I read somewhere about training crows to pickup cigarette butts in exchange food. I’ve always wondered if it would be possible to train a crow to pick up loose coins for food. I imagine the actual machine would be fairly easy to build but the most difficult part would be keeping the coin pathway free of non-coins as the crows are likely to pick up bottle caps, key rings and other junk. The other problem would be dealing with your neighbours as there would always be crows hanging around.
Side note: All the crows in Vancouver roost on a single street. Every day around sundown there are 10s of thousands of crows flying east and creating a chaotic scene at times. I’ve seen hundreds of crows ripping up a lawn looking for worms once and it felt like a scene from a movie. Here is a video of all the crows causing ruckus: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_QuEjaG4Ghs
Also we have one crow here in Vancouver who was raised by a human so he is essentially part of the population. He takes the sktrain, walks into McDonald’s and even stole a knife from a crime scene once. It’s an absolute hoot. He even has his own Instagram page: https://instagram.com/canuckthecrow
> I read somewhere about training crows to pickup cigarette butts in exchange food. I’ve always wondered if it would be possible to train a crow to pick up loose coins for food.
Probably not. It probably seems like I'm shilling this researcher's blog in this thread at this point but this commentary [1] gives a short explanation of why.
One of my hobbies is actually bird watching, particularly with crows. I love the animals, they're very fascinating creatures. I've had the opportunity to interact with many of them because I set out peanuts for them near my neighborhood. They've very gradually become acclimated to this routine, and they reliably arrive to pick up food if I make a particular noise and they're in the area.
But I'm very skeptical that I could "train" them to start exchanging items for food. In captivity a crow's intelligence can be especially fostered and trained because there's no other source of food to distract it. If you want it to proceed through a puzzle [2] to get food it has to do so. But wild crows are very, very cautious and (like most animals) very economically rational in their feeding habits. To date none of the wild crows who give people items have been trained to do so, it's been a happy accident (it's never happened to me, unfortunately). If you start imposing an exchange system on the food dispensary, you might find that the crows simply go elsewhere for easier meals.
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1. I read somewhere about training crows to pickup cigarette butts in exchange food. I’ve always wondered if it would be possible to train a crow to pick up loose coins for food.
> But I'm very skeptical that I could "train" them to start exchanging items for food. In captivity a crow's intelligence can be especially fostered and trained because there's no other source of food to distract it.
What seems not to have been mentioned so far is the difference between the economic rationality of an individual versus what happens when there's a large population of those individuals.
AFAICT, the goal of these projects isn't to train individuals but to train the population, in aggregate, perform the task.
Clearly an economically rational animal can still be influenced to a certain behavior, if you make the reward attractive enough.
It's not like crows are not willing to work for food. They have been documented breaking open stubborn mollusks by repeatedly flying them high above a road and dropping them until they crack, or throwing them under oncoming traffic to be smashed open.
Yeah that's true, and I've seen a number of corvid species (including crows) taking my peanuts and dropping them a few stories. They also like to soak almonds in water to soften them for chewing.
The thing is that there are ample other food sources so whatever you provide needs to be truly exceptional insofar as rewards go. And the crows might not know it's a great reward until they solve the puzzle to get it.
I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just pessimistic.
The coin thing could possibly make for a modest business model. But crows are SMART and you might want to consider the incentives you'd be creating by rewarding them for finding money... :)
Same thing here way over on the other coast in the Maritimes. The crows by the hundreds head home in the early evening, it's quite a sight. There is a local play/artsy thing about it too people dress up like crows. http://www.theguardian.pe.ca/news/local/crows-run-riot-throu...
Crow attacks generally only happen for a few weeks every spring as the young has left the nest and is still too young to fly. It's a known issue here and not really anything to worry about.
The strains are harder to find as they are considered premium strains these days with the rise of CBD but an easy replacement would be to consume your regular cannabis and then take a CBD pill immediately afterwards. It won’t be exact 1:1 but you can play around with it to get the effect you desire.
And it would mainly be a guess on the Doctor’s part as there isn’t enough science either way. Expect that to change in the next 10-20 years but at this point, your doctor, even with all the medical degrees behind them, know just as much as the bud tender behind the counter. Compound that with the fact that cannabis affects everyone differently then it all becomes a subjective mess.
It’s getting cheaper and cheaper to produce videos these days though. We’re kind of in the place that graphic design was in 10 years ago. As the equipment gets better, software more powerful, and generations of younger folks with substantial knowledge in the subject, the costs are going to go way down.
I’d say we’re at the end of the cost reduction curve. Capital requirements for video production have been minimal for a while. Costs are overwhelmingly people. People don’t get cheaper.
With the number of totally independent content producers on YouTube with extremely high production quality (often indistinguishable from professional TV shows), I honestly don't think cost/people is a big factor anymore, at all.
But a publisher is paying people to produce the content - so I'm saying after the planning, shooting and producing, the cost at probably a few thousand for a publisher. Supporting that with video ad Rev is really, really hard if you're like the typical online magazine that doesn't have a look at T of scale.
> after the planning, shooting and producing, the cost at probably a few thousand for a publisher.
There are all sorts of YouTube content creators who do everything for their channel, had no noteworthy background in any of it, and turn out several videos a week with broadcast TV levels of quality, in addition to holding down full time regular jobs.
You could spend several thousand per episode, but you no longer have* to.
I agree though, covering these now minimal costs with ad revenue is something else entirely.
> You could spend several thousand per episode, but you no longer have* to.
You don’t have to if you know how to do the work. It’s like making apps. It’s cheap to make an app and get it on the App Store if you’re an app developer. But if you need to hire somebody, suddenly you’re looking at multiple tens of thousands of dollars, at a bare minimum. The fact that there are all sorts of content creators doing video work for themselves doesn’t mean that doing video work is somehow cheap. They’re just working for themselves on spec.
This doesn't make logical sense to me....a lot of these skilled people run channels with next to no income, I would think only would many of them gladly take on some side work for multiple tens of thousands of dollars, at a bare minimum, but would fight over it, bidding it down to way less than that.
To me this seems like basic supply and demand in action, I'm curious which aspects of this scenario we disagree on to come to such a wide disagreement?
I agree with you. In addition to many more people saavy at generating and editing content, modern cell phones with motion stabilization and better editing tools make anyone a reporter/cinematographer if they are lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time to capture something interesting or otherwise news worthy.
Rationality only works if you’re true motivation is financial. I suspect that anyone with the means to achieve a 51% majority is playing a different game than you or I. At that level power becomes the motivation and the power to crash it all on a whims notice is infinitely more valuable than any profit obtained. That scenario is heaps more frightening to me as bitcoin (and other blockchain coins who make it through the inevitable great cryptocurrency filter) become more popular, we may see a power struggle between nations and individual high level players. Who knows though, it’s all fascinating to watch either way. There are smarter people than me studying this every day and it really does feel like we are on the dawn of some societal breakthroughs.
Most of these pages won’t be so forthcoming in their desire to influence. The idea for these ads is to pay for reach and credibility. Send it out there and hope that it goes viral. After which you’ve gathered a whole new army of people who have liked your seemingly innocent page. After that it’s just a matter controlling the tone on that page using bots to create a false narrative. As humans, we are so used to be told what to do that it becomes easy to follow the general flow of your social circle. If everybody you hang out with hates one politician, then the chances that you’re also going to hate that politician is high. So by creating pockets of people who are all there on the page because they have something in common, you can control it and therefore controlling the direction of their thoughts by manipulating their peer circles.
Engineers in other disciplines are held liable for their mistakes. Imagine a civil engineer signing off on a building and then having it collapse. If it was found that the engineer was negligent then you can bet your ass there will be reprucussions. As an engineer, you are the top of your field and with that comes a professional responsibility that is important to fully realize. Mistakes are mistakes sure, but if those mistakes end up being responsible for criminal activity then you’re fully responsible. It’s why the chain of command exists.
> Engineers in other disciplines are held liable for their mistakes.
To be fair, they have several hundred (if not thousands of) years of trial and error, documentation, etc. behind them to (try and) help people avoid the mistakes.
Computer Science has barely 70 years of half-arsed fumbling about.
Side note: All the crows in Vancouver roost on a single street. Every day around sundown there are 10s of thousands of crows flying east and creating a chaotic scene at times. I’ve seen hundreds of crows ripping up a lawn looking for worms once and it felt like a scene from a movie. Here is a video of all the crows causing ruckus: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_QuEjaG4Ghs
Also we have one crow here in Vancouver who was raised by a human so he is essentially part of the population. He takes the sktrain, walks into McDonald’s and even stole a knife from a crime scene once. It’s an absolute hoot. He even has his own Instagram page: https://instagram.com/canuckthecrow