Friday, January 17, 2014


Mystery Behind Birds Flying In a V
Formation Revealed

A new study published in the journal Nature and led
by researchers from Royal Veterinary College in the
UK, finds that the migrating birds carefully position
their wingtips and sync their flapping, apparently to
hook the former bird’s updraft—and save energy during
flight.

Scientists concluded after tracking a group of large black
birds, the northern ibises—each equipped with ultralight
sensors with a tiny GPS device—that had been
trained to follow an ultralight aircraft.
The surprising fact is that the birds know how this
formation contributes to the flock as a whole. Bird
formations, called echelons, come in many
arrangements. According to Scientific American, the “J”
formation is actually more common than the “V”
formation, but the V is probably the most commonly
noticeable.
According to a 2001 report on bird formations, the
birds fly in a V actually to conserve energy.
“From a behavioral perspective it’s really a
breakthrough,” says David Lentink, a mechanical
engineer at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California,
who was not a part of the study. “Showing that birds
care about syncing their wing beats is definitely an
important insight that we didn’t have before.”

Ty Hedrick said “It’s a pretty impressive piece of work as
it is, but it does suggest that there’s a lot more to learn.”
Ty Hedrick, is a biologist at the University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill, who studies flight aerodynamics in
birds and insects.
It was believed that birds doesn’t possess such precise
engineering quality. The scientists suspected that
whether they contain the skill to process the flight
dynamics and sensory feedback required to implement
these proficient formations.
A seven-minute analysis showed how perfectly the ibises
positioned themselves while flying in a V, so as to exploit
the updraft in another bird’s wake, letting them conserve
their energy.
They additionally appeared to time the flapping of their
wings to take full advantage of that updraft, by creating a
wingtip path, an equivalent wave track through the air as
the wingtip of the bird up ahead.
And once one bird flew directly behind another instead,

it gave the impression to regulate its fluttering to scale
back the effects of the wake’s downdraft. Thus birds will
either sense or predict the wake left by their flock mates
and regulate their fluttering consequently, a

noteworthy ability, the researchers said.
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The discourse of "Film Culture" requires us to conceive of cinema in its own terms.

The discourse of film research will lead us to particular descriptions, " limited" kinds of analysis determined by the categories cinema provides.

Discourse is a complex concept. It refers to the way in which something is told not just in terms of its specific language (whether verbal or visual) but also in terms of what it prioritizes. Discourses are both general and specific. Narrative "realist" cinema is a discursive form, a particular kind of human expression which represents the world in a certain way, employs a particular kind of a time-visual "language". Within narrative "realist" cinema as a whole, particular genres have their own more specific discourses. i.e. The Sci-Fi film is preoccupied with themata (idea-themes) of science and control. the romance is preoccupied with themata of sexuality, gender and often property relations. These ideas are either implicit -taken for granted within the way the story is conceived or explicit - in that the film actively promoted certain values, attitudes and beliefs.

The concept of Discourse is closely connected with another key concept HEGEMONY "taken-for-granted" a "common sense" outlook on some aspect of human reality shared by the vast majority of people within the society. Hegemony helps us to understand the illusion that commonly shared attitudes and values, ways of making sense of our world, appear to come from nowhere. Narrative "realist" cinema has this characteristic, it disguises its discursiveness by pretending to be simply "there". Discourses about law and order and sexuality, for example - are themselves seen as non-discursive, as natural, as taken for granted. These core values of society appear to come from nowhere- they simply are ! This leads to a compounding of a criticism leveled against popular cinema (and other popular media) that not only does it disguise its own discursive form, but it also "naturalizes" these profoundly significant social and political discourses. THINK CRITICALLY ABOUT THEIR "CONSTRUCTED" REALITY AND THE VALUE SYSTEMS THAT FUNDAMENTALLY INFLUENCE OUR LIVES. “being indoctrinated with a political spin.” From a commercial perspective, however, the very opposite may appear to be the case. People do not want to think critically about their "constructed" reality. They pay for their entertainment, so they can be released from the concerns of their lives. They may well want the security of hegemonic values within familiar discourses. The point is that it has less to do with questions of an active/passive audience. It has to do either with the choices we make or the level of (a)Competence - (b)Education and (c) CineNoesis we bring to cinema and the screening events we attend