Confessions of a Wildlife Biologist: IWB

Showing posts with label IWB. Show all posts

Sunday, 11 September 2011

Sharm El Sheikh Day 0

So! On the 11th September 2011 I flew out from Birmingham International Airport to Egypt’s Sharm El Sheikh International Airport, but let’s rewind to what led up to this… On the 10th, Saturday, I arrived in Birmingham by train:

(With MRSA of course!) and stayed overnight at a family friend’s house, who had an awesome picture in his bathroom:

Very cool.
Then, at unpleasant o’clock in the morning I headed to the Airport for 5 hours or so of waiting… This holiday involved a lot of that.
Coffee at Birmingham International is expensive as hell! And they have NO FREE WIFI! So I stole their electricity to charge my phone:

That’ll teach them.
We finally got on the plane and flew over to Egypt… And got to bed at around 12pm I think… Not sure to be honest!

Friday, 2 September 2011

Left Over From June

Finally got around to uploading this video Wendy and I made in June while we were driving up from Wales to Yorkshire.

The song is from Portal 2, called Want You Gone, I give no spoilers as to the ending

:edit: Due to PicasaWeb not having an “embed” feature… I’ve got to just give you the link:

From 2011-06 Driving from Wales

Tuesday, 12 July 2011

Mr Skipper BSc (Hons) woot!

After 4 years of university, and 3 years on this course, I have finally graduated with a 2:1 BSc in International Wildlife Biology (With honours) from the University of Glamorgan! Woot woot! So next step, MSc Marine Biology at Bangor University in September 2011. Slightly apprehensive, but I’m sure it’ll be grand!
So, the plans for the summer include working on the farm in Botton Village (North Yorkshire), a bit of scuba diving, and hopefully a trip to the Red Sea. Should be good!
Anyways, gnite all,
Skipper

Saturday, 23 April 2011

Stripe Scanner

Stripe Spotter: Available Here

Hello there, time for another review.

The stripes on zebras are unique to each animal, and realising that, the development team behind Stripe Scanner set out to create a program to recognise individuals from their stripes.

Now, this is not my area of expertise, I’m a diatoms man rather than a big game man, but I have done a module in African Biodiversity, so I do know a little bit.

Using photographs I’ve taken in South Africa and Kenya, I set out to create my own database of animals using their program. Here are my thoughts:

The UI is very simple, identifying animals is pretty easy, select the body part and press Identify Animal….

Now, here is where I ran into some difficulty.The images I took are from 2007 and 2009, so I have no idea which animal is which… To create the database you need to have a base population of identified zebras, with which to compare the later photographs. I lack this, so my database consists of guess work as to which are new animals.

Due to this, when I came to adding an individual from thousands of kilometres away, from Kenya, what should’ve been distinctively different stripes, the similarity is much higher than it should be. (0.46)

All in all, I think this is a valuable program for those who need to process a large local herd of individuals if you have a base number of photographs of identified individuals to work from. My example has a poor collection of disorganised photographs, of quality too low for a proper identification, so this test of the software was not really sound.

But all in all, worth checking out if you’ve got a lot of zebras to identify!

Download Here

Saturday, 9 April 2011

Diatom Diagram

Diatom Diagram by ~Skipperthepilot on deviant ART
Just a quick little diagram I drew in Illustrator for my dissertation. I've got a couple of weeks left now before it's got to be finished... Slightly concerned that I'm going to screw this one up completely.. but we shall see.
I'll put the PDF up here when it's all finished and marked... just in case someone wants to steal my work :)

Monday, 6 September 2010

Second Windows 7 theme

Hoka, this is the 2nd installment of my themes. This one is of the theme “Oceans.” Well, primarily coral and plants of the Red Sea Smile with tongue out

Anyways: sample as always:

||Download Here||

Spare a thought for me, I uploaded that whilst on the train over my tethered mobile phone… I dont want to look at this months bill…its gonna be a mile long…..

Tuesday, 20 July 2010

Skipper’s Windows 7 Desktop Nature Theme

Awrite!? Was just collecting some of my best pictures into a lil’ Windows 7 theme package, and figured why not just let the general public have it? So, without further a-do, here is Skipper’s Windows 7 Nature Theme. All images copyright to David Caplin (..thats me!), so dont go selling them or anything, or I will hunt you down and eat your babies.
So, enjoy!

|Download Link|

Sample image: