Where there is a birdstrike, there should have been a bird. Unfortunately, many reports on bird-strikes carefully recording type of aircraft and damage incurred are without reference to the bird. No bird remains had been collected or difficulties in getting these remains identified appeared unsurmountable. They are no longer. By a combination of macroscopical, microscopical and (in special case...

Integrative relations, which combine two independent concepts (e.g., ”lake” and ”bird”) into a compound representation (”lake bird”), induce lexical priming. For example, ”lake” speeds lexical decisions to ”bird” even though they are semantically dissimilar, lexically unassociated, and unfamiliar as a phrase. We report three experiments that investigate whether this integrative priming occurs p...

Cryptococcus neoformans is a fatal fungal pathogen of humans that efficiently parasitises macrophages. Birds can be colonised by cryptococci and can transmit cryptococcosis to humans via inhalation of inoculated bird excreta. However, colonisation of birds appears to occur in the absence of symptomatic infection. Here, using a pure population of primary bird macrophages, we demonstrate a mechan...

Filter strips are strips of herbaceous vegetation planted along agricultural field margins adjacent to streams or wetlands and are designed to intercept sediment, nutrients, and agrichemicals. Roughly 16,000 ha of filter strips have been established in Maryland through the United States Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program. Filter strips often represent the only ...

A previous conference presentation (Baltimore, 2004) introduced the subject of obscured turbo-fans and discussed it in the context of bird strikes. In such a case, the bird will have significant interaction with the internal structure of the aircraft intake during its passage from intake lip to fan and damage to the bird may well occur causing it to pose a significantly different threat to the ...

Automatic off-line classification and recognition of bird vocalizations has been a subject of interest to ornithologists and pattern detection researchers for many years. Several new applications, including bird vocalization classification for aircraft bird strike avoidance, will require real time classification in the presence of noise and other disturbances. The vocalizations of many common b...

This paper describes, within the context of the DARPA EARS program, the design and implementation of the Fisher protocol for collecting conversational telephone speech which has yielded more than 16,000 English conversations. It also discusses the Quick Transcription specification that allowed 2000 hours of Fisher audio to be transcribed in less than one year. Fisher data is already in use with...