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lowleveldrone

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North American birds are absolutely in decline. From this article [1], the overall population has decreased by about 1.5 billion birds since 1970. For some groups of species, for instance, aerial insectivores [2], things are much worse. For instance, the population of bank and barn swallows, chimney swifts and common nighthawks has decreased by 70% over the past twenty years alone.

The Christmas Bird Survey is done after most birds have migrated and so captures data on the relative abundance of resident birds, which as a group, are doing better than birds in North America overall.

[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/science/report-fi... [2] http://www.bsc-eoc.org/download/BWCwi08.pdf

For me it's a "hello world" for experimenting with building VHF antennas. It's nice, because they are on a schedule that you can plan around and more interesting than listening to the local dispatch systems.

There are over 250 species of bird present for at least part of the year in the city where I live, which has a population of 880000.

I just tried publishing my first app to the Play store and am in the middle of a horrible experience.

I wrote a little app to help myself learn birdsong. You copy some mp3s to a folder on your sdcard, open the folder in the app, and it will shuffle them and only show you the name of the file if you ask. Pretty simple, but I found it useful and thought it might be useful to other people. So I pay my $25, upload my app, and wake up the next day to an email saying my app had been suspended for "deceitful behaviour" and that it happened again they might suspend my other Google services, for instance the gmail account I've had since 2004.

Of course the email doesn't contain any information on what the deceitful behavior was, so like a Kafka story, I'm stuck defending myself against charges that I'm never informed of. When I heard back from support, they say that my app opens to a list of mp3 apps to download. So either my account has been hacked and someone changed the app apk, or they are unable to tell the difference between a directory listing from the sdcard and a list of mp3 apps. If the latter, how my app can be deceitful when it matches one of the screenshots I attached is completely beyond me.

Once my email migration to fastmail is complete, I'll rename my app and try again, this time with a modified UI that makes you click a button before showing a directory listing. I'd like to get my $25 worth if nothing else.

This whole incident has left me with zero confidence in their customer service or technical competence.

It appears relatively few are establishing their own practices because the income from a private practice is very uncertain.

It also looks like demand for lawyer related services has also decreased. The larger firms have responded to this by laying people off - it seems they would prefer to have few, highly compensated positions rather than many lowly paid positions.

Psychology is a very broad area and it's not fair to judge it based upon Dr. Phil style counselling or literary criticism.

The psychologists I've worked with design experiments to attempt to determine fundamental mental capabilities in terms of perception, memory, spatial reasoning, etc. and how this can be applied to design safe and effective user interfaces, in particular for safety critical systems like aircraft.

Sure, the models they develop are likely just useful approximations, but it seems that models at the neuron level would be too unwieldy for these sorts of questions anyway.

The City of Ottawa blames geese for E. coli despite routinely dumping raw sewage into the Ottawa river due to linked storm and sanitary sewers. The beaches are closed after significant rain storms.