FDR

This article seeks to demonstrate the underlying ideological similarities between President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Depression-era political rhetoric and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Captains Courageous (1937), an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s 1897 novel of the same title. Rather than claim a simple causal relationship between FDR’s oratorical calls for socio-economic reform and M-G-M’s cinematic tale of cooperative teamwork in the face of adversity, the authors make the more modest assertion that the president’s mid-1930s discourse is echoed in, and mediated by, director Victor Fleming’s contemporaneous production. The film, which on the surface displays the hallmarks of a conservative cultural production, actually functions as a pro-collectivist, pro-New Deal message about the perils of dishonest, unbridled competition. In addition, Captains Courageous is suffused with audiovisual signifiers that are unexpectedly in tune with the sound design and mise-en-scene of ‘social realist’ films of the period. In making their case, the authors not only provide a reading of Captains Courageous that goes against conventional wisdom, but also pose a critical intervention in the traditional historiography of Depression-era film production, which has often neglected to account for this and other (admittedly anomalous) instances of pro-Roosevelt sentiments issuing forth from a studio that famously supported the Republican Party.

A field experiment with spilt plot design was carried out for standardization of Frequency Domain Reflectometry (FDR) and Watermark sensors in drip irrigated broccoli(Brassica oleracea var. italica). The experiment included three levels of irrigation frequencies: N1 (once every day), N2 (once every 2 days) and N3 (once every 3 days) with three irrigation regimes of 100, 80 and 60 % of crop evapotranspiration (ETc). For evaluating the performance of different soil moisture sensors, the sensors’ readings were taken from the plot on a daily basis and these readings were compared with gravimetric methods (standard). It was observed that the calibration of two sensors (FDR and Watermark) give a similar calibration equation with lowRMSE after field calibration. The value of coefficient of determination (R2) for FDR was observed 0.85, 0.86, 0.89 and 0.86 for 0-15, 15-30, 30-45 and 45-60 cm soil depth whereas, the value of coefficient of determination (R2) for Watermark sensor was observed as 0.76, 0.83, 0.84 and 0.85 for 0-15, 15-30, 30-45 and 45-60 cm soil depth, respectively. The Watermark sensor curves observed less sensitive at low soil water tension, whereas FDR sensors performed better in wet as well as dry conditions. That field calibration of soil moisture sensors is a prerequisite to measure soil moisture content in the soil.