I would like to thank everyone on this list for taking the survey for the
Percevia online bird search engine. As promised here are the annotated
results:

http://tinyurl.com/5qo6u

And here is the full link:

http://www.percevia.com/Survey\BirdIdentificationSurveyJan2005-Results.htm


Below is the original message inviting people to take the survey. Its still
available if you wish to take it.

Thank you

Mitchell Waite
Sausalito, California
http://www.percevia.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Mitchell Waite
Sent: Friday, February 11, 2005 5:29 PM
To: 
Subject: Matching and Bird ID Survey #2 (Percevia)

Last year the list masters allowed me to post a survey to help us figure out
what colors people assign to birds when only given a limited number of
choices. Since then and based on the feedback we have spent a great deal of
time perfecting our search engine, added a lot of new features, and
increased the number of birds from a few hundred to over 680. We created
this second poll to see if our work has been correct. The engine itself is
found at:

http://www.percevia.com/birds.htm

This new survey is primarily designed to help us determine how well the non
profit Percevia search engine identifies birds of North America using colors
as the primary attribute. Color is a difficult characteristic to use to
identify birds for several reasons: people do not see colors alike; they
give names that are inconsistent and determining the predominant color is
extremely subjective. So this survey does not necessarily test your
knowledge of bird colors rather it determines if the way we have set up the
search method actually works. 

There are other optional parts of the survey that evaluate the new wizard
and intelligent search box.

Would you all please take this test? Here is the link:

http://www.percevia.com/Survey/BirdIdentificationSurveyJan2005.HTM

Again the database is free for non commercial use. I have an advisory board
of about 35 expert birders, ornithologists and published authors such as Ken
Kaufman, editors like Ted Floyd, and many PhD ornithologists helping to
perfect it, and this test was the result of many discussions with them.


Thanks

Mitch Waite
Sausalito, CA
http://www.percevia.com