Bibliographic record
Abstract
Yapa, A., and G. Ratnavira. 2013. The Mammals of Sri Lanka . Field Ornithology Group of Sri Lanka, Department of Zoology, University of Colombo, Colombo 3, Sri Lanka. 1,012 pp. ISBN: 978-955-8576-32-8, price (hard cover), Rs. 7500. The last comprehensive book on the mammals of Sri Lanka was compiled 8 decades ago when the island nation off the coast of India was known as the British colony of Ceylon (Phillips 1935). A sumptuously illustrated opus that updates and exceeds this earlier monograph was published last year with text exquisitely written by Asoka Yapa and color plates artistically painted by Gamini Ratnavira. I am sure that the original concept was probably a compact field guide but the meticulous attention to detail of the first author has created an encyclopedic volume on the current knowledge of mammals in Sri Lanka. But you will have to pour over this fact-packed book at home or in your office and not carry it into the field in your backpack because it is over 1,000 pages long and weighs almost 5kg. The liberal use of photography to capture species in their natural habitat on the island acts as a showcase to bring this charismatic group of animals back to the forefront of Sri Lankan wildlife. Many are stunning full-page images taken by local amateur photographers with an interest in biological conservation. The contents of the book start with a foreword by Rohan Pethiyagoda, founder of the Wildlife Heritage Trust and author of several papers on Sri Lankan biodiversity. He laments the decline of biological research since independence from British colonial rule in 1948. A resurgence in scientific research began with the start of a conservation movement to save the dwindling forest on the island in the 1980s, but there is still a need for “fresh exploration” because “the enlightenment is yet to come.” A section on “Enconiums” follows that sets out the authors’ inspiration for writing this book. They wanted to produce an updated version of Phillips’ “Mammals of Ceylon” that would do … Department of Natural History, Royal Ontario Museum, 100 Queen’s Park, Toronto, ON M5S 2C6, Canada; e-mail: burtonl{at}rom.on.ca.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".