SHORT REPORT On reading colour rings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The use of engraved plastic leg rings (Ogilvie 1972) has proved an extremely useful tool for long-term studies of individual birds within populations. Several studies have examined the longevity of marks (eg Rees et al 1990) and the colour fastness of certain materials (eg Lindsey et al 1995). In addition, Kania (2001) asked observers to read letters on metal rings used on White Stork Ciconia ciconia using binoculars. Inexperienced observers misread up to 27 % of letters, whereas trained observers misread up to 8 % of letters. On reading numbered neck collars on Canada Geese Branta canadensis, casual observers made 23 times more mistakes than trained professionals (Raveling et al 1990). However, as far as we are aware, there is little information on whether letters on certain colour combinations are easier to read than others. We examined this using a simple experimental approach using two different telescopes, sets of engraved plastic rings with different colour combinations and several observers. Each ‘ring ’ consisted of a plastic strip c 38 mm x 105 mm, the same dimensions as commonly used on Whooper Swan Cygnus cygnus colour rings. Three engraved letters, each 20 mm tall, 10 mm wide and with a 2 mm cut width were repeated three times on each ring. Each set of rings comprised five commonly used colour combinations; dark blue with white letters, orange/black, pale green/black, white/black and yellow/black. Each ring set, therefore, comprised 15 different letters. The letters were randomly chosen from 15 letters normally used on engraved rings
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 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 | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.224 | 0.119 |
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".