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Spotted at Hackaday is a story on positive reinforcement to train crows to pick up litter:
A Dutch startup wants to teach the crow population to pick up cigarette butts in exchange for bird treats.
The whole Corvidae family of birds is highly intelligent so it shouldn’t be a problem training them that they will get a reward for depositing something the Hominidae family regularly throw on the street where the birds live. This idea is in turn an evolution of the open-source Crow Box.
For some, leveraging the intelligence of animals is more appealing than programming drones which could do the same thing. A vision system mixed with a drone and a manipulator could fulfull[sic] the same function but animals are self-repairing and autonomous without our code. The irony of this project is that, although it's probably fairly easy to train crows to recognize cigarette butts, the implementation hinges on having a vision system that can recognize the butts in order to properly train the crows in the first place.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Tuesday October 10 2017, @04:51PM (12 children)
Your "probably" is unnecessary here. It's a certainty. Humans really are that stupid, at least in the US. (You won't see cigarette butts all over the place in Japan, or any other trash for that matter.)
I heartily agree with Frojack's idea of training the birds to attack and peck at people who litter. However, this could result in the birds being injured by the litterers; some laws strongly punishing litterers who even attempt to defend themselves against the birds (as this might hurt the birds) probably won't help much because the litterers' reactions are partially reflexive. So maybe we should train the birds to shit on people who litter.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday October 10 2017, @05:03PM (3 children)
That I can back, for filtered cigarettes anyway. Throwing your non-biodegradable trash, or even noticeably large bits of biodegradable trash, anywhere but in an appropriate receptacle is a real shithead move on any land you don't personally own (on your own land it's moronic but acceptable).
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @07:26PM (1 child)
Please begin your usual gymnastics to justify why what bothers you is wrong, what bothers others shouldn't bother them, and you hold the one true view.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday October 10 2017, @08:29PM
Care to try again in the correct thread?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Wednesday October 11 2017, @03:59AM
There are benefits of dumping biodegradable trash on land surfaces to actually "biodegrade" compared to having it locked in an anaerobic landfill:
http://newatlas.com/orange-peel-forest-costa-rica/51012/ [newatlas.com]
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/08/22/orange-new-green-how-orange-peels-revived-costa-rican-forest [princeton.edu]
It stinks while rotting though so dumping orange or banana peels in your neighbor's garden without permission might not be welcome.
But if 100s of hikers a day scattered their banana peels in a forest while hiking the forest might actually benefit. More "nutritious" food waste might attract bears or other large predators so might wish to be careful about that...
Meanwhile I'm wondering how long it would take for a "significant level" of fungi and bacteria to work out better ways to crack plastic like was done for wood cellulose ages ago.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Aiwendil on Tuesday October 10 2017, @07:28PM (7 children)
Other than japanese just being adverse to littering it also is a result of an invention that seems dumfounds the rest of the world - pocket ashtrays. It basically is a little thing that looks like a pocket watch that you extinguish the cigarette in and then put the butt in until you are at a suitable place to toss its contents (exactly the same design that was common among the gentlemen up until the mid 1900s).
I'd actually love to see a country send half a dozen (should cost less than a buck per such pack) such to each household (and hand it out at shelters) and then launch a massive campaign pointing out that the only remaining reason for tossing butts is that you are a lazy antisocial slob that deserves being ostracized (for the littering)
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday October 10 2017, @09:51PM (6 children)
Other than japanese just being adverse to littering
No, that's the main reason right there, not anything about pocket ashtrays. It's not just cigarette butts that are missing from the streets of Japan and other public areas, it's all other trash too. You can even see it at the train/subway station: in Japan, there's just the rails, and the gravel, and that's it. Go to any subway in the US and you'll see all kinds of trash strewn around the tracks. Americans are simply litterbugs. They're not quite as bad as they were decades ago in the 70s, and not quite as bad as some underdeveloped countries, but they're really not clean people at all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @07:30AM
As the joke goes: During the FIFA World Cup the stadiums were cleaner AFTER the Japanese fans... I've friends who've stayed in Japan and they say they'd believe that- e.g. the fans might pick up trash and clean seats with wet-wipes. There are places where there aren't trash bins to be seen but they'd still be clean - you'd see the Japanese carry their trash with them, all the way home if necessary.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday October 11 2017, @11:07AM (2 children)
That's one of the things I least liked about moving from OK to TN. People in OK, for the most part, do not litter but every fucking morning here in TN I have to go pick up whatever bullshit some asshole decided they'd rather throw out their window into my yard than keep in their car until they got home.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:44PM (1 child)
> but every fucking morning here in TN
Probably not very often. How often do you get to fuck in the morning?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday October 12 2017, @01:37AM
More often than I care to. I want caffeine, nicotine, and solitude for the first few hours of the morning. It's bad manners to ignore a guest even if they're getting on your nerves though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Wednesday October 11 2017, @12:14PM (1 child)
For fun - imagine the issue of putting the cigarette out and keeping the butt without the portable ashtray (designated smoking areas are a quite new thing).
But yes, I agree that the main reason is being litter-adverse but I'd argue that it is helped by devices that makes keeping clean easier.
Personally I don't consider the japanese to ge that extreme in cleaning but I'm a native swede - here we at least dump our thrash near the thrashcan (fun thing in sweden, you can tell if a can is full just by seeing thrash next to it, and we can bury a thrashcan in garbage and keep the rest of the area clean without finding it odd), except for cigarettebutts for some reason.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday October 11 2017, @03:14PM
But yes, I agree that the main reason is being litter-adverse but I'd argue that it is helped by devices that makes keeping clean easier.
I completely disagree. The devices exist in Japan because of their litter-averseness. Remember, necessity is the mother of invention, so the portable ashtray was invented because someone, somewhere, didn't want to litter cigarette butts. Therefore, smokers in Japan buy these things and use them to avoid littering, whereas American smokers probably haven't even heard of such a thing, because they don't give a shit about littering.
Personally I don't consider the japanese to ge that extreme in cleaning but I'm a native swede
That's because you live in another highly civilized society, not one that really isn't much different from some dirty third-world country.