality of service (QoS) is increasingly being used to describe a broad collection of attributes, ranging from the performance-centric metrics used in the networking community to other metrics related to reliability, timeliness, and security. Moreover, QoS is also being applied to guarantees provided by a wider variety of services, ranging from communication services to higher level middleware ...

Food security has become an issue of serious concern because global food supplies are threatened by systemic collapse. increasing demand for food caused by global population growth, changing lifestyles in developing countries, climate change and competition with bio fuels are combining to create a ‘perfect storm’ (godfray et al, 2010). Moreover, short-term weather pattern changes leading to flo...

The digital electronics, embedded systems and wireless communications together result in wireless sensor networks. A general wireless sensor network consists of a number of sensors spread across a geographical area. Each sensor has wireless communication capability and sufficient intelligence for signal processing and networking of the data. So these networks have a wide range of potential appl...