"Owls of the World: A Photographic Guide" by Heimo Mikkola. 2012. [book review]
Bibliographic record
Abstract
pages.49.95 CAD.Cloth.Heimo Mikkola's first book, Owls of Europe, in 1983, shared his extensive knowledge, immediately recognized as a classic, one still available electronically after printed copies sold out.By nature benevolent and altruistic, Heimo then shared his other expertise, in zoology and agriculture.He joined FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations "that leads international efforts to defeat hunger" and moved to Africa to assist struggling farmers improve their methodology.After Heimo retired from FAO, Jim Martin from Bloomsbury Publishing approached Heimo and suggested he write a new book on the world's owls.This new book, Owls of the World, is the first comprehensive guide to the world's owls.It contains the finest collection of owl photographs I have seen in one book, up to eight for each of the 249 species.Legends for each colour photograph point out clues for recognition of each species and some subspecies.There are up-todate maps of each species' distribution.Literature cited continues through the end of 2011, proof that the content is up-to-date.To me, additional pleasure was derived from reading Heimo's insightful chapters.Under "What makes an owl?" the specialized and unique vision, especially night vision, hearing, silent flight, bill and claws are succinctly explained.Under "The nature of owls," similar attention is given to: shape and size, calls, colour variation and ageing, abnormalities in plumage, moult, food and hunting, habitat, behaviour, interspecific aggression, breeding strategies, longevity records, and movements.Shorter selections explain the evolution, distribution, taxonomy, DNA-sequencing, and conservation of owls.Altogether it provides an entire miniencyclopedia for enjoyable reading and subsequent
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.069 | 0.044 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".