I had a special visitor on my Friday Evening Walk: A Mississippi Kite. He sat on the wire while I walked the road. Birds appear to be sitting still on the wires if You just casually glance at them. Actually, they are moving all the time-watching, hunting or preening. I snapped quite a few shots of Mr Kite and made a slideshow so You can see his movement in and out of the shadows. This is really a fine bird to have for a visit! Your photostudy tonight is Skyscapes with the added Picasa effect of 'Heat Map'. I had a request for more of these colorful, hot clouds, so enjoy!
Also, a Big Bonjour to all the new viewers in France! Welcome to our informal, mini nature class Photo Blog! I love sharing my life in the woods of Texas with All People!
Mississippi Kite
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Mississippi Kite (Ictinia mississippiensis) is a small bird of prey in the family Accipitridae. It is 12 to 15 inches (30–37 cm) beak to tail and has a wingspan averaging 3 feet (91 cm). Weight is from 214 to 388 grams (7.6-13.7 oz).[1] Adults are gray with darker gray on their tail feathers and outer wings and lighter gray on their heads and inner wings. Males and females look alike, but the males are slightly paler on the head and neck. Young kites have banded tails and streaked bodies.[2] Mississippi Kites have narrow, pointed wings and are graceful in flight, often appearing to float in the air. It is not uncommon to see several circling in the same area. Their diet consists mostly of insects which they capture in flight. They eat cicada, grasshoppers, and other crop-damaging insects, making them economically important. They have also been known to eat small vertebrates, including amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and occasionally birds. Their call is a high-pitched squeak, sounding similar to that of a squeaky dog toy.
Mississippi Kites breed across the central and southern United States. Breeding territory has expanded in recent years and Mississippi Kites have been regularly recorded in the southern New England states and a pair has successfully raised young as far north as Newmarket, New Hampshire.[3] They migrate to southern subtropicalSouth America in the winter. Mississippi Kites usually lay two white eggs (rarely one or three) in twig nests that rest in a variety of deciduous trees. In the past 75 years, they have undergone changes in nesting habitat from use of forest and savanna to include shelterbelts and are now very common nesters in urban area that are highly populated in the western south-central states.
Mississippi kites nest in colonies and both parents (paired up before arriving at the nesting site) incubate the eggs and care for the young.[4] They have one clutch a year which takes 30 to 32 days to hatch. The young birds leave the nest another 30 to 35 days after hatching. Only about half of kites successfully raise their young. Clutches fall victim to storms and predators such as raccoons and Great Horned Owls. Because of the reduced amount of predators in urban areas, Mississippi Kites produce more offspring in urban areas than rural areas. They have an average lifespan of 8 years.[4]
While the Mississippi Kite is not an endangered species,[5] it is protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918,[6] which protects the birds, their eggs, and their nests (occupied or empty) from being moved or tampered with without the proper permits. This can make the bird somewhat of a nuisance when it chooses to roost in populated urban spots such as golf courses or schools. The birds protect their nests by diving at perceived threats, including humans. Staying at least 50 yards from nests is the best way to avoid conflict with the birds. If unavoidable, wearing a hat or waving hands in the air should prevent contact from being made but will not prevent the diving behavior.
| Mississippi Kite | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Mississippi Kite | |
| Conservation status | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Subclass: | Aves |
| Order: | Falconiformes (or Accipitriformes, q.v.) |
| Family: | Accipitridae |
| Genus: | Ictinia |
| Species: | I. mississippiensis |
| Binomial name | |
| Ictinia mississippiensis (Wilson, 1811) | |
Slideshow of the Friday Night Kite:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_map
Heat map
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A heat map is a graphical representation of data where the individual values contained in a matrix are represented as colors.Fractal maps and tree maps both often use a similar system of color-coding to represent the values taken by a variable in ahierarchy. The term is also used to mean its thematic application as a choropleth map. The term "Heatmap" was originally coined and trademarked by software designer Cormac Kinney in 1991, to describe a 2D display depicting real time financial market information.[1]
Heat maps originated in 2D displays of the values in a data matrix. Larger values were represented by small dark gray or black squares (pixels) and smaller values by lighter squares. Sneath (1957) displayed the results of a cluster analysis by permuting the rows and the columns of a matrix to place similar values near each other according to the clustering. Jacques Bertin used a similar representation to display data that conformed to a Guttman scale. The idea for joining cluster trees to the rows and columns of the data matrix originated with Robert Ling in 1973. Ling used overstruck printer characters to represent different shades of gray, one character-width per pixel. Leland Wilkinson developed the first computer program in 1994 (SYSTAT) to produce cluster heat maps with high-resolution color graphics. The Eisen et al. display shown in the figure is a replication of the earlier SYSTAT design.
There are different kinds of heat maps:
- Web heat maps have been used for displaying areas of a Web page most frequently scanned by visitors. Web heatmaps are often used alongside other forms of web analytics and session replay tools.
- Biology heat maps are typically used in molecular biology to represent the level of expression of many genes across a number of comparable samples (e.g. cells in different states, samples from different patients) as they are obtained from DNA microarrays.
- The tree map is a 2D hierarchical partitioning of data that visually resembles a heat map.
- A mosaic plot is a tiled heat map for representing a two-way or higher-way table of data. As with treemaps, the rectangular regions in a mosaic plot are hierarchically organized. The means that the regions are rectangles instead of squares. Friendly (1994) surveys the history and usage of this graph.
There are many different color schemes that can be used to illustrate the heatmap, with perceptual advantages and disadvantages for each. Rainbow colormaps are often used, as humans can perceive more shades of color than they can of gray, and this would purportedly increase the amount of detail perceivable in the image. However, this is discouraged by many in the scientific community, for the following reasons:[2][3][4][5]
- The colors lack the natural perceptual ordering found in grayscale or blackbody spectrum colormaps.
- Common colormaps (like the "jet" colormap used as the default in many visualization software packages) have uncontrolled changes in luminance that prevent meaningful conversion to grayscale for display or printing. This also distracts from the actual data, arbitrarily making yellow and cyan regions appear more prominent than the regions of the data that are actually most important.
- The changes between colors also lead to perception of gradients that aren't actually present, making actual gradients less prominent, meaning that rainbow colormaps can actually obscure detail in many cases rather than enhancing it.
Software Implementations[edit]
Several heat map software implementations are listed here (the list is not complete):
- NeoVision Hypersystems, Inc., a software firm founded by Cormac Kinney, and funded by Intel and Deutsche Bank, developed Heatmaps depicting real time financial data and calculations, which were licensed to over 50,000 users. NeoVision Heatmaps became a feature on nasdaq.com.[6]
- R Statistics, a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics, contains several functions to trace heat maps [1]
- Gnuplot, a universal and free command-line plotting program, can trace 2D and 3D heat maps [2]
- The Google Docs spreadsheet application includes a Heat Map gadget, but for country-wise data only, not for general matrix data.
- Qlucore includes a heat map that is dynamically updated when filter parameters are changed.
- The ESPN Gamecast for soccer games uses heat maps to show where certain players have spent time on the field.
- GENE-E is a matrix visualization and analysis platform designed to support visual data exploration.
- By searching the List of bioinformatics companies more tools for heat maps can be found.
- Microsoft Excel can be used to generate heat maps using the Surface Chart. Though the default color range for Surface Charts in Excel is not conducive to heat maps, the colors can be edited to generate user-friendly and intuitive heat maps.
From the Google Index:
The Best Tips for Picasa. - Tech Study.Net
www.techstudy.net/2012/06/best-tips-for-picasa.html
Jun 9, 2012 – One of our favourite new effects in Picasa (picasa.google.com) lets you create a heat map from a photo, as if you're viewing the scene through ...
Download Picasa3.9 Free - Free Download. Instant Install
picasa.downloadinfo.co/38 reviews for downloadinfo.coThe best Photo Editing Software
The Clouds are Red!
Oh No! Don't Heat Map the Kite!
Too Late, she 'heat mapped' the bird too!
O+O
