503 research outputs found
Marshall Stearns Interview -- Samuel Hayakawa Interview -- Other Interviews
No full textLeonard Feather interviews Marshall Stearns in what seems like a public setting. Leonard Feather interviews an unidentified person who mentions doing a song called How Do You Say Al Vida Sara (?) with a Johnny M. author of My Huckleberry Friend. Leonard Feather interviews an unidentified man. The interview ends mid-sentence. Leonard Feather interviews Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa, past president of San Francisco State University. Leonard Feather interviews a member of a band. 9:40 Unidentified Interview (1); 13:12 Unidentified Interview (2); 15:05 San Francisco State teacher interview; 37:58 Band member interview
The effect of optimized lighting conditions on feather pecking and production of laying hens
No full textFeather pecking is one of the major problems in commercially kept laying hens. The current research considers the relevance of colour of light in the feather pecking problem
Evaluating Machine Learning Models of Sensory Systems
No full textWe rely on our sensory systems to perceive and interact with the world, and understanding how these systems work is a central focus in neuroscience. A goal of our field is to build stimulus-computable models of sensory systems that reproduce brain responses and behavior. The past decade has given rise to models that capture complex behaviors such as image classification, word recognition, and texture perception. Yet, there are known discrepancies between such models and human observers, such as in the architectural components, learning mechanisms, and resulting representations, that must be rectified to obtain complete models of the brain.
This dissertation investigates the representations in contemporary models of sensory systems, focusing on the auditory and visual systems. The first study explores the extent to which deep neural network audio models capture human fMRI responses to sound. Most tested models out-predicted previous hand-engineered models of auditory cortex and exhibited hierarchical brain-model correspondence. The second study investigates the invariances of visual and auditory models of perception using "model metamers", synthetic stimuli that produce the same activations in a model as a natural stimulus. Behavioral experiments on humans using these stimuli reveal that the invariances of most current computational neural network models of perception do not align with human perceptual invariances. Our experiments trace this discrepancy to invariances that are specific to individual models, and provide some guidance for how to eliminate them. The third study uses similar techniques as those used to generate model metamers, but applies them to auditory texture models with the aim of reducing their dimensionality. We found that previous hand-engineered models of auditory texture can be significantly reduced in dimensionality without compromising their ability to capture human perception. The fourth study investigates the representational geometry of neural networks trained with biologically-inspired stochasticity. Together, this work presents ways to compare the representations of neural networks to those of human perceptual systems, and suggests paths for future improvements of these models.Ph.D
Numerical Aerodynamic Study of a Primary Feather Section from a Multi-slotted Wing
No full textBird flight has evolved to be highly efficient over a time span of a million years. Much of the evolution in flight of various birds is specialized to increase the flight performance of the bird in the adopted habitat. The bird flight in a macroscopic point of view has been a topic of research for a long time now. A few researchers in the past have looked into the microscopic structure and have recommended further studies in the aerodynamic significance of the microstructure. The coupling of the microscopic structure on the overall aerodynamics of the bird wing is not significantly studied or known. The current project extends the understanding of dynamics of flow of air around the micro-structure present in a feather section of a Multi slotted wing. Here, the motivating researches done in the past and helpful facts are detailed to make a clear picture of the project in hand. In the course of the present project we use a structural model of a feather section from a Multi slotted wing tip of a Western jackdaw. The experimentation in this project is done by the use of computational fluid dynamics toolbox called openFoam. The experimentation is designed as a list of possible variations of microstructural morphology of the feather section. The trends in the preliminary results are used to further identify the course of later experiments to relate specific regimes of bird flight. The primary goal of the project was to study the influence of vane asymmetry, vane porosity and feather roughness on aerodynamic coefficients. Further detailed view of the fluid dynamics of such a feather section is presented and compared with the observations at the Animal flight lab, Lund University, Sweden. The primary outcome of this project is to show that the micro-structure indeed has an effect on the flow characteristics and the variation of the micro-structure would lead to variation in the aerodynamics of the feather. The final outcome would be synthesis of a hypothesis related to influence of micro-structure of the feather based on the subjected variations in the feather morphology.Aerospace Engineerin
Feather Morphology as an Age Indicator in Mandarin Ducks
No full textAuthor Institution: Environmental Studies Center, Bowling Green State UniversityAn investigation of known-age Mandarin ducks {Aix galericulata) indicated that primary feather length and secondary feather markings could be used to separate the majority of yearling from adult birds. The lengths of the 7th, 9th, and 10th primaries of adults of both sexes were longer than the corresponding feathers in yearlings. The 7th and 9th primaries probably would provide the greatest ageing accuracy, since their lengths were significantly different when the same females were measured as yearlings and adults. Color patterns on the secondaries could not be used to segregate age groups reliably
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