Tootfinder

We've been visited by a humming bird hawk moth, aka bee moth. Its a moth, not a bird, but it feeds by hovering while sipping nectar from deep-throated flowers, like a humming bird.
I managed to get these pictures. I'll try to get some more over the weekend.
#Bloom #mothstodon

From Observational Data to Clinical Recommendations: A Causal Framework for Estimating Patient-level Treatment Effects and Learning Policies
Rom Gutman, Shimon Sheiba, Omer Noy Klien, Naama Dekel Bird, Amit Gruber, Doron Aronson, Oren Caspi, Uri Shalit
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11381

From Observational Data to Clinical Recommendations: A Causal Framework for Estimating Patient-level Treatment Effects and Learning Policies
We propose a framework for building patient-specific treatment recommendation models, building on the large recent literature on learning patient-level causal models and inspired by the target trial paradigm of Hernan and Robins. We focus on safety and validity, including the crucial issue of causal identification when using observational data. We do not provide a specific model, but rather a way to integrate existing methods and know-how into a practical pipeline. We further provide a real wor…

OnlineBEV: Recurrent Temporal Fusion in Bird's Eye View Representations for Multi-Camera 3D Perception
Junho Koh, Youngwoo Lee, Jungho Kim, Dongyoung Lee, Jun Won Choi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08644

OnlineBEV: Recurrent Temporal Fusion in Bird's Eye View Representations for Multi-Camera 3D Perception
Multi-view camera-based 3D perception can be conducted using bird's eye view (BEV) features obtained through perspective view-to-BEV transformations. Several studies have shown that the performance of these 3D perception methods can be further enhanced by combining sequential BEV features obtained from multiple camera frames. However, even after compensating for the ego-motion of an autonomous agent, the performance gain from temporal aggregation is limited when combining a large number of imag…

"Fossil-fuelled heat has caused tropical birds to decline by ‘up to 38%’ since 1950s"
#FossilFuels #Climate #ClimateChange

Fossil-fuelled heat has caused tropical birds to decline by ‘up to 38%’ since 1950s - Carbon Brief
An uptick in heat extremes has caused tropical bird populations to decline by up to 38% since the 1950s, according to new analysis.

I'm not sure much has changed since 1969. Sympathy by Rare Bird
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vN6-1Zeg2w&list=RD9vN6-1Zeg2w&start_radio=1

LATIS: Comparing Galaxy and IGM Tomography Maps as Tracers of Large-scale Structure and Protoclusters at $z \sim 2.5$
Andrew B. Newman, Nima Chartab, Mahdi Qezlou, Gwen C. Rudie, Guillermo A. Blanc, Daniel D. Kelson, Simeon Bird, Caitlin Casey, Enrico Congiu, Olga Cucciati, Denise Hung, Brian C. Lemaux, Victoria P\'erez, Jorge Zavala
https://

LATIS: Comparing Galaxy and IGM Tomography Maps as Tracers of Large-scale Structure and Protoclusters at $z \sim 2.5$
We investigate the consistency of intergalactic medium (IGM) tomography and galaxy surveys as tracers of the cosmic web and protoclusters at $z \sim 2.5$. We use maps from the Ly$α$ Tomography IMACS Survey (LATIS), which trace the distributions of Lyman-break galaxies (LBGs) and IGM Ly$α$ absorption on $\simeq 4$ $h^{-1}$ cMpc scales within the same large volume. Overall, the joint distribution of IGM absorption and LBG density is well constrained and accurately described by a simple physical…

Last week one of my milkweeds was covered with several large, healthy-looking, Monarch caterpillars.
The caterpillars ate all of the leaves, thus leaving them hungry and quite visible to the many birds in our area.
The birds ate all of the Monarch caterpillars.
We have about a half dozen milkweeds - mostly the California native types - around the house. I will plant more, especially the type that was devoured by the caterpillars, but I will cover them with bird netting.

Green Heron. Descanso Gardens, La Canada Flintridge, California, USA. July 2025. #descansogardens #heron #greenheron

So just for my amusement I asked chatgpt "why does the porridge bird lay its eggs in the air" and got this response, which is not, quite, right.
#chatgpt

Intermediate Interaction Strategies for Collective Behavior
Y. Kikuchi, M. Iwamoto
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09457 https://arxiv.org…

Intermediate Interaction Strategies for Collective Behavior
From bird flocks and fish schools to migrating cell sheets, collective motion is a ubiquitous biological phenomenon that inspires quantitative modeling through self-propelled particle (SPP) frameworks. Conventional SPP models prescribe either distance-based (metric) or rank-based (topological) interactions; however, empirical studies indicate that real groups may blend both types of interaction. Motivated by this graded perception, we introduce a new three-dimensional SPP model in which metric …

Good morning from Harlem
#Photography #GoodMorning #Sunrise #NYC

Last night J came across a hedgehog by the covered grid. I stood and watched it whilst she went to get water and some food.
I looked up into the kitchen and looked back and the hedgehog was gone.
I doubt it was needing food, they've taken from the bird food on the ground feeders in the past. It was more the water we were concerned about.

Revisiting Cross-View Localization from Image Matching
Panwang Xia, Qiong Wu, Lei Yu, Yi Liu, Mingtao Xiong, Lei Liang, Yongjun Zhang, Yi Wan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10716 ht…

Revisiting Cross-View Localization from Image Matching
Cross-view localization aims to estimate the 3 degrees of freedom pose of a ground-view image by registering it to aerial or satellite imagery. It is essential in GNSS-denied environments such as urban canyons and disaster zones. Existing methods either regress poses directly or align features in a shared bird's-eye view (BEV) space, both built upon accurate spatial correspondences between perspectives. However, these methods fail to establish strict cross-view correspondences, yielding only co…

Big Bird: Privacy Budget Management for W3C's Privacy-Preserving Attribution API
Pierre Tholoniat, Alison Caulfield, Giorgio Cavicchioli, Mark Chen, Nikos Goutzoulias, Benjamin Case, Asaf Cidon, Roxana Geambasu, Mathias L\'ecuyer, Martin Thomson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05290

Big Bird: Privacy Budget Management for W3C's Privacy-Preserving Attribution API
Privacy-preserving advertising APIs like Privacy-Preserving Attribution (PPA) are designed to enhance web privacy while enabling effective ad measurement. PPA offers an alternative to cross-site tracking with encrypted reports governed by differential privacy (DP), but current designs lack a principled approach to privacy budget management, creating uncertainty around critical design decisions. We present Big Bird, a privacy budget manager for PPA that clarifies per-site budget semantics and in…

Found this going through my 8 year old iPad (image is from 2013 by @…)
What a difference 12 years makes, huhn?

"How farmers are becoming unexpected heroes in the bird migration crisis"
#Birds #Farming #Agriculture

How farmers are becoming unexpected heroes in the bird migration crisis
Across the Americas, rice and crawfish farmers are helping keep migrating birds alive by transforming their land into makeshift wetlands.Lela Nargi reports for Knowable Magazine.In short:Bird populations like ducks, cranes, and sandpipers are plummeting as wetlands vanish due to climate change and d...

🦖🦕
via @…

Design and optimization of neural networks for multifidelity cosmological emulation
Yanhui Yang, Simeon Bird, Ming-Feng Ho, Mahdi Qezlou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07184

Design and optimization of neural networks for multifidelity cosmological emulation
Accurate and efficient simulation-based emulators are essential for interpreting cosmological survey data down to nonlinear scales. Multifidelity emulation techniques reduce simulation costs by combining high- and low-fidelity data, but traditional regression methods such as Gaussian processes struggle with scalability in sample size and dimensionality. In this work, we present T2N-MusE, a neural network framework characterized by (i) a novel 2-step multifidelity architecture, (ii) a 2-stage Ba…

The Fast and the Frame-Dragging: Efficient waveforms for asymmetric-mass eccentric equatorial inspirals into rapidly-spinning black holes
Christian E. A. Chapman-Bird, Lorenzo Speri, Zachary Nasipak, Ollie Burke, Michael L. Katz, Alessandro Santini, Shubham Kejriwal, Philip Lynch, Josh Mathews, Hassan Khalvati, Jonathan E. Thompson, Soichiro Isoyama, Scott A. Hughes, Niels Warburton, Alvin J. K. Chua, Maxime Pigou

The Fast and the Frame-Dragging: Efficient waveforms for asymmetric-mass eccentric equatorial inspirals into rapidly-spinning black holes
Observations of gravitational-wave signals emitted by compact binary inspirals provide unique insights into their properties, but their analysis requires accurate and efficient waveform models. Intermediate- and extreme-mass-ratio inspirals (I/EMRIs), with mass ratios $q \gtrsim 10^2$, are promising sources for future detectors such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). Modelling waveforms for these asymmetric-mass binaries is challenging, entailing the tracking of many harmonic mod…

Florida’s Everglades National Park is often referred to as the most endangered national park in the United States.
In 1968, developers tried to construct the largest airport in the world in the middle of the park,
which was already suffering from a multitude of environmental crises:
disrupted water flow, a drastic decline in the bird population, human development, invasion of exotic species, and the endangerment of the Florida panther.
After an upswell of public outcry…

DeSantis Races to Open Immigrant Detention Camp in Swamp Amid Hurricane Season
Even before “Alligator Alcatraz,” Ron DeSantis had defined his political legacy by gleeful cruelty against immigrants.

One of the young starlings, now quite independent.

Got woken up by a dumb bird tweeting the same pattern over and over and over and over again. Fell back asleep only to get woken up by the same bird but in my dream. 🤦‍♂️

I always wondered if the shiny scales made them more conductive. https://flipboard.com/@cbcnews/british-columbia-i8sdok9nz/-/a-0hKECWU_QJiZ3BJuKmSPTQ:a:107108217-/0

B.C. brush fire sparked by bird dropping fish on power lines, firefighters say
Firefighters in B.C.'s Interior believe they have identified the cause of a small brush fire and power outage — an osprey and a fish. Ashcroft Fire …

Just finished "Hilda and the Bird Parade" by Luke Pearson, and as usual with Pearson's "Hilda" books, it's tremendous! A lovely magical world, childhood curiosity paired with responsibility, and that touch of each parental love.
#AmReading

Could this bird sound The vOICe spectrogram-based soundscapes? https://youtu.be/hCQCP-5g5bo?t=1066 by @…; starling "can record and playback virtually any sound"…

My project that I completed yesterday. An old patio umbrella base, a fence post from a big box store, two old wall brackets for flower baskets, a couple of bird feeders that were on sale at CanTire, and a repurposed squirrel baffle. About $100 in total cost, not including the black oil seed. It's positioned right outside our sunroom for bifd watching, by us and our cat Casper.
#DIY #Birdwatching #Gardening

If it’s anything like their “dire wolf,” they’ll sink millions into bringing the world… a fat kiwi. https://rssfeed.media/@abcfeeds/114910888061846217

Enormous early-season wildfireshave erupted across the prairie provinces of Canada this week,
taxing local emergency response and threatening a long stretch of dangerous air quality across eastern North America.
The country’s largest fires
– the Bird River fire and the Border fire
– remain completely uncontained in northern Manitoba.
In Manitoba alone, wildfires have burned about 200,000 hectares already this year – already about three times the recent full-year …

Dynamic Bayesian Item Response Model with Decomposition (D-BIRD): Modeling Cohort and Individual Learning Over Time
Hansol Lee, Jason B. Cho, David S. Matteson, Benjamin W. Domingue
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21723

Dynamic Bayesian Item Response Model with Decomposition (D-BIRD): Modeling Cohort and Individual Learning Over Time
We present D-BIRD, a Bayesian dynamic item response model for estimating student ability from sparse, longitudinal assessments. By decomposing ability into a cohort trend and individual trajectory, D-BIRD supports interpretable modeling of learning over time. We evaluate parameter recovery in simulation and demonstrate the model using real-world personalized learning data.

BLUE: Bi-layer Heterogeneous Graph Fusion Network for Avian Influenza Forecasting
Jing Du, Haley Stone, Yang Yang, Ashna Desai, Hao Xue, Andreas Z\"ufle, Chandini Raina MacIntyre, Flora D. Salim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22692

BLUE: Bi-layer Heterogeneous Graph Fusion Network for Avian Influenza Forecasting
Accurate forecasting of avian influenza outbreaks within wild bird populations requires models that account for complex, multi-scale transmission patterns driven by various factors. Spatio-temporal GNN-based models have recently gained traction for infection forecasting due to their ability to capture relations and flow between spatial regions, but most existing frameworks rely solely on spatial connections and their connections. This overlooks valuable genetic information at the case level, su…

"Reform UK backs plan to put swift bricks in every new home in England"
#UK #UnitedKingdom #Birds #Animals

Formation of ultracold $^{39}$K$^{133}$Cs Feshbach molecules
Charly Beulenkamp, Krzysztof P. Zamarski, Robert C. Bird, C. Ruth Le Sueur, Jeremy M. Hutson, Manuele Landini, Hanns-Christoph N\"agerl
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16520

Formation of ultracold $^{39}$K$^{133}$Cs Feshbach molecules
We report the creation of an ultracold gas of bosonic $^{39}$K$^{133}$Cs molecules. We first demonstrate a cooling strategy relying on sympathetic cooling of $^{133}$Cs to produce an ultracold mixture. From this mixture, weakly bound molecules are formed using a Feshbach resonance at 361.7 G. The molecular gas contains $7.6(10)\times 10^3$ molecules with a lifetime of about 130 ms, limited by two-body decay. We perform Feshbach spectroscopy to observe several new interspecies resonances and cha…

EffiComm: Bandwidth Efficient Multi Agent Communication
Melih Yazgan, Allen Xavier Arasan, J. Marius Z\"ollner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19354 https://

EffiComm: Bandwidth Efficient Multi Agent Communication
Collaborative perception allows connected vehicles to exchange sensor information and overcome each vehicle's blind spots. Yet transmitting raw point clouds or full feature maps overwhelms Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications, causing latency and scalability problems. We introduce EffiComm, an end-to-end framework that transmits less than 40% of the data required by prior art while maintaining state-of-the-art 3D object detection accuracy. EffiComm operates on Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) feature m…

Good morning from Harlem
#Photography #GoodMorning #Sunrise #NYC