As natural habitat continues to be lost and the world steadily becomes more urbanized, biologists are increasingly studying the effect this has on wildlife. Birds are particularly good model systems since their life history, behaviour, and physiology are especially influenced by directly measurable environmental factors such as light and sound pollution. It is therefore relatively easy to compare urban individuals and populations with their rural counterparts. This accessible text focuses ...

How do we make ourselves a Whiteheadian proposition? This question exposes the multivalent connections between postmodern thought and Whitehead’s philosophy, with particular attention to his understanding of propositions.Edited by Roland Faber, Michael Halewood, and Andrew M. Davis, Propositions in the Making articulates the newest reaches of Whiteheadian propositions for a postmodern world. It does so by activating interdisciplinary lures of feeling, living, and co-creating the wo...

This book offers a comprehensible overview of Big Data Preprocessing, which includes a formal description of each problem. It also focuses on the most relevant proposed solutions. This book illustrates actual implementations of algorithms that helps the reader deal with these problems.This book stresses the gap that exists between big, raw data and the requirements of quality data that businesses are demanding. This is called Smart Data, and to achieve Smart Data the preprocessing ...

This textbook offers an easy-to-follow, practical guide to modern data analysis using the programming language R. The chapters cover topics such as the fundamentals of programming in R, data collection and preprocessing, including web scraping, data visualization, and statistical methods, including multivariate analysis, and feature exercises at the end of each section. The text requires only basic statistics skills, as it strikes a balance between statistical and mathematical understandin...

****“Science Friday” Summer Reading Pick****Discover magazine Top 5 Summer Reads****People magazine Best Summer Reads**“A lovely, big-hearted book…brimming with compassion and the tales of the many, many humans who devote their days to making animals well” (The New York Times).**Have you ever wondered if your dog might be a bit depressed? How about heartbroken or homesick? Animal Madness takes these questions seriously, expl...

This book is an illustrated field guide to diurnal raptors, a bird group that many people find among the most difficult birds to identify. Raptors are popular and iconic birds, and important ecologically as well as in legislation, with some species listed as threatened. Birds of Prey of Australia will enable people to more easily identify them. It also provides a brief overview of the biology of raptors and an indication of the current state of knowledge on them. The book has been completely ...

Laughing Kookaburras are the largest kingfishers in the world, and Blue-winged Kookaburras are not far behind. Their size and distinctive shape and posture make them easily recognisable; their comical and personable characters make them readily memorable. They are able to live in a wide variety of habitats, and adapt to living around humans relatively well. This cheerful familiarity has caused them to figure prominently in the psyches and folklores of all peoples who have inhabited Austral...

In her comprehensive and carefully crafted book, Gisela Kaplan demonstrates how intelligent and emotional Australian birds can be. She describes complex behaviours such as grieving, deception, problem solving and the use of tools. Many Australian birds cooperate and defend each other, and exceptional ones go fishing by throwing breadcrumbs in the water, extract poisonous parts from prey and use tools to crack open eggshells and mussels. The author brings together evidence of many such cogniti...

In an obsessive 82,000-mile quest for dead birds, how much trouble can one scientist get into?Finally, the world's leading authority on the extinct Labrador Duck, Dr. Glen Chilton, shares the story of his frenzied obsession to reveal the histories behind the mysterious bird -- a saga wherein he sets out to examine the remains of every Labrador Duck, conduct genetic analysis on every Labrador Duck egg, and visit every site where the duck was shot...with man...

Recent classifications of Australian birds have been limited to lists of "species" which are inadequate as biodiversity indicators. The Directory of Australian Birds: Passerines fills a huge gap in ornithological knowledge by separating out and listing not only 340 species of song-birds but also the 720 distinct regional forms. Covering about half the national bird fauna, the Directory provides science and the community with baseline information about what bird it is and where it lives in an ...

A gifted biologist's careful and beguiling study of why cuckoos have got away with tricking other birds into hatching and raising their young for thousands of years.The familiar call of the common cuckoo, “cuck-oo,” has been a harbinger of spring ever since our ancestors walked out of Africa many thousands of years ago. However, for naturalist and scientist Nick Davies, the call is an invitation to solve an enduring puzzle: how does the cuckoo get away with laying ...

Australia is a land of many unique animals, some of which are active only during the cooler evening and night-time and so are rarely seen. These are the after dark animals so widespread yet so little noticed by humans, whether in our backyards, the arid desert, woodlands or rainforest. Australian Wildlife After Dark brings this hidden fauna into the light. The after dark fauna includes a surprising diversity of familiar (and some not-so-familiar) species, from cockroaches, moths and spiders t...