Search

The development of Ganajeevamrutha and Jeevamrutha, two natural farming additives, required the identification of an effective combination of cow dung and cow urine. In this study, cow dung and urine samples were taken from desi cows (Gir) and cross breeds (HF) and analysed for total bacterial, fungal, actinomycete population, and nutritional status (N, P and K). In terms of bacterial population (50 x 106 cfu/ g of sample), fungal population (29 x 104 cfu/g of sample), actinomycetes population (9.3 x 103 cfu/g of sample), and nutrients status (N (0.532 percent), P (0.173 percent), and K (0.182 percent), samples from desi cow dung had a higher number of microflora population. As a result, it is regarded as the desi cow dung and urine is ideal cultural material for preparing Ganajeevamrutha and Jeevarutha.

In a variety of problem domains, it has been observed that the aggregate opinions of groups are often more accurate than those of the constituent individuals, a phenomenon that has been termed the "wisdom of the crowd." Yet, perhaps surprisingly, there is still little consensus on how generally the phenomenon holds, how best to aggregate crowd judgements, and how social influence affects estimates. We investigate these questions by taking a meta wisdom of crowds approach. With a distributed team of over 100 student researchers across 17 institutions in the United States and India, we develop a large-scale online experiment to systematically study the wisdom of crowds effect for 1,000 different tasks in 50 subject domains. These tasks involve various types of knowledge (e.g., explicit knowledge, tacit knowledge, and prediction), question formats (e.g., multiple choice and point estimation), and inputs (e.g., text, audio, and video). To examine the effect of social influence, participants are randomly assigned to one of three different experiment conditions in which they see varying degrees of information on the responses of others. In this ongoing project, we are now preparing to recruit participants via Amazon?s Mechanical Turk.