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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday October 10 2017, @03:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the articles-for-the-birds dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Wednesday October 11 2017, @03:06PM

    by Aiwendil (531) on Wednesday October 11 2017, @03:06PM (#580501) Journal

    1) Try it, especially with new blends. It will allow you to fully experience the flavour of some blends since some subtleties otherwise will be lost (At least try it for a few puffs of the pipe - kinda like how one rolls a new beer on the tounge to fully experience it before going into enjoyment mode rather than exploring - if nothing else just to whet your apetite for the first "normal" inhale :)

    2+4) Tobacco is remarkably easy to grow and can be grown and cured even in apartments (some snus-users do it over here) - try growing 2-4 plants in pots (quart-sized are enough) for leaves for cigarrs (or cigarrilos). Youtube has some quite useful videos on rolling cigarrs.

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