Bird

In this paper we propose a new descriptor for birds search. First, our work was carried on the choice of a descriptor. This choice is usually driven by the application requirements such as robustness to noise, stability with respect to bias, the invariance to geometrical transformations or tolerance to occlusions. In this context, we introduce a descriptor which combines the shape and color descriptors to have an effectiveness description of birds. The proposed descriptor is an adaptation of a descriptor based on the contours defined in article Belongie et al. [5] combined with color moments [19]. Specifically, points of interest are extracted from each image and information’s in the region in the vicinity of these points are represented by descriptors of shape context concatenated with color moments. Thus, the approach bag of visual words is applied to the latter. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our descriptor for the bird search by content.

It is well known that there are functional differences between right and left brain hemispheres. However, it is not clear whether these functional differences are reflected in morphometric differences. This study was carried out to investigate the right-left asymmetry, and sex and species differences of the brains using the Cavalieri principle for volume estimation. Seventeen lambs, 10 rats and 12 avian brains were used to estimate brain volumes. A transparent point grid was superimposed on the slices of lamb brains directly and the slices of the rat and avian brains were projected onto a screen at 10x magnification. Surface areas of the cut slice faces were estimated by simply counting the points that hit the slices. Mean brain volumes were 37.74 cm3, 598.95 mm3 and 730.38 mm3 and the coefficients of variations were 0.08, 0.05 and 0.05 for lamb, rat and avian brains respectively. The differences between left and right hemispheres did not show statistical significance (P> 0.05). ...

The diversity and the feeding guilds of birds in three different habitats (secondary forest, oil palm plantation and paddy field) were investigated in riparian areas of the Kerian River Basin (KRB), Perak, Malaysia. Point-count observation and mist netting methods were used to determine bird diversity and abundance. A total of 132 species of birds from 46 families were recorded in the 3 habitats. Species diversity,measured by Shannon’s diversity index, was 3.561, 3.183 and 1.042 in the secondary
forest, the paddy field and the oil palm plantation, respectively. The vegetation diversity and the habitat structure were important determinants of the number of bird species occurring in an area. The relative abundance of the insectivore, insectivore-frugivore and frugivore guilds was greater in the forest than in the monoculture plantation. In contrast,the relative abundance of the carnivore, granivore and omnivore guilds was higher in the plantation. The results of the study show that the conversion of forest to either oil palm plantation or paddy fields produced a decline in bird diversity and changes in the
distribution of bird feeding guilds.

In modern times, sign has been the center of human’s attention and is among the topics that have undergone thorough rethinking. Qajar painting has witnessed the development of semiotic readings in recent decades. Abundantly seen in Qajar painting, bird is one of the main signs in Qajar period. Adopting iconographic interpretation, Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968) relates studies on the history of art with other studies of humanities. In comparative studies, we do not always examine formal qualities of an artwork, but find relations between the work and literature, philosophy, social system, and other cultural systems of its era, whether the artist had such an intention or not. To do so, the research analyzes the key concepts of Panofsky’s theory. Based on this analysis, the main question of the research is as follows: According to Panofsky, what is the signification of bird in the portraits of men and women of the court in the Qajar era? The content of this research is qualitative and based on descriptive-analytic methodology and the method of library data collection. The findings indicate that the norms of aesthetics of Iran in the preceding periods influenced the display and presence of bird in Qajar art. In these works, bird acts as an active and dynamic symbol that is in balance with the painting and manifested in the evolution of the final process of the portrait.

In this paper, we develop a new algorithm to construct Multiple and Global Alignments (MGA) of primary structures, i.e., strings coding biological macromolecules. The construction of such alignments is based on the one of the (longest) Approximate Common Subsequences (ACS), made up by longer approximate substrings appearing, approximately, in the same positions in all the strings. This ACS represents a MGA. Constructing such alignments is a way to find homologies between biological macromolecules. Our algorithm is of complexity O(N 2*L 2*(log(L))2) in computing time, where N is the number of the strings and L is the length of the longest string.

We report on the unambiguous identification of protected avian species from as little as one barb of a feather. Many avian species are protected by international agreements and national legislation, yet they are traded illegally because of their high value. Two sections of the avian mitochondrial genome were chosen to identify bird species, being a 561-bp section of ND2 gene and a 921-bp section of the ND5 gene. Two different DNA extraction methods were compared for their ability to reliably isolate sufficient DNA to be detected in a subsequent PCR. Using a commercial kit supplied by QIAGEN, a complete sequence was obtained from one barb for the ND2 gene, whereas two barbs were required to reliably sequence the 921-bp section of the ND5 gene. The process worked on all species tested using feathers from archival museum specimens, resulted in minimal damage to the specimen and can readily be adopted by a forensic science laboratory.

Over the past years, a number of metrics have been introduced to characterize the topology of complex networks. We use these methodologies to analyze networks obtained through Blast data mining. The algorithm we present consists of the following steps: 1- encode results of Blast searches as a distance matrix of e-values; 2- perform entropy-controlled clustering analysis to identify the communities; 3- statistical analysis of the resulting network, 4- gene ontology and data mining in sequence databases to infer the function of the identified clusters. We report on the analysis of two data sets; the first is formed by over 3300 plasmid encoded proteins and the second comprises over 4200 sequences related to nitrogen fixation proteins. In the first case we observed strong selective pressures for horizontal transfer and maintenance of genes encoding proteins for resistance to antibiotics, plasmid stability and conjugal transfer. Nitrogen fixation proteins can be divided on the basis of our results into three different groups: proteins with no paralogs in any of the genomes considered, proteins with paralogs belonging to different metabolic processes (O–paralogs) and proteins with paralogs in other and the same metabolic processes (I/O–paralogs).