Book Review: <i>Owls of the United States and Canada: A Complete Guide to Their Biology and Behavior</i> By Wayne Lynch
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although the text is partly written as a first-person narrative, most of it is a succinct, interesting summary of comparative owl biology, rather than a series of individual species accounts, which tend to repeat already available information. In-text literature citations aren’t used, but the authors of major research findings are identified and their work referenced in a literature section with nearly 300 citations, some published as recently as 2005.\nI have more than a dozen owl books on my office bookshelves, a testimony to their popularity among both biologist-authors and the reading public, but probably none is so attractive and accessibly informative as this one. Through the work of missionaries such as Wayne Lynch and Robert Nero, the Canadian public’s understanding of and appreciation for owls has been greatly improved, to the point that three of Canada’s ten provinces have selected owls for their provincial emblems. As one who has seen dozens of wounded and dead owls senselessly and illegally shot by Nebraska hunters, I find some hope in the efforts of such eloquent Canadian spokesmen for the survival of these wonderful birds.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".