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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @05:41PM
I'm a non-smoker, but I'd hardly say cigarettes smell bad, at least while they're being smoked. Now, the stale smell of smoke on clothing, that's nothing pleasant...but it's not really any worse than some of the crap people buy to spray on themselves because they think it smells nice. Nevermind what some body sprays will do to your eyes and nose. The best deterrent to keeping adults away from school children is Axe body spray, blech. Never mind car exhaust, which in addition to all of these issues, ALSO actually is a health hazard.
I guess the point is, if you don't like being around what other people do, maybe a city isn't the place for you. Go out to the country, and give the cows some Poo-Pourri.