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: 2) by frojack on Tuesday October 10 2017, @06:39PM
Exactly.
I can usually avoid smoking zones, those smoking stations (marked by the Butt disposal pylons) invariably are littered with butts, not to mention the ash flicked off at random and tracked into the establishment. But the filters persist in the environment for decades.
https://www.thoughtco.com/are-cigarette-butts-biodegradable-1204105 [thoughtco.com]
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/15/ban-cigarette-filters-hazardous-tobacco-waste [theguardian.com]
http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/20/Suppl_1/i25 [bmj.com]
But The Buzzard doesn't smoke filtered Cigs, so even though he admits to tossing the butts on the ground, and doesn't lobby loudly for publicly funded health care, he expects to be above reproach.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.