This article traces the early stages of urban electrification in the French protectorate of Tonkin (in Vietnam’s north) from the late 1880s to the late 1920s. It focuses on Hanoi, where in 1895 the French entrepreneurs Hermenier and Planté secured a concession for lighting the streets of the soon-to-be capital of French Indochina. Before long, the city’s fast-paced development and the concomitant rise in demand for both public and private lighting necessitated contractual amendments and further capital investment in the upgrading of the power station and grid extensions. In 1902, Hermenier converted the business into a joint stock company named the Société Indochinoise d’Électricité with the aim of enabling further growth and geographical expansion. Contractual arrangements were frequently renegotiated and adjusted to new circumstances. However, electricity supplies kept lagging behind the fast pace of demand growth. During the post-First World War years of colonial economic expansion, power failures and blackouts became a routine occurrence and were a frequent target of press coverage. It was only in the late 1920s that electricity supplies improved and turned Hanoi into a city of lights. Although the majority of Vietnamese residents remained excluded from private electricity access throughout the colonial period, electric power quickly became a fact of everyday life for an emerging Vietnamese urban bourgeoisie and served as a marker of modern sophistication. Plans for an interconnected distribution network in the Tonkin delta subsequently also triggered hopes for an electrified future for the countryside.

The illuminance and spectral power distribution in 19 duckling and 16 turkey poult houses in the UK were sampled. Illuminance was highly variable within duckling houses and to a lesser extent in housing for turkey poults. In a free choice experiment, the preferences of commercial ducklings and turkey poults for four incandescent illuminances (<I, 6, 20 and 200 Ix; Osram, 60 W, Pearl) were tested at 2 and 6 weeks of age. Four replicate flocks of 12 birds were given continuous access to four compartments illuminated with each illuminance for six days. The illuminances were changed daily between the compartments. After two days of conditioning, the birds’ location and behaviour was recorded at 10 min intervals over 22 h. Nine and 12 defined behavioural categories were recorded for the ducklings and poults respectively. Ducklings spent significantly more time occupying the three brightest light environments both at 2 and 6 weeks of age, and the least time in the dimmest. Illuminance had a significant effect on the partition of behaviours amongst the light environments. At 2 weeks of age, locomotion and environmentally directed pecking occurred most often in 6, 20 and 200 lx, whereas at 6 weeks, preening and feeding also occurred more often in these light environments. At 6 weeks of age, resting, standing and drinking occurred significantly more often in 6 lx than in the dimmest environment. Turkeys spent most time in the brightest environment at 2 weeks of age, but in 20 and 200 Ix at 6 weeks. This change in overall preference was reflected in the partition of different behaviours between the light environments. At 2 weeks of age, all behaviours were observed to occur most often in 200 lx. At 6 weeks, resting and perching were observed least often in <I lx, whereas all other activities were observed more in the two brightest light environments. These results show that ducklings and turkey poults have significant but differing preferences for illuminance, and imply that some spatial or temporal variation in the ambient illuminance of housing would be consistent with their preferences.

Both the presence of slurry and dark conditions may deter dairy cows from using passageways in cubicle accommodation, thus restricting movement and normal behaviour. We attempted to train seven dairy cows to recognize the quantity of reward offered in a transparent tube containing molasses in a Y-maze. Only one cow failed to consistently select the aisle containing the larger reward. The cows were then individually offered the choice of traversing either a passageway with a 5cm-depth of cow excreta or a clean, dry passageway to collect their rewards. The quantity of the rewards on the two sides was varied between zero and 400ml of molasses to determine the price that the cows were prepared to pay for entering the aisle with excreta. Only two of the seven cows showed a clear avoidance of the passageway with excreta. There was a tendency (P < 0.1) for the cows to avoid the passageway with excreta only when it contained no reward and the clean passageway contained a reward of 400ml molasses. Otherwise, there was no clear avoidance of the passageway with excreta. We also investigated whether cows preferred to enter a lighted or unlighted passageway. All the cows, except one, showed a strong avoidance of the dark passage, even when it contained the largest reward and the lighted passage contained no reward. We conclude that dairy cows demonstrate only mild avoidance of passageways with excreta but strongly avoid passageways without lighting. Therefore, we suggest that passageways for dairy cows should be lit at all times.

Four aspects of lighting which may influence the behaviour and physiology of housed poultry are light intensity, photoperiod, light source and wavelength. These factors are frequently manipulated in an attempt to improve productivity and to facilitate management practices. This review examines the effects of such manipulation upon the welfare of the birds. The majority of papers on lighting in poultry houses deal with their effects upon performance, rather than on factors associated with behaviour and health which may impinge upon welfare. Data about the preferences of birds for different lighting conditions are almost entirely lacking, but the practice of housing birds in relatively low light intensity is considered likely to lead to sensory deprivation in species where vision is important. Tentative recommendations are given pending the results of future research as to appropriate light intensity, photoperiod and light sources for domestic poultry.

Two experiments were carried out to determine whether lighting conditions during handling affected heart rate or behaviour in farmed red deer. In Experiment 1 heart rate was measured in 24 individual deer, held under restraint in a mechanical deer crush for two minutes, under either dark (0lux) or light (1500lux) conditions. A stethoscope was used to monitor heartbeat which was indicated vocally by the stethoscope operator on to a Dictaphone. In Experiment 2, 10 groups of three deer were confined for four minutes in an unfamiliar 4×6m light-proof pen with lighting provided either on the left or right-hand side of the pen, to provide a gradient across the pen from approximately 12 to 1000lux. For the first two minutes the deer were alone and for the second two minutes a person stood in the pen. An infrared video camera was used to record behaviour.

In Experiment 1, heart rate was lower (P < 0.05) in the dark compared with in the light when recording commenced, thereafter it decreased overall with similar (P > 0.05) values observed for the different lighting treatments. In Experiment 2, the mean position of the groups across the pen varied according to whether lighting was on the left or right, with groups displaced to the right when the lights were on the left, and standing in the middle of the pen when the lights were on the right (P < 0.05). During testing, groups moved away from whichever side the lights were on (P < 0.05). The experiments suggested that stress during restraint was reduced by providing darkness and that deer preferred dim lighting compared with bright lighting when confined in unfamiliar surroundings.

In the rural areas of the eastern Amhara region where livelihoods are predominantly based on agriculture with almost all the rural people earning their income from agriculture, awareness toward clean energy, and efficient appliances is at a very infant stage. As an indication, the research comes up with energy utilization is mainly of biomass-based with traditional stoves of very low efficiency. However, the future demand of the community toward the clean and improved efficient appliances has got a better preference over other energy technologies. Regarding the factor in determining the energy and energy appliance type choice, accessibility is found as the major reason.

The type of energy sources and energy technologies utilized for cooking and lighting have their own effect on health, environmental degradation, and overall economic development. Therefore, the primary objective of this study was to analyze the general trend of household energy source and energy technology utilization in rural areas of the Eastern Amhara region. The study utilized primary and secondary data collected over stratified systematically sampled households and from energy experts in the area. The study examined the utilization of various forms of energy and energy technology for the most common household energy-intensive processes (injera baking and stew cooking) as well as lighting. The development of different estimates across the whole population of the study region to indicate the relations among different factors was done through different statistical approaches; and the finding of the analysis revealed that 57.7% of the energy share is biomass-based firewood from which 99.5% of this source was used only for food preparation. The two main determinant factors of the community in selecting the energy types are found to be accessibility and health impact.

Large area lighting OLEDs manufactured in a Roll-to-Roll (R2R) fashion enable the well-longed production capability with considerably high throughput based on flexible substrates, hence largely reduced OLED manufacturing cost. This paper will outline the present status of R2R OLED fabrication on ultra-thin glass with the focus on transparent OLED devices and how to perform segmentation by printing of silver- and dielectric pastes. Ultra-thin glass (UTG) is laminated on a PET film to avoid fabrication interruptions when glass cracks occur during the Roll-to-Roll process. The R2R fabricated flexible OLEDs also show key-values comparable to conventional OLEDs fabricated on small rigid glass in lab-scale.

The importance of the crop is often underestimated in poultry production. In addition to storing ingested feed, it also can impact nutrient digestion by digesta softening and the initial activity of feed (endogenous and exogenous) and microbial enzymes. The crop represents the first major defence against poultry pathogens and zoonotic organisms with well established adaptive and innate immune function, and a lactobacilli dominated microbiota capable of reducing the passage of these organisms further along the digestive tract. However, the potential to improve bird productivity and health, as well as affect meat and egg safety, are influenced by the nature of the diet, and in particular feed entry and extended presence in the crop. This is required to promote lactobacilli fermentation, the production of lactic acid and other volatile fatty acids, and the lowering of crop pH. Management practices such as meal feeding and the use of lighting programs with extended dark periods encourage crop utilisation. Further, the use of feed additives such as prebiotics and probiotics may enhance crop function, which in turn contributes to well-being of the entire digestive tract. A healthy and functional crop, along with other segments of digestive tract, has increased importance in an era of reduced antibiotic use in poultry feeds.

Photorefractoriness is a condition that was exhibited in all fowl before modern selection programmes were implemented. Expressed in its absolute biological form, it ensures that birds cannot hatch and then breed in the same season. This paper reviews the literature regarding the exhibition of photorefractoriness, within populations and between genders, in avian species. Photorefractoriness has been eliminated in commercial laying hens, and the possibility of selecting against this in broiler breeders is investigated, as it would result in increased egg output and fertility, especially in operations in which it is not possible to rear these birds on short (<10 h) days.

The aim of this research was to clarify and quantify the demands of the working environment and watch-keeping regime for large commercial ships in relation to dark adaptation. The night lookout task requires the identification of the relatively bright navigational lights of other ships against the dark background of the sky and sea. The probability of detection is determined by the ambient lighting conditions on the bridge and the dark adapted state of vision. Light levels were such that threshold sensitivity (after 15 minutes) was reduced by around 2 log units in comparison to complete darkness. This has implications for the effective range of navigational lights at sea as defined in regulations. The intensity and position of navigation lights on larger vessels is such that the sensitivity of the eye under typical bridge conditions is likely to be sufficient for their visibility to be acceptable. This may not be the case for less well lit small craft.