ENG-1963 — Page 384

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RESEARCH

be applied to many practical problems. In addition, an AC Net- work Analyzer, using transistor instrumentation, has been designed and constructed in the electrical laboratories and it is expected to function in 1964.

The Department of Mechanical Engineering completed hydraulic tests on a scale model of the bellmouth spillway, discharge tunnel and stilling basin of the Lower Shing Mun dam, which is under construction as part of the Plover Cove water scheme. The tests have given the discharge coefficient of the spillway and have pro- posed modifications to the stilling basin to provide a well-behaved flow down the river basin to prevent flooding of arable land under abnormal flood conditions.

GOVERNMENT

Medical and Health Department. The main emphasis continued to be on poliomyelitis and cholera. Research was done on the former in the Government virus unit in connexion with the mass oral poliomyelitis vaccination campaigns of January and March. Sera were tested amongst groups of vaccinated and unvaccinated children to assess the former's response to the vaccine and the degree of spread of the vaccine virus to the latter. General surveys for entero virus excretion rates during the months of April, June and August and studies of generic characters of polio-virus types isolated from clinical cases were carried out. In the case of cholera, research continued into various aspects of the carrier state in- cluding the dissemination and prevalence of cholera vibrios in nightsoil.

Fisheries Research is the responsibility of the fisheries research station which is part of the Co-operative Development and Fisheries Department. This work is dealt with in detail in chapter 7.

Research and Applied Meteorology. Because of the abnormally dry weather the emphasis at the Royal Observatory in the year was on climatology. Revised climatological tables were prepared and new 70-year period 'normals' were introduced. Rainfall maps for the Colony based on the past 11 years are being prepared and work continues on a climatological summary for aeronautical pur- poses. An extremely dense network of autographic rain-gauges has been set up to study the distribution of rainfall intensity in