Effects of enzymes in diets with varying energy levels on growth and egg production performance of Japanese quail

The present study was conducted to evaluate the effect of feed‐grade enzyme supplementation in diets with varying levels of energy on the performance of growing and laying Japanese quails. Day‐old Japanese quails, 504 in number, were subjected to six dietary treatments with six replicates at each treatment. Each replicate had 14 chicks. The dietary treatments consisted of three energy levels ie 12.15 MJ (2900 kcal), 11.30 MJ (2700 kcal) and 10.48 MJ (2500 kcal) ME kg^?1 diet and two enzyme levels (0 and 0.5 g kg^?1 diet). A metabolism trial was conducted at the fourth week of age. At the end of week 5, 10 quails (five of each sex) per treatment were sacrificed for carcass characteristics and 20 female quails from each of the six dietary groups were housed in individual laying cages and fed respective layer diet to study the laying performance and egg quality up to 20 weeks of age. Body weight gains of quails fed 12.15 MJ or 11.30 MJ ME kg^?1 diets were significantly higher (p < 0.01) than those fed diets with 10.46 MJ ME kg^?1 diet. Feed intake was significantly lower (p < 0.01) in birds that received diet with 12.15 MJ ME kg^?1 than in birds that diets containing either 11.30 or 10.46 MJ ME kg^?1 diet. Feed conversion ratio (p < 0.01) was best at 12.15, followed by 11.30 and 10.46 MJ ME kg^?1 diet. Enzyme supplementation did not improve the growth performance, feed intake or feed conversion efficiency of quails. Enzyme addition also did not influence nitrogen retention or energy or dry matter metabolizability. The carcass characteristics did not differ because of energy or enzyme supplementation. Feed intake increased significantly (p < 0.01) as the dietary energy level decreased. The egg production and quality characteristics remained almost similar in all the dietary treatments. It was concluded that the optimum dietary energy level for quail was 12.15 MJ (2900 kcal) ME kg^?1 during the growing phase and 11.30 MJ (2700 kcal) ME kg^?1 during the laying phase. Addition of feed enzymes to conventional diets containing varying levels of maize, soyabean meal, fish meal and deoiled rice bran was not beneficial to improve growth, carcass traits, egg production performance or nutrient utilization. Copyright © 2004 Society of Chemical Industry     

Legal counselling system

Legal reasoning involves case analysis in statutory as well as real world perspectives. The impact of real world perspective on case analysis poses a serious challenge to knowledge engineers for building legal expert systems. A legal expert system intends to provide intelligent support to legal professionals. The proposed legal predictive system is an attempt to predict the most probable outcome of a case according to statutory as well as real world knowledge of the legal domain. The system accepts the current fact situation of a case and analyses it interactively with legal personnel. This work introduces a frame-like knowledge structure,lattice, with two-dimensional attributes. This paper contains a detailed discussion on artificial intelligence-based case analysis of theft cases in a real world perspective.     

Ferromagnetic resonance characterization of magnetostrictive metallic glass coatings

Amorphous ferromagnetic alloys are a promising class of materials that have been successfully used as magnetostrictive elements in fiber optic magnetic sensors. We have used ferromagnetic resonance (FMR) at about 9.5 GHz to characterize highly magnetostrictive film coatings of the amorphous ferromagnetic alloy Fe₈₁B_13.5Si_3.5C_2.R.f. sputtering was used to prepare films 0.1–0.6 μm thick on glass substrates and cladded single-mode optical fibers of diameter approximately 80 μm. Because of its inherent sensitivity, the FMR technique is shown to be an excellent non-destructive probe for investigating microscopic as well as macroscopic structural inhomogeneities that may arise from the fabrication process itself, subsequent handling or thermal aging of the coatings. An added advantage of the FMR technique is that it also allows a simultaneous measurement of such material parameters as the saturation magnetostriction coefficient, the saturation magnetization, the g factor and the uniaxial magnetic anisotropy energy. The effect of thermal annealing on some of these properties is also reported.     

High voltage electron microscope irradiation and observations in metallic glasses

High voltage electron microscope (hvem) has been extensively used to produce radiation damage and to study the characteristics of defects so produced in crystalline solids. To understand the defect production in metallic glasses and to evaluate the influence of such defects on physical properties like crystallisation temperature etc., high voltage microscopy and subsequentin situ heating and observation has been extremely useful technique. This paper gives a qualitative overview of such work performed in metallic glasses. In particular results obtained on a nickel based metallic glass using ahvem and an electron accelerator are presented. The advantages and limitations ofhvem irradiation are highlighted.     

A cold standby system with arrival time of server and correlated failures and repairs

This paper presents the analysis of a two unit cold standby system with random arrival time of a server. The failure and repair times of each unit are assumed to be correlated and their joint density is taken as bivariate exponential. Using the regenerative point technique, various reliability characteristics of the system have been obtained. The behaviour of MTSF and steady state availability have also been studied through graphs.     

Effect of temperature on the removal of lead(II) by adsorption on China clay and wollastonite

The removal of Pb(II) from aqueous solution by adsorption on china clay and wollastonite is an attractive process. The amount of Pb(II) removed by adsorption is highly dependent on the temperature of the adsorbate solution and favours low temperature. The equilibrium times were noted, i.e. 90 min for china clay and 120 min for wollastonite. The various rate parameters of the adsorption process have been determined at different temperatures. The activation energies were determined and found to be ?5.345 kJ mol^?1 and ?8.730 kJ mol^?1 for Pb(II)-china clay and Pb(II)-wollastonite systems, respectively. The adsorption isotherm was measured experimentally at various temperatures. The negative values of enthalpy change (ΔH = ?77.95 kJ mol^?1 and ?16.40 kJ mol^?1 for china clay and wollastonite, respectively) indicate the exothermic nature of the adsorption processes for both systems. The isosteric heats of the adsorption process have been determined at various surface coverages of the adsorbents used. The various thermodynamic parameters have been calculated to elucidate the mechanism involved in the adsorption process.     

Reliability analysis of a three-state multi-component warm standby redundant complex system with waiting for repair

Investigations have been carried out with the help of Laplace transforms and supplementary variable techniques for the evaluation of reliability analysis of a three-state multi-component warm standby redundant complex system suffering three types of failures, namely minor, major, and human due to critical human errors incorporating the concept of waiting for repair.     

Paralytic poliomyelitis (1989-1994): report from a sentinel center

OBJECTIVE: To study the trends of paralytic poliomyelitis in pre Pulse Polio Immunization period. SETTING: Hospital based sentinel surveillance. METHODS: Analysis of 6704 line-listed poliomyelitis cases from January 1989 to December 1994 attending the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. RESULTS: 85% of all cases reported in Delhi were from this center. A decline in alternate year peaks was observed from 1621 cases in 1990 to 1062 cases in 1994. There was an increase in proportion of cases with poliomyelitis in fully vaccinated children from 14% to 22.9%. Polio type I virus was the commonest isolated virus in all the years except 1993, when type II was isolated in 38.7% of cases. CONCLUSION: Despite improvement in immunization coverage, the study reveals that a large number of children (67.2%) who suffer from poliomyelitis are unvaccinated. This stresses need to intensify and sustain high level of immunization coverage with effective vaccine.     

Linear and non-linear optical transmission from multi-walled carbon nanotubes

The multi walled carbon nanotubes grown by the CVD technique were suspended in methanol and their linear and non-linear transmission properties have been studied. It is observed that the linear transmission spectrum, measured in the range 450–1100 nm, depicts features similar to those of single walled nanotubes. The observed features may be well characterized as the van-Hove singularities of the one-dimensional electronic density of states. Further, excellent non-linear optical properties have been observed in these suspensions. Experiments are conducted to study the optical limiting behavior in the visible (532 nm) as well as in the near infra-red (1064 nm) region by using a dual beam pulsed pump-CW probe, technique. The grown multi walled carbon nanotubes show a strong limiting behavior at both of these wavelengths. The recovery time as observed from the probe beam transmission is measured at different values of the incident pulse energy. The results are discussed in the light of the existing results.