BACKGROUND Avian reoviruses (ARVs) cause a range of disease presentations in domestic, captive and free-living bird species. ARVs have been reported as a cause of significant disease and mortality in free-living corvid species in North America and continental Europe. Until this report, there have been no confirmed cases of ARV-associated disease in British wild birds. CASE PRESENTATION Sporad...

A survey is presented of the author's own investigations on the effects of ambient temperature and photoperiod on sleep in corvids. Daily sleep patterns of rook, Corvus frugilegus and magpie, Pica pica have been studied electrographically under natural ambient conditions of light and temperature. The daily amount of total sleep time (TST) was positively correlated with night duration, whereas t...

Magpie is a lightweight block cipher proposed by Li et al. in Acta Electronica Sinica volumn 45, issue 10. It adopts an substitution-permutation network (SPN) structure with size of 64 bits and the key 96 bits, respectively. To achieve consistency encryption decryption, which both hardware software friendly, 16 are used as control signals to select S-boxes another determine order operations. As...

Urban environments present novel and challenging habitats to wildlife. In addition to well-known difference in abiotic factors between rural and urban environments, the biotic environment, including microbial fauna, may also differ significantly. In this study, we aimed to compare the change in microbial abundance on eggshells during incubation between urban and rural populations of a passerine...

A West Nile virus (WNV) lineage 2 strain was molecularly identified and characterised in a Eurasian magpie hunted in Greece in 2010, during a WNV outbreak in humans. Phylogenetic analysis revealed the highest sequence similarity (>99%) with other WNV lineage 2 strains derived from birds of prey in Austria and Hungary (2004–2009). This first molecular detection of WNV in sedentary wild birds in ...

Urbanization influences the food availability and quality for birds in many ways. Although a great amount of is provided incidentally or intentionally urban areas, quantity insect-based can be reduced cities. We studied role one artificial source, insects smashed on front panels cars, Finland, more specifically city Rovaniemi, by conducting questionnaire research, searching data from databases ...

Understanding the performance of distributed systems requires correlation of thousands of interactions between numerous components — a task best left to a computer. Today’s systems provide voluminous traces from each component but do not synthesise the data into concise models of system performance. We argue that online performance modelling should be a ubiquitous operating system service and o...

This paper describes two approaches to integrating standalone information processing techniques into a semantic application capable of acquiring and maintaining knowledge, which we conducted using our open Semantic Web framework of Magpie. We distinguish between integration through aggregation and through choreographing, and argue that the latter is not only simpler to realize but also provides...