Fairfield , H. and Smith, M.S.A. (1936) A discriminant function for plant selection. Annals of Human Genetics, 7 (3). pp. 240-250.
|
PDF
- Published Version
| Preview |
Abstract
If you run into Jay Panda at a party, and there's no party in the city where he doesn't get invited, you'll find it hard to believe his profession is politics. He carries an O2 palmtop mobile that doubles as his moving theatre where the last movie that was playing was Bridget Jones's Diary; he's a techno-junkie who spends two to six hours surfing the World Wide Web, his favourites websites being c-net.com and cedmagazine.com, and answering 100-150 e-mails using the Groove collaboration software, which he says is going to be "the next big thing" in the virtual world; he has been a Wall Street analyst and a restaurant developer in New York, before he returned home, inspired by Rajiv Gandhi, the man he calls "the Kennedy of our generation"; he has owned a computer since 1984, when he got his first Apple Mac, and from 1994, a laptop has been his constant companion. That's the other side of the Rajya Sabha MP, founder-member of the Biju Janata Dal led by the Orissa Chief Minister Navin Patnaik, and one of the moving spirits of the Back Benchers Club, which has been re-named the Young Parliamentarians Forum, comprising 31 MPs from nine parties. "I haven't entered the Rajya Sabha to attain social prominence. It's the culmination of my efforts to build a political party and to make a difference," says the MP, obviously aware of the reputation that many of his colleagues in the Rajya Sabha have acquired for being fixers during the day and party animals at night. Panda is a natty dresser who insists his clothes are off the shelf, "except for a couple of suits made by my good friend Ravi Bajaj". He's endowed with poster-boy good looks, and his wife, Jagjit Mangat Panda, a Jat Sikh from Secunderabad known among friends as Jagi, is a Gladrags Supermodel who quit the Paris runway after the French couturier Jean-Paul Gaultier asked her to shave off her hair for one of his shows (now she manages their broad-band network that reaches 60,000 homes in Bhubaneswar, Cuttack, Rourkela, Paradip and Puri). But he insists he's not fussy about his looks, or his grooming. "Fitness is more important than grooming," he says. Then he tells us that he spends an hour every day at his home gym's cross-trainer. A keen reader of The Economist, which he says is the only thing he'd like to have in case he gets marooned in a deserted island, Panda enjoys quoting Vilfredo Pareto, the Italian neo-classical economist, who postulated that 20 per cent of the market gives a business 80 per cent of its revenue. Extending this argument to his public life, he says that 5 per cent of it, which he spends circulating in parties and attending wine dinners, shouldn't blur the remaining 95 per cent. "Judge me by my participation in the Rajya Sabha, judge me by what my party people say about me. I work very hard to be taken seriously," says the Engineering & Management Communications graduate from Michigan Tech, which, incidentally, is also his father's old school. Panda's association with politics began unconsciously when Biju Patnaik, the charismatic Orissa politician whose son now leads the state, hosted a reception in London to celebrate the marriage of his parents in 1959. His father, Dr Bansidhar Panda, was then a research scientist with US Steel making special metals for NASA's space programme; his mother, Ila, a student of Nandlal Bose in Santiniketan, was a textile designer supplying to Liberty, the prestigious London store on Regent Street, decades before fashion designers attained their current celebrity status. When Biju Patnaik, who, as Panda tells me, cycled from Cuttack to Kabul when he was a teenager, before becoming an aviator, an entrepreneur and a mass leader, took charge as the Chief Minister of Orissa in 1961, he encouraged Dr Bansidhar Panda to return home and start his own business. The Indian Metals & Ferro Alloys, which makes silicon and chrome alloys, took six years to establish itself; today, it employs 4,500-5,000 people in eight districts across Orissa and its annual turnover has touched Rs 450 crore. Panda, after turning his back to a life spent with the jet-set in Manhattan, joined his father in 1989, revamped the company completely, commissioned and operated a power plant just outside Cuttack, and within two years he was prepared to "give up and go back" for he was spending "80 per cent" of his time "running after bureaucrats and politicians." It was Manmohan Singh's first Budget speech that made him stay back and he was getting increasingly drawn into politics. There was need for change, but the change agent was missing. Panda and people like him had been telling Biju Patnaik to launch a regional party to address local aspirations, but it was only after Navin Patnaik's entry into politics after his father's death that the move gathered momentum. "The people of Orissa have this innate faith that anyone from Biju Patnaik's family can never sell the state," says Panda. It is this faith that made Panda give up his active association with his father's company to become a professional politician who'd like to be known as "a serious young man who takes his work very seriously." That's a career objective not many MPs seem to have these days. THE characters with which a plant breeder is principally concerned are those known as “ quantitative characters ”. They present particular difficulty because heritable variations are masked by larger non-heritable variations which make it difficult to determine the genotypic values of individual plants or lines unless we have sufficient seed and facilities to grow replicated plots of each line. In the earlier stages of selection breeders try to select plants in the field on the basis of observable characters which they believe may be associated with the desired character or quality (for example, grain and ear sizes as indices to yielding ability, or flintiness of grain as an index of protein content), but the actual worth to be attributed to each character is usually unknown. The problem may be ap- proached by seeking to determine what “discriminant function ” (Fisher, 1936) of the observable characters may best indicate the (‘genetic value” of a plant or line.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | SNNigam Collection |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | Discriminant function, Plant Selection |
| Author Affiliation: | Division of Plant Industry, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Canberra, Australia |
| Subjects: | Plant Production Crop Improvement |
| Divisions: | Chickpea Groundnut Millet Pigeonpea Sorghum |
| Depositing User: | Mr Arbind Seth |
| Date Deposited: | 03 Apr 2013 08:54 |
| Last Modified: | 03 Apr 2013 08:54 |
| Official URL: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-1809.1936.tb02143... |
| URI: | http://eprints.icrisat.ac.in/id/eprint/10179 |
Actions (login required)
 |
View Item |
