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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: 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.