Missing cat features influencing their returning to owners

In this study, the features influencing finding and returning missing cats to their owners were investigated. The data were collected on the missing and recovered cats in the City of Zagreb, Croatia, during the 2011–2016 period, including the following features: breed, sex, age, colour, hair length, castration and microchipping. A data analysis was performed by use of the Statistica v13.4 software. Out of 946 cats reported to be missing, 372 (39%) were returned to their owners. Purebred (P < 0.01), castrated (P < 0.05), microchipped (P < 0.05) cats, and those with semi-long and long hair (P < 0.05) were more frequently returned to their owners, whereas the sex, age and colour had no significant impact on the missing cat recovery. The study results showed particular cat features influencing their finding to be correlated (P < 0.05). In conclusion, cat owners should attempt to control their movements, in particular of older and non-castrated cats, to reduce the rate of cats going missing. In addition, microchipping would facilitate finding them. The large-scale implementation of the concepts highlighted in this study can contribute to reducing the number of missing cats and increasing the number of cats being returned to their owners.

Knowing savagery: Australia and the anatomy of race

When Australia was circumnavigated by Europeans in 1801–02, French and British natural historians were unsure how to describe the Indigenous peoples who inhabited the land they charted and catalogued. Ideas of race and of savagery were freely deployed by both British and French, but a discursive shift was underway. While the concept of savagery had long been understood to apply to categories of human populations deemed to be in want of more historically advanced ‘civilisation’, the application of this term in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was increasingly being correlated with the emerging terminology of racial characteristics. The terminology of race was still remarkably fluid, and did not always imply fixed physical or mental endowments or racial hierarchies. Nonetheless, by means of this concept, natural historians began to conceptualise humanity as subject not only to historical gradations, but also to the environmental and climatic variations thought to determine race. This in turn meant that the degree of savagery or civilisation of different peoples could be understood through new criteria that enabled physical classification, in particular by reference to skin colour, hair, facial characteristics, skull morphology, or physical stature: the archetypal criteria of race. While race did not replace the language of savagery, in the early years of the 19th century savagery was re-inscribed by race.

Tinybop. Me: A Kid’s Diary by A. Seixas

Seixas, Ana. Tinybop. Me: A Kid’s Diary. 2016. Apple App Store, https://itunes.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1126531257?mt=8. Ages 3-7 (depending on parent assistance)Cost: $2.99 This app allows young children to create a digital diary filled with their own writings, photos, audio recordings, and drawings. The child creates an avatar from a varied array of options for skin colour, hair colour and style, facial features, and accessories. The app then encourages the child to respond to prompts, such as, “A song about me would be titled…,” “This is an interesting fact about my family,” and, “If I were an animal, I would look like this.” Some questions require a textual response, while others ask the child to draw, record, or take a snapshot of their response to the prompt, thereby taking advantage of the affordances offered by a tablet or phone. Other activities include the option to create a family tree, to create avatars of the child’s friends, and to answer all kinds of questions about the people in the child’s life. A child can draw, record, and photograph daily activities, such as their life at school. Children can use the app to explore their own ideas, experiences, and feelings through both serious and silly questions. A Kid’s Diary takes a simple process and makes it even more accessible to quite young children. Ana Seixas’ illustrations use eye-popping colours, with good use of contrast and negative space to make clicking easy. The language of the questions is simple and displayed in a large font. Younger children should be able to use this app with the help of caregivers reading the text for the children’s answers. Caregivers should know that the company foregrounds their privacy policy on the developer site, noting that the app does not collect information about the users through the application itself. It is highly recommended as a fun way for children and their caregivers to learn more about themselves and the world they observe around them. Highly recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Allison Sivak Allison Sivak is the Public Services Librarian at the University of Alberta Libraries. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Library and Information Studies and Elementary Education, focusing on how the aesthetics of information design influence young people’s trust in the credibility of information content.

The Problem of Determining Twin Zygosity for Epidemiological Studies

The use of epidemiological studies of twins as a means of determining the existence of genetic factors in various conditions is well known. To be of value, the zygosity of the twin pairs must be identified with as great a degree of confidence as possible. A method of determining twin zygosity, using concordance in general likeness, hair colour, hair type, eye colour, ear form, tongue roll and phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) taste sensitivity, was developed for use in a survey of 244 pairs of like-sexed twins aged 5 to 15 years. The results obtained and the problems raised when applying this method are discussed. The method was simple to apply to a large group of twin pairs, and monozygotic pairs were identified with a degree of confidence greater than 95%.

Studies in race crossing. IX. Crosses of Australians and Papuans with Caucasians, Chinese, and other races

SummaryIn continuation of the series of studies of racial crosses, this paper gives a genctical account of various race hybrids, in which Australian aborigines or Papuans are involved with Chinese, Malayans or Filipinos. Several families are traced through four or five generations, and some involve three or (in one case) four different races. Most of these racial combinations have not been studied previously.The racial characters recorded in Tables include colour of eyes, hair, eyebrows, eyelashes and skin, form of hair and measurements of head and of ears. In addition various observations of brow ridges, orbits, eyefolds, nose, lips and mouth were made. The Mongolian brachycephaly is strongly inherited from male Chinese ancestors; also the eyefolds, especially the top fold, which is more or less independent of the epicanthic fold. In Malay crosses the face and head are often very narrow. Marked segregation in sibs can occur in head form (cephalic index), hair colour, hair form, skin colour and other features. It has already been shown that in the F1 of aborigines × White the skin is near white. The same is true of Papuan × White, and in addition the child's hair is flaxen or very light brown although the Papuans appear to have always black or near-black hair.Incidentally, it was also observed that the Papuans not infrequently have marked brow ridges, depressed nasal root and sunken orbits like the Australian aborigines, indicating common elements in the ancestry of these two races.The Papuan nose, commonly with an overhanging tip, differs in some respects from the Semitic nose, and appears to be an independent (parallel) development.All contrasted human racial characters, such as hair form and colour, head shape, brow ridges, nasal root depression, size of ear and of mouth appear to depend on a small number of cumulative genes, generally without dominance. In how far these are alleles or based on genes at independent loci can only be determined by further investigations.

On the influence of bias and of personal equation in statistics of Ill-defined qualities: An experimental study

I. This experiment was undertaken to elucidate the real character of such statistics as those of eye-colour, hair-colour, temper, health, etc., which have been given, e. g ., by Mr. Galton and by Professor Pearson. The statistics are, it should be noted, not merely statistics of qualities , but of ill-defined qualities , the only guidance to the use of the terms of classification being—with some exceptions—common usage. Strictly speaking we must remember that data so collected are statistics, not of qualities themselves, but of names assigned thereto. It was desired to determine how far the distinction is of importance (1) as regards the naming of single samples: (2) as regards the naming of pairs, two samples of a quality being named more or less together, by themselves, for forming a contingency-table. A matt-surfaced photographic paper was printed by successive exposure to 16 depths of tint, from a slightly impure white to a deep blackish-brown. Small scraps of about ⅜-inch square were cut from each tint, and mounted on cards, two scraps being placed on each card, combined in such a way that every possible combination occurred, making 16 x 16 = 256 cards. Observers were then asked to name the tints on each card under one or more of the following schemes of classification, each observer naming the whole pack:—