How to find a Morepork

In a previous blog (https://www.2040.co.nz/blogs/news/first-morepork-automatically-identified), you may have read about how I started down the road of automatically detecting morepork calls. Since then I’ve made some further progress and thought I’d share the journey so far with you

Bring the bird music back across New Zealand part of Smart Hamilton Smart Space

Every day, all around New Zealand, the dawn chorus tells us that our birdlife is one of our greatest treasures. Yet, New Zealand’s native birds are under threat from introduced predators such as possums, rats and stoats. How can modern information technology help to solve this problem

U.S. PREMIUM BEEF: SELLING MEAT AND MEALS INSTEAD OF CATTLE

Livestock Production/Industries,

CacophonyViz: Visualisation of Birdsong Derived Ecological Health Indicators

The purpose of this work was to create an easy to interpret visualisation of a simple index that represents the quantity and quality of bird life in New Zealand. The index was calculated from an algorithm that assigned various weights to each species of bird. This work is important as it forms a part of the ongoing work by the Cacophony Project which aims to eradicate pests that currently destroy New Zealand native birds and their habitat. The map will be used to promote the Cacophony project to a wide public audience and encourage their participation by giving relevant feedback on the effects of intervention such as planting and trapping in their communities. The Design Science methodology guided this work through the creation of a series of prototypes that through their evaluation built on lessons learnt at each stage resulting in a final artifact that successfully displayed the index at various locations across a map of New Zealand. It is concluded that the artifact is ready and suitable for deployment once the availability of real data from the automatic analysis of audio recordings from multiple locations becomes available

Dental erosion: In vitro model of wine assessor's erosion

The document attached has been archived with permission from the Australian Dental Association. An external link to the publisher’s copy is included.Background: Wine makers and assessors frequently experience severe dental erosion. The objectives of this study were to develop an in vitro model of dental erosion caused by frequent wine contact with teeth, and to use this model to assess the effectiveness of a variety of methods which might protect against this form of erosion. Methods: An initial pilot study found that riesling style wine was more erosive than champagne style, and both more than claret. Wine tasting was simulated by subjecting exposed windows of enamel and root surfaces on 50 intact, extracted human teeth to 1400 one minute exposures to white wine (pH 3.2). A variety of dental materials were applied to the exposed windows on groups of teeth prior to erosive challenge, to assess their protective ability. Results: Protective resin coatings and fluoride varnishes protected both enamel and roots against wine induced erosion. A high degree of protection was provided by APF gel, with less by NaF gel. Conclusions: It was concluded that dentists may be able to help minimise erosion resulting from frequent wine-tasting in their patients by the clinical application of one or a combination of these agents at times prior to prolonged assessment periods.Tong Bee Mok, J McIntyre and D Hun

Network Synchronization in a Noisy Environment with Time Delays: Fundamental Limits and Trade-Offs

We study the effects of nonzero time delays in stochastic synchronization problems with linear couplings in an arbitrary network. Using the known exact threshold value from the theory of differential equations with delays, we provide the synchronizability threshold for an arbitrary network. Further, by constructing the scaling theory of the underlying fluctuations, we establish the absolute limit of synchronization efficiency in a noisy environment with uniform time delays, i.e., the minimum attainable value of the width of the synchronization landscape. Our results have also strong implications for optimization and trade-offs in network synchronization with delays.Comment: 3 figure