No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Road safety has become a worldwide public health concern. Although many factors contribute to collisions, pedestrian behaviors can strongly influence road safety outcomes. This paper presents results of a survey investigating the effects of age, gender, attitudes towards road safety, fatalistic beliefs and risk perceptions on self-reported pedestrian behaviors in a Chinese example. The study was carried out on 543 participants (229 men and 314 women) from 20 provinces across China. Pedestrian behaviors were assessed by four factors: errors, violations, aggressions, and lapses. Younger people reported performing riskier pedestrian behaviors compared to older people. Gender was not an influential factor. Of the factors explored, attitudes towards road safety explained the most amount of variance in self-reported behaviors. Significant additional variance in risky pedestrian behaviors was explained by the addition of fatalistic beliefs. The differences among the effects, and the implications for road safety intervention design, are discussed. In particular, traffic managers can provide road safety education and related training activities to influence pedestrian behaviors positively.

Wireless power transfer systems have been widely applied in the field of portable and implantable devices, featuring contact-free and reliable energy supply. Novel implant systems, such as brain-computer interfaces, impose the challenges of strong miniaturization and operation under loosely coupled conditions. Therefore, maximizing power transfer efficiency while decreasing the size of transmitter and receiver structures becomes a central research question. This paper presents a unified design strategy of modeling, analyzing and optimizing planar spiral coils with integrated capacitive elements, so-called capacitively segmented coils, for operation in wireless power transfer interfaces. It mathematically analyzes and experimentally verifies that the combination of capacitive coil segmentation, increased operational frequencies and geometrical coil optimization can be used to establish wireless power transfer links with comparatively high efficiency, small size and limited detuning effects in lossy dielectric environments. The paper embraces the formulation and verification of a broadband analytical link model based on partial element equivalent circuits, which is subsequently used to determine dominant coupling and loss mechanisms and to optimize the coils' geometries for high efficiency. Moreover, an extended analysis shows how the capacitive coil segmentation can effectively suppress dielectric losses and non-uniform current distributions by canceling the inductive contribution of every coil segment at the frequency of operation. Utilizing these methods, an exemplary 40.68 MHz wireless power link with a 30 mm primary and a 10 mm secondary coil is designed and evaluated: With a maximum efficiency of up to 31 % in biological tissue at 20 mm separation distance, it features efficiency levels which are up to ten times higher and a specific absorption rate which is up to five times lower compared to non-segmented systems. When operated at 150 MHz in air, efficiency levels are up to 1.5 times higher than in state-of-the-art systems of the same size.

| Escherichia coli is one of the common microbial flora of poultry gut. Most of E. coli isolates are nonpathogenic but are considered to be an indicator of fecal contamination in food industry. A study was carried-out on the prevalence, incidence, isolation and antibiogram of E. coli from table eggs. A total of 100 table eggs were collected from various locations of district Peshawar, Pakistan and divided into three parts viz., the egg-yolk, egg-white and eggshell. These were cultured on different media and identified organism was subjected to antibiogram study using the disk diffusion method. The overall prevalence of E. coli was found as 37%. While, incidence was recorded as 15% in eggshells, 12% in egg-whites and 10% in egg-yolks. It was concluded that the table eggs were contaminated with E. coli and higher incidence of E. coli was recorded in eggshells as compared to other components of the eggs. The antibiotics ciprofloxacin and enrofloxacin were recorded highly active against E. coli.

No abstract

Environmental heat stress is one of the most challenging conditions which have adverse effect on the poultry industry. Broiler chickens are sensitive to heat stress mainly due to not having sweat glands. The current study was conducted to observe the effect of heat stress on performance of Ross-308 broiler chickens. 1600 Ross-308 broiler day old chicks were obtained from local hatchery and randomly divided into two groups, the heat stress group A (n=800) and heat free group B (n=800). Group A was reared in high temperature (101 0 F) whereas group B was reared in ideal temperature. To evaluate the physiological stress indicators blood glucose levels and total blood cell count were checked on day 21 and 28. The parameters observed were; feed intake, body weight gain, feed conversion ratio, water intake and carcass yield. The results indicated that feed intake, weight gain, water intake, feed conversion ratio and carcass yield were significantly higher in group B compared to group A. It was concluded that heat stress has deleterious effect over the performance of broiler Ross-308 chicken.