Bird's Eye Research Articles

The mechanistic, genetic and evolutionary causes of bird eye colour variation

Birds display a rainbow of eye colours, but this trait has been little studied compared with plumage coloration. Avian eye colour variation occurs at all phylogenetic scales: it can be conserved throughout whole families or vary within one species, yet the evolutionary importance of this eye colour variation is under‐studied. Here, we summarize knowledge of the causes of eye colour variation at three primary levels: mechanistic, genetic and evolutionary. Mechanistically, we show that avian iris pigments include melanin and carotenoids, which also play major roles in plumage colour, as well as purines and pteridines, which are often found as pigments in non‐avian taxa. Genetically, we survey classical breeding studies and recent genomic work on domestic birds that have identified potential ‘eye colour genes’, including one associated with pteridine pigmentation in pigeons. Finally, from an evolutionary standpoint, we present and discuss several hypotheses explaining the adaptive significance of eye colour variation. Many of these hypotheses suggest that bird eye colour plays an important role in intraspecific signalling, particularly as an indicator of age or mate quality, although the importance of eye colour may differ between species and few evolutionary hypotheses have been directly tested. We suggest that future studies of avian eye colour should consider all three levels, including broad‐scale iris pigment analyses across bird species, genome sequencing studies to identify loci associated with eye colour variation, and behavioural experiments and comparative phylogenetic analyses to test adaptive hypotheses. By examining these proximate and ultimate causes of eye colour variation in birds, we hope that our review will encourage future research to understand the ecological and evolutionary significance of this striking avian trait.

Fisherfolk and football: An ethnographic tale of loss in a changing climate

Sea level rise is dramatically altering the daily lives of fisherfolk in the Ottummal coastal region of Malabar, India. This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork to explore the erosion of subaerial beaches, which have traditionally served as vital social and cultural touchstones for the community. It examines the profound impact of this erosion on the community's leisure activities, particularly their beloved pastime of football. It also analyses the local government's proposed strategy of managed retreat, which involves relocating vulnerable communities away from threatened areas. It considers its limitations in light of the fisherfolk's deep emotional and cultural connections with their lands and non‐material culture. The article posits that while climatologists and satellites can give a bird's eye view, anthropologists and ethnographers can give a worm's eye view of climate change.

Front and Back Covers, Volume 39, Number 5. October 2023

Front and back cover caption, volume 39 issue 5IBN KHALDUN AND RE‐TRIBALIZATIONA bust of Ibn Khaldun (1332‐1406), at the entrance of the Kasbah of Bejaia, Algeria. As you gaze upon this scholar, who first delved into the cyclical dynamics of tribes and civilizations, you are not just looking at history — you are looking at a mirror reflecting our modern world. Khaldun's pioneering insights into tribal cohesion (asabiyyah) and its impact on societal rise and fall are not relics of the past; they are prophetic echoes reverberating in today's global landscape.In an increasingly interconnected yet paradoxically fragmented world, the concept of ‘tribalism’ is making a surprising comeback.No longer confined to anthropology textbooks or remote communities, tribalism resurfaces in our political dialogues, social affiliations, and even international relations. But this is not your grandfather's tribalism; it is ‘re‐tribalization’, a modern reimagining of ancient affiliations and loyalties shaping nations and rewriting global equations.In this issue, the first of a two‐part article by Ahmed et al., ‘Re‐tribalization in the 21st century’, peels back the layers of this complex phenomenon. It challenges the conventional wisdom that pits ‘tribalism’ against ‘civilization’, revealing instead a dynamic interplay that influences everything from state governance to globalization. Whether it is the UK Brexit vote, the rise of ethnonationalism in various countries or the enduring conflicts in the Middle East, the fingerprints of tribalism — and its modern avatar, re‐tribalization — are unmistakably present.As we navigate the complexities of a world that is both a ‘global village’ and a patchwork of evolving tribal identities, the concept of re‐tribalization serves as an analytical lens. This resurgence of tribal affiliations is a complex adaptation to the challenges and opportunities of a globalized world. The ancient codes of tribalism are being reinterpreted in the context of modern geopolitics and digital communication. While the old and the new may seem to be in tension, they are part of a complex dynamic that requires scrutiny. The ancient and the modern coexist in a world as fraught with conflict as it is ripe for cooperation.FOOTBALL AND CLIMATE CHANGEOn the dwindling sands of Ariyallur Beach in the coastal hamlet of Ottummal, Malabar, India, children passionately kick a football around, savouring the shrinking space that remains for their cherished sport. Their laughter and shouts echo against a backdrop of rising tides and eroding shores, a poignant reminder of the impermanence of their playground.In this issue, Muhammed Haneefa delves into the heart of this coastal community to explore how the relentless rise in sea levels is not just a geographical alteration but a transformation of a way of life. He uncovers the erosion of subaerial beaches — once the lifeblood of the community's social and cultural fabric — and its devastating impact on leisure activities, most notably the deeply ingrained pastime of football.Haneefa also scrutinizes the local government's ‘managed retreat’ strategy, a well‐intentioned but complex proposal that involves relocating these vulnerable communities away from their endangered coastal homes. While the plan may offer a temporary respite from the encroaching waters, it fails to account for the fisherfolk's profound emotional and cultural ties to their land and traditions.This article serves as a lens through which we can view climate change from the ground up. While satellite images and climatological data may provide a bird's‐eye view of the planet's changing face, it is through the worm's‐eye view of anthropologists and ethnographers like Haneefa that we truly understand the human cost. Here, climate change is not just a statistic or a future projection; it is a lived reality that is reshaping communities, altering identities and challenging the very essence of cultural heritage.

Capturing self‐regulated learning processes in virtual reality: Causal sequencing of multimodal data

AbstractThis study examines the embodied ways in which learners monitor their cognition while learning about exponential functions in an immersive virtual reality (VR) based game, Pandemic by Prisms of Reality. Traditionally, metacognitive monitoring has been assessed through behavioural traces and verbalised instances. When learning in VR, learners are fully immersed in the learning environment, actively manipulating it based on affordances designed to support learning, offering insights into the relationship between physical interaction and metacognition. The study collected multimodal data from 15 participants, including think‐aloud audio, bird's‐eye view video recordings and physiological data. Metacognitive monitoring was analysed through qualitative coding of the think‐aloud protocol, while movement was measured via optical flow analysis and cognitive load was assessed through heart rate variability analysis. The results revealed embodied metacognition by aligning the data to identify learners' physical states alongside their verbalised metacognition. The findings demonstrated a temporal interplay among cognitive load, metacognitive monitoring, and motion during VR‐based learning. Specifically, cognitive load, indicated by the low‐ and high‐frequency heart rate variability index, predicted instances of metacognitive monitoring, and monitoring predicted learners' motion while interacting with the VR environment. This study further provides future directions in understanding self‐regulated learning processes during VR learning by utilizing multimodal data to inform real‐time adaptive personalised support within these environments. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topic Immersive virtual reality (VR) environments have the potential to offer personalised support based on users' individual needs and characteristics. Self‐regulated learning (SRL) involves learners monitoring their progress and strategically regulating their learning when needed. Multimodal data captured during VR learning, such as birds‐eye‐view video, screen recordings, physiological changes and verbalisations, can provide insights into learners' SRL processes and support needs. What this paper adds Provides insights into the embodied aspects of learners' metacognitive monitoring during learning in an immersive VR environment. Demonstrates how SRL processes can be captured via the collection and analysis of multimodal data, including think‐aloud audio, bird's‐eye view video recordings and physiological data, to capture metacognitive monitoring and movement during VR‐based learning. Contributes to the understanding of the interplay between cognitive load, metacognitive monitoring, and motion in immersive VR learning. Implications for practice and/or policy Researchers and practitioners can use the causal relationships identified in this study to identify instances of SRL in an immersive VR setting. Educational technology developers can consider the integration of online measures, such as cognitive load and physiological arousal, into adaptive VR environments to enable real‐time personalised support for learners based on their self‐regulatory needs.

Non-Hermitian Floquet Topological Matter-A Review.

The past few years have witnessed a surge of interest in non-Hermitian Floquet topological matter due to its exotic properties resulting from the interplay between driving fields and non-Hermiticity. The present review sums up our studies on non-Hermitian Floquet topological matter in one and two spatial dimensions. We first give a bird's-eye view of the literature for clarifying the physical significance of non-Hermitian Floquet systems. We then introduce, in a pedagogical manner, a number of useful tools tailored for the study of non-Hermitian Floquet systems and their topological properties. With the aid of these tools, we present typical examples of non-Hermitian Floquet topological insulators, superconductors, and quasicrystals, with a focus on their topological invariants, bulk-edge correspondences, non-Hermitian skin effects, dynamical properties, and localization transitions. We conclude this review by summarizing our main findings and presenting our vision of future directions.

Modeling the Visual Landscape: A Review on Approaches, Methods and Techniques.

Modeling the perception and evaluation of landscapes from the human perspective is a desirable goal for several scientific domains and applications. Human vision is the dominant sense, and human eyes are the sensors for apperceiving the environmental stimuli of our surroundings. Therefore, exploring the experimental recording and measurement of the visual landscape can reveal crucial aspects about human visual perception responses while viewing the natural or man-made landscapes. Landscape evaluation (or assessment) is another dimension that refers mainly to preferences of the visual landscape, involving human cognition as well, in ways that are often unpredictable. Yet, landscape can be approached by both egocentric (i.e., human view) and exocentric (i.e., bird's eye view) perspectives. The overarching approach of this review article lies in systematically presenting the different ways for modeling and quantifying the two 'modalities' of human perception and evaluation, under the two geometric perspectives, suggesting integrative approaches on these two 'diverging' dualities. To this end, several pertinent traditions/approaches, sensor-based experimental methods and techniques (e.g., eye tracking, fMRI, and EEG), and metrics are adduced and described. Essentially, this review article acts as a 'guide-map' for the delineation of the different activities related to landscape experience and/or management and to the valid or potentially suitable types of stimuli, sensors techniques, and metrics for each activity. Throughout our work, two main research directions are identified: (1) one that attempts to transfer the visual landscape experience/management from the one perspective to the other (and vice versa); (2) another one that aims to anticipate the visual perception of different landscapes and establish connections between perceptual processes and landscape preferences. As it appears, the research in the field is rapidly growing. In our opinion, it can be greatly advanced and enriched using integrative, interdisciplinary approaches in order to better understand the concepts and the mechanisms by which the visual landscape, as a complex set of stimuli, influences visual perception, potentially leading to more elaborate outcomes such as the anticipation of landscape preferences. As an effect, such approaches can support a rigorous, evidence-based, and socially just framework towards landscape management, protection, and decision making, based on a wide spectrum of well-suited and advanced sensor-based technologies.

Understanding Design Collaboration Between Designers and Artificial Intelligence: A Systematic Literature Review

Recent interest in design through the artificial intelligence (AI) lens is rapidly increasing. Designers, as a special user group interacting with AI, have received more attention in the Human-Computer Interaction community. Prior work has discussed emerging challenges that persist in designing for AI. However, few systematic reviews focus on AI for design to understand how designers and AI can augment each other's complementary strengths in design collaboration. In this work, we conducted a landscape analysis of AI for design, via a systematic literature review of 93 papers. The analysis first provides a bird's eye view of overall patterns in this area. The analysis also reveals three themes interpreted from the paper corpus associated with AI for design, including AI assisting designers, designers assisting AI, and characterizing designer-AI collaboration. We discuss the implications of our findings and suggested methodological proposals to guide HCI toward research and practices that center on collaborative creativity.

Plastic Chip Electrode: An Emerging Multipurpose Electrode Platform.

The properties of electrodes play a crucial role in the processes occurring on them. Therefore, a variety of materials have been tried as electrodes. Carbon composite materials are among the most admired ones. Use of composites as electrode material dates back to the mid of the last century when polymer-carbon composites were tried as general-purpose electrode platforms and epoxy impregnated graphite paste/ solid electrodes were tried in polarography. Later the composite electrodes have seen several phases of development. Plastic Chip Electrode (PCE) is a class of polymer composite electrode developed by our group. This monographic review gives a bird's eye account of polymer composite electrodes and appurtenant work, followed by elaborating on various aspects and state-of-the-art plastic chip electrodes.

A Case of Immunoglobulin G4-related Tubulointerstitial Nephritis with Simultaneous Resolution of Plasma Cell Infiltration and Fibrosis after Steroid Treatment.

We performed 3 kidney biopsies in a 71-year-old man. At the first biopsy, we made the diagnosis of immunoglobulin G4 (IgG4)-related interstitial nephritis characterized by the simultaneous presence of IgG4-positive plasma cells and characteristic fibrosis with a bird's-eye pattern. At the second biopsy, rather than finding fibrosis as a post-inflammatory scar, we noted that steroid treatment had caused the simultaneous disappearance of IgG4-positive plasma cells and fibrosis and had restored the normal tubular structure. The third biopsy showed the recurrence of the disease with inflammatory cells accompanied by fibrosis. These findings suggest that IgG4-positive plasma cells and fibrosis occur simultaneously.

A bird's eye view of civic engagement and its facets: Canonical correlation analysis across 34 countries

ABSTRACT Civic engagement is a multi-faceted concept that is integral to the proper functioning of a democratic society. The present study investigates the effect that a wide range of individual-level demographic, educational, cognitive, and health-related predictors have on civic engagement and its facets, providing an overview of 34 countries around the world. The use of canonical correlation analysis allows us to quantify both the shared and unique contribution of the predictors to two facets of civic engagement, voluntary work and political efficacy. The common scale of the analysis provides an intuitive visualization of barriers and pathways to one's engagement in the community and society at large. We further ground our findings in country-level socio-demographic data, providing external validation to our method.

A Photo Score For Aesthetic Outcome In Sagittal Synostosis: An ERN CRANIO Collaboration.

European Reference Network (ERN) CRANIO is focused on optimizing care for patients with rare or complex craniofacial anomalies, including craniosynostosis and/or rare ear, nose, and throat disorders. The main goal of ERN CRANIO is to collect uniform data on treatment outcomes for multicenter comparison. We aimed to develop a reproducible and reliable suture-specific photo score that can be used for cross-center comparison of phenotypical severity of sagittal synostosis and aesthetic outcome of treatment. We conducted a retrospective study among nonsyndromic sagittal synostosis patients aged <19 years. We included preoperative and postoperative photo sets from 6 ERN CRANIO centers. Photo sets included bird's eye, lateral, and anterior-posterior views. The sagittal synostosis photo score was discussed in the working group, and consensus was obtained on its contents. Interrater agreement was assessed with weighted Fleiss' Kappa and intraclass correlation coefficients.The photo score consisted of frontal bossing, elongated skull, biparietal narrowness, temporal hollowing, vertex line depression, occipital bullet, and overall phenotype. Each item was scored as normal, mild, moderate, or severe. Results from 36 scaphocephaly patients scored by 20 raters showed kappa values ranging from 0.38 [95% bootstrap CI: 0.31, 0.45] for biparietal narrowness to 0.56 [95% bootstrap CI: 0.47, 0.64] for frontal bossing. Agreement was highest for the sum score of individual items [intraclass correlation coefficients agreement 0.69 [95% CI: 0.57, 0.82]. This is the first large-scale multicenter study in which experts investigated a photo score to assess the severity of sagittal synostosis phenotypical characteristics. Agreement on phenotypical characteristics was suboptimal (fair-moderate agreement) and highest for the summed score of individual photo score items (substantial agreement), indicating that although experts interpret phenotypical characteristics differently, there is consensus on overall phenotypical severity.

The Software Design Overview by Processing The Recording From Bird's-Eye View Images to Determine The Crop Detection and Functionality of The Various Land Types

To meet the demand for food, humanity has begun to use the latest technologies such as artificial intelligence, the internet of things, and drones, in addition to advanced tractors, seeds, and crop planting methods. Precision agriculture has been achieved by using the latest technology in this field, especially in recent years, the use of drones for agricultural land spraying has gained great interest. In this study, a Python programming language was used to process the video footage of a certain height taken from agricultural land with the help of a drone, using individual photo frames obtained from the footage. Each pixel was separated into different color contrast values, and certain colors were distinguished by counting. The proportional distribution of different types of surfaces on the land was determined. The software enabled the determination of various geophysical properties such as the productivity of crops, crop development status, and identification of areas where the crop does not grow.

Constitutional Government in the Time of Covid: The Scottish Experience

The author provides a bird's eye view from his time as an MSP of the Scottish Government's legislative and executive response to the Covid-19 pandemic. He concentrates on the efforts of Scottish Parliament and the Scottish courts to hold them to account, and ultimately finds them lacking.

Bird's Eye View Semantic Segmentation based on Improved Transformer for Automatic Annotation

Bird's Eye View Semantic Segmentation based on Improved Transformer for Automatic Annotation

Bird's eye view of augmented reality and applications for education and training: A survey of surveys and reviews

AbstractAugmented reality (AR) is a field of knowledge being developed since the middle of the last century. Its use has been spreading because of its usefulness, but more recently because of mobile platforms being widespread and accessible. AR has been applied in several fields of activity, and also in the field of Education and Training, because AR has several advantages over other teaching methods. In this paper, we search and analyze surveys and reviews of AR to present a brief history and its definition. We also present a classification of our sample under a scheme we developed in past work, and present also examples of technologies and applications of AR in each field. Finally, we do a deeper analysis over the publications of Education and Training, advantages and issues of AR in this field, and some research trends.

AN ANALYSIS OF PUBLIC INVESTMENT ON HIGHER EDUCATION IN INDIA

Higher education is the integral part of social infrastructure which determines the destiny of any nation. Public policy on education is one of the most significant areas of contemporary development strategy and in a developing country like India, investment on education assumes most important place in such a policy. The higher education sector in India has witnessed a paradigm shift in recent years, in order to shape the future social and economic progress it is necessary to expand, restructure and raising the quality of education in the country. Development of human resources is one of the main purposes of Higher Education, which will play a critical role in preparing the workforce to be constructively utilized. Therefore, India needs to show more concern over higher education in terms of quantity and quality. In this background, the paper presents a birds eye view of the public expenditure by the centre and the state on higher education along with sector wise allocation in the country. An attempt has been made to analyze the growth and trends in public investment with the help of statistical tools like correlation and regression analysis. KEY WORDS: Higher Education, Public Investment, Sector-wise Allocation, Gross Domestic Product.

Infectious Disease And Diabetes.

In this communication, we provide a bird's eye view of the various ways in which infectious diseases intersect with diabetes. We list the ways in which infectious diseases can influence glucose homoeostasis and diabetes management, and explores how diabetes care is associated with infections and infection management. This is especially important for health care providers in regions with a high burden of infectious disease.

Review of measurement of sustainable development goals: a comprehensive bibliometric and visualized analysis.

The global focus on evaluating environmental performance means that sustainable development goals must be prioritized to preserve environmental sustainability. In order to accomplish the SDGs, it is crucial that activities be preferred and that methods be developed to assess their effectiveness. As a result, the techniques used for the measurement and assessment of the SDGs have increased in significance for all countries. Researchers and academics create these technologies through research and invention. By undertaking a bibliometric analysis, this study aims to identify the scholarship in the area of SDG assessment and measurement. The analysis was produced by collecting the related studies from the Web of Science database. The information was retrieved, and a thorough and organized analysis was done to give crucial insights on the chosen issue. The analysis revealed the most often cited articles, important institutions that contributed, leading research-involved nations, and institutions. To evaluate the varied collection of techniques accessible for the goal of evaluating SDGs, a thorough review of the most cited works is conducted and provides a bird's eye view of research on mechanisms for measuring the outcomes of SDGs.

Multi-Object Tracking Based on a Novel Feature Image With Multi-Modal Information

Multi-object tracking technology plays a crucial role in many applications, such as autonomous vehicles and security monitoring. This paper proposes a multi-object tracking framework based on the multi-modal information of 3D point clouds and color images. At each sampling instant, the 3D point cloud and image acquired by a LiDAR and a camera are fused into a color point cloud, where objects are detected by the Point-GNN method. And, a novel height-intensity-density (HID) image is constructed from the bird's eye view. The HID image truly reflects the shapes and materials of objects and effectively avoids the influence of object occlusion, which is helpful to object tracking. In two sequential HID images, a new rotation kernel correlation filter is proposed to predict the objects. Furthermore, an object retention module and an object re-recognition module are developed to overcome the object matching failure in the in-between frames. The proposed method takes full advantage of the multi-modal data and effectively achieves the information complementation to improve the accuracy of multi-object tracking. The experiments with the KITTI dataset show that the proposed method has the best performance among the existing traditional multi-object tracking methods.

Crop-saving with AI: latest trends in deep learning techniques for plant pathology.

Plant diseases pose a major threat to agricultural production and the food supply chain, as they expose plants to potentially disruptive pathogens that can affect the lives of those who are associated with it. Deep learning has been applied in a range of fields such as object detection, autonomous vehicles, fraud detection etc. Several researchers have tried to implement deep learning techniques in precision agriculture. However, there are pros and cons to the approaches they have opted for disease detection and identification. In this survey, we have made an attempt to capture the significant advancements in machine-learning based disease detection. We have discussed prevalent datasets and techniques that have been employed as well as highlighted emerging approaches being used for plant disease detection. By exploring these advancements, we aim to present a comprehensive overview of the prominent approaches in precision agriculture, along with their associated challenges and potential improvements. This paper delves into the challenges associated with the implementation and briefly discusses the future trends. Overall, this paper presents a bird's eye view of plant disease datasets, deep learning techniques, their accuracies and the challenges associated with them. Our insights will serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in the field. We hope that this survey will inform and inspire future research efforts, ultimately leading to improved precision agriculture practices and enhanced crop health management.