Field experiments were conducted in Ethiopia to evaluate the effect of silicon fertilizer and sugarcane bagasse on tomato bacterial wilt (Ralstonia solanacearum). Silicon fertilizer significantly reduced the bacterial population, mean wilt incidence, percent severity index, and corresponding areas of disease incidence, and severity progress curves in the moderately resistant tomato cultivar (King Kong 2). Similarly, sugarcane bagasse resulted in a significant reduction of mean wilt and percent severity index, the corresponding areas under disease incidence and severity progress curves and the bacterial population at 5 days post inoculation, compared to the control, in cultivar King Kong 2. However, neither silicon fertilizer nor sugarcane bagasse resulted in any significant reduction of all disease parameters in the moderately susceptible cultivar Marglobe. Silicon fertilizer and sugarcane bagasse amendments also increased fruit yield for cultivar King Kong 2, but not for cultivar Marglobe. The total silicon content was also significantly increased in silicon fertilizer amendment, followed by sugarcane bagasse amended plants. The study recommends use of silicon fertilizer as a soil amendment under field conditions to augment resistance in moderately resistant cultivars where bacterial wilt disease problems prevail. However, a silicon fertilizer or silicon source was not found to substantiate or improve a susceptible cultivar. Sugarcane bagasse was demonstrated to possess a potential as an alternative soil amendment material and as an alternative silicon source.

Combining ability and heterosis were studied in a 7×7 half diallel cross in maize for grain yield and yield contributing characters. Significant general and specific combining ability variances were observed for all the characters studied. The significant estimates of GCA and SCA variances suggested the importance of both additive and non-additive gene actions for the expression studied traits. In these studies, variances due to SCA were higher than GCA for all charactesr, which revealed the predominance of non additive gene action (dominance and epistasis) for controlling these traits. Parents P 1 and P 4 were excellent general combiner for days to tasseling and silking while P 1 and P 5 for early maturity. P 4 for short height and, P 4 and P 7 for higher thousand kernel weight. The parents P 4 and P 6 having good combining abilities for yield. Heterosis estimation was carried out using two commercial varieties NK40 and 900MG. When standard commercial check NK40 was used, the percent heterosis for kernel yield varied from -51.39 to 12.53%. Among the 21 F 1 s, 3crosses exhibited significant positive heterosis for kernel yield. The highest heterosis was exhibited by the cross P 4 ×P 6 (12.43%), P 6 ×P 7 (10.89%) and P 2 ×P 3 (9.87%) respectively. Compared with 900MG as check, the percent heterosis for kernel yield varied from -53.73 to 7.01%. Among the 21 F 1 s, none of the crosses exhibited significant positive heterosis for kernel yield. The highest heterosis were exhibited by the crosses P 4 ×P 6 (7.01%), P 6 x P 7 (5.55%) and P 2 ×P 3 (4.57%). The crosses showed significant positive SCA values could be used for variety development after verifying them across the agro-ecological zones of Bangladesh.

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Understanding the genetic relationships and diversity of Ethiopian lentil in relation to lentil from other countries is important in attempting to widen the genetic base of germplasm in the country. The objectives of this study were to generate information on agromorphological variability, to estimate PCV, GCV, heritability, and expected genetic advance of quantitative traits of lentil. 228 genotypes with different population types were studied for 11 agromorphological traits and rust disease severity score for two seasons (2011-2012) over three locations. The analysis of variance showed highly significant variations (P≤0.01) among genotypes for all characters studied. As per genetic parameter values, four groups of character were deduced. It is inferred that the exotic genotypes introduced from ICARDA showed rich genetic bases for 100-seed weight, number of seeds per plant, seed weight per plant, resistance source for rust, and high yielder in high yielding environment, where rainfall is not a major problem. Use the Ethiopian accessions for developing cultivars that could be used in double cropping and drought prone areas.

Predicting students" academic performance is very crucial especially for higher educational institutions. This paper designed an application to assist higher education institutions to predict their students" academic performance at an early stage before graduation and decrease students" dropout. The performance of the students was measured based on cumulative grade point average (CGPA) at semester eight. The students" course scores for core and non-core courses from the first semester to the sixth semester are used as predictor variables for predicting the final CGPA8 upon graduation using Neural Network (NN), Support Vector Regression(SVR), and Linear Regression (LR). The study has verified that data mining techniques can be used in predicting students" academic performance in higher educational institutions. All the experiments gave valid results and can be used to predict graduation CGPA. However, comparisons of the experiments were done to determine which approaches perform better than others. Generally, SVR and LR methods performed better than NN. Therefore, we recommend the adoption of SVR and LR methods to predict final CGPA8, and the models can also be used to implement Student Performance Prediction System(SPPS) in a university. Thus, the study has used the models from SVR and LR methods for designing an application to do the prediction task.