Japanese aquarium urges public to video-chat with eels
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
https://www.sumida-aquarium.com/news/details/2236/
A shame that The Guardian’s article did not include a backlink to it.
For all the lamenting about the media's decline there's plenty of amateur blogs out there that manage to link their sources when writing an article.
How in the world can a majority of major news organizations not overcome the hurdle of... adding links to what they're covering..?
It makes digesting political news all but impossible.
Because news is not meant to inform, it's meant to indoctrinate and keep you passively under the thumb of the rich.
https://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Econo...
>It makes digesting political news all but impossible.
The question is do you know the upper classes know your brain doesn't see the world as it is, you can be told the facts and not reason to the right conclusion?
Pathetic, right?
It might just be a policy to not add links except if it's to articles on the same site, which is obviously stupid from the user's point of view.
How on earth do they still exist with a business model that seems to consist solely of making absurd interpretations of YouTube videos and tweets?
When I asked if it's okay to link to sources, they told me I was allowed to if absolutely necessary. I should try not to because it takes readers away from our site, and they might not come back.
I suspect that many sites have the same line of reasoning.
> I suspect that many sites have the same line of reasoning.
Not your fault, obviously, but FFS: this is the most vapid line of reasoning. If I want to find out more I'm going to leave your site anyway, so surely it's better if I'm not irritated by your lack of citations when I do inevitably go?
Does Wikipedia worry about people leaving and not coming back? No. Do you know why I go back to Wikipedia all the effing time, often using it as a starting point for research? Well, one of the big reasons is that many articles have a decent list of authoritative citations and external links at the bottom that I can use to find out more when I need or want to.
Talk about myopic: even the BBC do this, and it's incredibly frustrating. Absolutely smacks of some clueless senior manager[1] setting up the wrong metrics for measuring site performance.
[1] Manager bashing is a bit of a tired trope here on HN and I'm not trying to make a generalisation but, as with every job, some of them are certainly idiots/clowns.
If the reason they're leaving makes it's more likely they'll come back again in future this may lead to an increase in ad revenue due to more sessions even though average session duration falls.
Obviously I don't know, and unfortunately I've learned not to trust that higher-ups in certain organisations have done their homework on revenue-affecting decisions, but you'd at least hope that they had some data to back up the thinking.
I’m also curious about how well these eels can perceive screens. Some animals seem to be able to process things on a screen while others seem to totally ignore it. Is there some biological difference here, maybe the frequencies of light emitted by a TV/monitor being designed for human eyes?
For binocularity, I'm not as sure, but it may be that with different eye setups, perspective has different rules to appear realistic.
There is also the simple fact that images on a screen don't appear realistic to us either, we just choose to take interest in them because we understand what they are meant to represent.
In my experience, it's more about the particular individual of animal rather than broadly "all eels can see screens", at least that's what I experience with my dogs. One of them ignore screens and seemingly can't see / don't want to see what's on the screen, even if prompted to look at it. The other one watches TV with me, as soon as I'm watching something. And if there is something appearing on the screen resembling an animal, she tries to scare them away with barks. Humans on TV is fine, and she follows them, but birds, dogs or any other animal is an enemy according to her. Even animated animals are recognized as animals for her, unless they are too abstract.
Watching BoJack Horseman was an interesting experience, to see where she would react vs not. Seems most animals/humans in that show are fine, unless they are really behaving like animals, then it's not fine.
At least it worked on me, I spent 2h digging through wikipedia and Youtube about Garden Eels.
There are more cheap and simple solutions than video-chat (figures printed on cardboard and cut for example), so we can safely assume that eel eye reaction to screen flickering is not the real point here.
The OP delights and your question made me think about how some among the unwashed masses of Internet users will send video to the eels that may harm and/or frighten them.
The direct translation of this article for me is: Aquariums are expensive to maintain, especially if the public expects a high level of excellence. If your bussiness depend on massive loads of people and suddenly this is not possible anymore by the current situation, you have a problem. Some systems will struggle after two-three months of sudden lack of income. Either they are trying to monetize remote viewings or, if coronavirus keeps pushing, "Adopt an eel" campaign will most probably follow.
Both are reasonable solutions to a problem, of course, as long as people remain informed if their video-chat data are being monetized somehow.