Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser
preprints.org
preprints.org
To work in the real world - cover a whole room or terrace - presumably a much higher resolution camera (or much faster scanning system) would be required. Even a 1W laser is dangerous to eyesight, if it was being fired at targets mingling with people.
The system could be mounted on small drones that would patrol larger areas - but the idea of robotic drones armed with lasers roaming around is beginning to sound worse than the mosquitos.
A 1W laser is even more dangerous than you say. It is powerful enough to start wood fires.
Having a computer point-and-shoot one at random directions in free air is just madness. There is zero discussion of human safety of such a system in the paper.
How well/badly dd it work?
Where's the blog post?
:-)
[0] https://www.livescience.com/20733-mosquitoes-survive-raindro...
You don’t want to put kilograms of it in your garden, but this device is not consuming anywhere close to that amount of salt. It holds about the quantity of a salt shaker of salt, and can be fired 80 times from that amount.
Most are indeed very lethargic, but there are some much more agile variants out there.
Perhaps it's possible to make something that's kinda safe for eyesight if you make it track and light up the fly/mosquito for e.g. 50 seconds instead of 0.5 seconds.
You hang it out behind a shed or garage, the lid has a little maze that they crawl into and then they can't find their way out.
My parents always used https://www.bigstinkyflytrap.com/ . It definitely caught a lot of flies, which can be different than catching enough flies of course.
It worked far too well.
Within a day it had attracted flies from a large surrounding area. The nearly filled jar of flies had a presence I can only describe as "Stephen King-esque" just buzzing with raw malevolence. If you think one large black fly can make quite the noise I invite you to listen to a 1000+ angry flies in a jar.
And while many were certainly capture - an equally abhorrent number were all over the cans and the side of the house. So a mixed experience.
The method I devised to get rid of these large black flies from indoors:
Open a door and simply herd/walk them out by making yourself big. It's surprisingly easy - so much easier than trying to swat them. They seem to instinctively avoid things moving towards them, and because of that they're pretty easy to herd.
I also tried once with an insecticide which also contained a bait, it came in granules and you had to mix with water and spray all over. The floor of my outdoors where full of dead flies.
Best advice I can give: never use any kind of bait. That’s completely BS, you are never going to kill them all. You want flies to go to another place, keep things clean.
Flies hate wind, use fans.
Just look at the images in the article - the guy's best result was detecting a black speck appearing on a nearby white wall with some 60-70% reliability (based on his own numbers). So you would be missing a lot of mosquitoes - but will be happy firing the laser at random shadows and what not. And that was in a completely stationary setup and controlled lab conditions, i.e. not at all something resembling a typical poorly lit room!
This article is BS. Preprints are not peer reviewed (i.e. nobody has checked anything in it - so could even be a complete hoax), it is a pretty typical gadgetry style paper (we do it because we can, not because it makes sense) you do at when you need to fill up your resume with research papers (e.g. for keeping/obtaining a job reasons).
The "save the world" (mosquito control, diseases, etc.) justification is also par for the course for this type of crappy paper. Anyone who seriously thinks that one could control mosquito problem by shooting them one by one by a laser is delusional.
But neural networks and "AI" are being used, so it has to be cutting edge groundbreaking stuff, right?
BTW, this nonsense idea has been floated as a publicity stunt a few years ago (including a slow motion video of a laser burning off wing of a mosquito in flight) and it seems that some Russian PhD student from a fairly obscure uni either didn't do their research or has reinvented the wheel (or just plain copied the thing without attribution). The list of irrelevant or only very tangentially relevant (it is about mosquitoes, so in scope, right?) references is a dead giveaway there (paper on mosquitoes spreading zika? seriously?).
Here, it was even on National Geographic in 2010(!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKm8FolQ7jw
Oh and that was supposed to be a handheld device to boot. With the same "save the world from malaria" spiel too. I wonder what are the owners of the company that was pushing this concept to investors back then trying to sell today ...
There are actually multiple videos on Youtube showing products from different companies that were attempting to push this as some sort of viable concept.
The paper cites even earlier stuff:
> For the first time, the idea of using a laser to protect against insects was expressed in the early 1980s by American astrophysicist Lowell Wood.
That would make you a spoil sport, burst my bubble... I am going to have a little cry in the corner now.
I really wanted a AI powered, laser equipped, mosquito hunting drone for my house. After all, what could possibly go wrong?
This is why I should not be in charge of anything.
That describes about 80% of the field of machine learning today: that's how most new work in machine learning is presented to the community, through preprints on arxiv that never get published, therefore peer-reviewed; and most of it is of the "we did it because we can, not because it makes sense" type. The same goes for much of AI research in the past. Here's John McCarthy:
1. Much work in AI has the ``look ma, no hands'' disease. Someone programs a computer to do something no computer has done before and writes a paper pointing out that the computer did it. The paper is not directed to the identification and study of intellectual mechanisms and often contains no coherent account of how the program works at all.
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/reviews/lighthill/lighthi...
(Take note that the above was written in 1973)
I'm prepared to bet that the exact same work could be published by a respectable research team (you know, with good English) and it would get many adulatory comments in social media (though I hope you would retain your skepticism).
You need a good way to tell that you're on target. The way to do that is to use the vision system only as a search radar, to find that there's something to shoot at and approximately where it is. Then point the laser near the target, at low power, and start scanning around the target. Modulate the outgoing beam, so you can see when it's illuminating something. Get range from time of flight. When you find something worth shooting, go to high power and take it out.
This is roughly how radar-controlled anti-aircraft gun systems work.
An ordinary UV lamp with bug zapper will probably be more effective.
Alas, as I discovered recently when looking at those nifty, cheap, USB-powered UV + fan mosquito killers -- mosquitoes aren't attracted to UV.
Evidently they are attracted to CO2 and warmth, which are a bit harder to generate at 5V, sadly.
On the other side, burning methane generates CO2: CH4 + 2 O2 → CO2 + 2 H2O. Methane is distributed nearly everywhere in my country for cooking and heating. That at least solves the problem of refilling.
I guess we should burn a very small amount of methane to lure mosquitoes into those traps. But how about climate change etc.?
If you have a mosquito problem, refilling your traps is the least of your worries.
(These types of traps are commercially available and quite effective.)
Not only more effective, but i imagine it would be easy to misdetect someone's iris as a fly D:
Same thought as well. They must not have done the math on the optics... You'd have a much better chance using an acoustic array (mosquitoes put out a very distinctive sonic frequency), or even better an array of radar modules. There is simply too much noise and data in the visible spectrum to catch something that small without expensive optics and an expensive processor to process all of those pixels.
I personally would go with the radar route; it's slightly more expensive that the acoustic route, but accuracy would be fantastic, even at a distance.
even if you had a RED Komodo feeding uncompressed 4K DCI 60fps video to a pci-express bus capture card, the sensor resolution and tiny size of mosquitoes means that unless the lighting conditions are just right, and the mosquito is somehow highlighted against a background, it's going to be very hard to pick them out at distances of 2 or more meters.
and that's before you get into the software problem of processing the fire hose of data that is 4096x2160 at 60fps raw. and the hardware cost of a very serious workstation class PC capable of taking the capture at 1:1 realtime.
possibly a lidar based sensor or something might be more suitable to locating the x/y/z position of mosquitoes in a few meter area.
You could have several bluetooth mikes scattered around the room for good triangulation
There are a few places here in Sydney where you see a remarkable cloud of bats feeding in bright light - the lights over the harbour bridge and several of the tax buildings bordering the Botanic Gardens regularly have flocks of bats whirling around presumably attracted to all the insects flying in the bright lights...
And if you want to actually solve the mosquito issue, don't have standing water around. Or make sure fish and frogs can live in it. They love eating mosquito larvae.
Not this boondoggle. Remember, engineering is also about realizing that the fact that you are able to do something doesn't always mean you should.
A phased microphone array is the only sensible approach to localized mosquito detection. It would probably work reasonably well.
The problem is that the entire field is patent encumbered, because Myhrvold's company Intellectual Ventures has done some research on it, and no on in their right mind would go up against those guys.
It would probably be louder than desired, though, unless ultrasonic.
The paper claims "1 - 5mm" for a mosquito, which seems plausible. Lets pick 5mm out of pure optimism. The new(ism) HQ Raspberry Pi camera modules are 12megapixel ~4000x3000 pixel sensors, if you assume you could recognise a mosquito based on it's flight/movement pattern rather than needing to have an image of the mosquito, maybe having a 2x2 pixel resolution of it might be enough, so you could use an appropriate lens and cover a 5mm x 4000pixel / 2 = 10,000mm or 10m wide by 7.5m tall region. That seems totally do-able. Even up to 4x4 pixel per mosquito at 5m x 3.75m would happily cover the wall of my bedroom with the windows. You _might_ even be able to do that with the cheaper 8 megapixel V2 camera module instead of the HQ one.
The background subtraction is fairly easy to do in OpenCV. Assuming there's not too much moving in the background (I might need to tie back my curtains?) I wonder if the path a mosquito traces out would be distinct enough to detect?
Research (read "the first google hit) suggests mosquitos fly at 1.6-2.4kmh - call it 2 - which is just over half a meter per second, so about 20mm per frame at 25fps, or 8mm per frame at 60fps. If we choose to use the 4px = ~5mm numbers from above, that means if you detect a thing that might be a mosquito, you don't need to search very far around it in the subsequent frame to track it - if it's a mosquito, it's likely to be still there and within 6 or 7 px of where it was in the previous frame. (I've never tried doing this on something so small, but that technique works really well tracking people across multiple frames in a video. See: https://data-flair.training/blogs/python-project-real-time-h... )
I don't think that at least x,y detection of a mosquito in a 12 or 8 megapixel camera is impossible. The 8MP raspi camera has a 63deg horizontal field of view, so that 5m wide assumed view from earlier would be at 5m distance give or take. If you could get your shoot-down laser close enough to your detection camera, you might not need to care about the z axis. The camera module is about 20mm square - at 5m range shooting the laser across the edge of the camera module pcb might be "close enough"? Might not work at short range, though once you're close you could scan the bean around a bit, it'll be super obvious in the camera view when you've got a hit (assuming the background doesn't;t reflect the laser brighter that a lit up mosquito? Great, now I have an excuse to paint my walls with VantaBlack...)
Another idea... Assume a similar setup - a camera aimed at a 5x3.75m cross section of space, with a line laser shining across it (one of those lasers shone through a cylinder that makes a line, like some power tools use to project guidelines). I'd guess it'd be possible (maybe even easy) to distinguish between dust mites and mosquitos lighting up as they cross the line laser? Perhaps have three co-planar line lasers 10mm or 20mm apart to make the timing of aiming your shoot-down laser easier, use the first flash as a detection signal and swivel your galvos to that region, and then use the 2nd/3rd flashes close by to quickly fine tune the aim without needing to swing too far?
(Now I just need to work out which if any of my half finished projects I should stop working on and half finish this one... ;-) )
But then using a laser just insane - anything that has enough energy to down a mosquito will have enough energy to blind someone unfortunate to see the laser or its reflection. I'd go with power LED and some focusing with very narrow focal depth. maybe a lens moved like in optical drives, maybe a MEMS reflector like are used in projectors (but instead of spreading all pixels to cast a projection focusing it in a single point?
haven't you just described how to make a laser?
If the thing you're cutting/engraving isn't present, then 100mm past the focal plane, it's back to 10mm diameter, and 100mm after that, it's 20mm, and just continues dissipating. It's really pretty hard to focus it back into a coherent beam sufficiently narrow to damage eyesight (much less skin).
Yes, the CDRH is really concerned about the possibility of a laser system accidentally lasing a blob of metal into a perfect mirror that will send a coherent beam directly into the eye of an operator standing meters away; I've got laser systems with thousands of hours on them etching reflective foil off of plastic and there's no sign of reflections causing damage to the smoked acrylic that's shrouding the operation.
The typical mechanism used to drive laser engravers is more like a HDD actuator that moves the read/write heads - it's called a galvanometer. Basically a mirror on a stick connected to a magnet. A voice coil pulls the magnet +/- 10 degrees or so; They've got sub-millisecond response times so hitting a moving mosquito would be no problem!
I propose that you suck the mosquitoes through an enclosure with something like a box fan or duct booster. Make sure the entrance and exit has to go through a couple right angles so your laser optics are never visible to someone outside the box. Backlight the inside of the box so that instead of AI to see whether the thing in your camera FOV is a mosquito or a songbird really far away, you just zap any black mosquito-sized blobs that pass through.
Even with your example of 10W, 10mm beam it has a bit more than 0.12 W/mm^2. Hundred times the power output from the sun. Even if we use a 1W laser, which should be enough for a mosquito, it's still like looking into the sun with a 10x magnifier.
And as you said - you focus the spot in 0.1mm with a small focal length - that's great for cutting or engraving but won't deliver enough energy to a mosquito 5 meters away unless you start with the same beam size, then focus it 5 meters away at the target. Only then it will need another 5 meters for the beam to return to the initial diameter and many more times that to finally be safe.
What I propose is a big reflector and aiming optics directed at it(a bit like a satellite antenna). I didn't do the math, but tens of centimetres or even more than a meter of dimeter. Let's say 50cm==500mm.
Then if you want to focus it to 5mm at 5 meters it will have less than 10mm at +-5cm. You could do the same with a laser but you just don't need to. Instead of 1W laser you can use a 10W powerled, have the same energy at the target but it will be much safer at almost every stage before it.
And what most people think about when they talk about shooting mosquitoes with a laser is, I think, sending a coherent 5mm beam directly - e.g. from a laser pointer. So you don't have to estimate the distance, but it is even more dangerous.
it's literally called ``Raspberry PI for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser'' not quite sure what you were expecting
Not completely BS for me. I have actually learned something:
> The size of a mosquito can vary from 1 mm to 5 mm, this is the main criterion for the method of detection and retrieval of mosquito coordinates. When monitoring the position of the mosquito with ultrasound, it is necessary to use several sensors in different places and processing their information to calculate the location, which theoretically is suitable only for detecting one mosquito, but if there are several mosquitoes, the device will not work correctly. The temperature of the body of a mosquito due to its cold blood is like the temperature of the environment. With a very high resolution of the thermal imager, the mosquito temperature will differ insignificantly against the background - on the order of 0.1 C. The use of sonar has several difficulties when working in open areas where it is necessary to use sonar with a narrow beam and a narrow radiation pattern.
tl;dr, ultrasonic/infra-red/sonar don't work either.
Other than just sensing CO2 and other chemicals they have some kind of way of sensing heat, but maybe that's separate from their eyes. If that is sensed radiatively that might be a good target for some kind of eye safe laser (if it is following thermal gradients in the air near the skin or something, not so much).
I don't really mind mosquitos outdoors, what I really hate is when I'm trying to sleep and there is a mosquito in the room. This means I have to turn the light bright on and spend time hunting them down or fill the room wit a toxic insecticide gas.
I would rather leave the room (or stay there with my eyes covered - to serve as a bait for the mosquitos), activate the robot and come back when it's done.
Or at least that could tell a camera where to look.
For safety, I think using multiple coordinated laser sources would be better (making them all converge at a single point). That, plus obviously a wavelength not dangerous for our eyesight.
Angular precision is an issue, but one could probably go around it by using a closed-loop control system that targets before increasing the power.
Targeting is hard as well, if you want a reliable system, there's probably no alternative to sensor fusion (sound, active infrared range-meter, maybe radar & ultrasound).
In the end, it's probably overkill compared to a trap, but the challenges are interesting.
Bzzzt.
I've had this idea many years ago and my solution to that problem was to use two or more lasers of lower power that all shoot at the same point in 3 dimensional space. If you guess wrong then at least you won't set your house on fire (or blind someone).
Don't pilots have protective windows?
What they don't seem to work out is that they're drawing a super clear line in the sky directly back to themselves, and police in choppers have colleagues on the ground who are very happy to show up and arrest the guy with the laser...
The average laser pointer for a presentation, for reference, is less than .005 Watts (<5mW)
I built tech ~10 years ago to track quiet, sound emitting objects in real time to sub CM resolution using microphone arrays. And in one demo I even had a laser pointer mounted on a 2 axis.... "swinging thingie" (sorry, I'm not a mech-E) which would constantly stay pointed on the loudest object in the room, as it moved. Fun stuff. Creepy even.
Shame I never found a use or a buyer for the tech. :/
EDIT: I bet an improved hybrid one would use sound to get within the right 1-2cm, with a zoom camera mounted on the pan/tilt apparatus to get it even more accurate.
https://country-blocker.zend-apps.com/scripts/4982/205c3608e...
It's a bit of a leap to "You'll shoot your eye out" or "it'll never work in real life" because it was never meant to be anything more than that.
Personally, I think it's awesome!
Nowhere in that guy's post about how to make this silly gizmo did he make any kind of claim about reducing diseases of any kind spread by mosquitoes.
I don't know if you're blaming him for not preventing your friend's sister's death and you getting sick or mad at me because I didn't blame him.
But your complaint does make me wonder what you're doing to solve the malaria problem?
I interpret this sentence to say the mosquito laser is an unserious project. Saying that something is "for shits and giggles" expresses a flippant attitude. My comment points out that malaria-fighting projects are extremely serious, even if they are ineffective first version tech demos.
> Nowhere in that guy's post about how to make this silly gizmo did he make any kind of claim about reducing diseases of any kind spread by mosquitoes.
The paper starts out with: "More than 700 thousand human deaths from mosquito bites are observed annually in the world. It is more than 2 times the number of annual murders in the world. In this regard, the invention of new more effective methods of protection against mosquitoes is necessary. In this article for the first time, comprehensive studies of mosquito neutralization using machine vision and a 1 W power laser are considered."
> But your complaint does make me wonder what you're doing to solve the malaria problem?
This is a strange thing to say. You are implying that a person who thinks a problem is serious should work toward solving that specific problem. This is not true. There are many serious problems in the world. Each person must make their own decisions about how to use their time, including how much time/energy/resources to spend on themselves, on their family, and on others.
You are employing a tactic called deflection [0]. You try to redirect attention away from yourself by criticizing me. This habit can harm relationships. I hope you can break the habit of deflecting when you feel criticized. Your life will be better if you stop deflecting. Changing habits is super hard. I have been struggling to change my own habits for the last 5 years. It's hard and worth the effort. Good luck and best wishes.
[0] https://www.betterhelp.com/advice/psychologists/what-is-defl...
I apologize for thinking this was just for shits and giggles.
In regards to it's design for that purpose I think it's probably awful.
I think an effective indoor mosquito control system will detect mosquitos with microphones, aim with a zoom camera, and shoot mosquitoes with soapy water droplets.
Soapy water kills bugs. The soap eliminates water's surface tension. Once the bug touches the droplet, it sticks to it. As the bug struggles, it gets pulled inside the droplet. The water blocks respiration, causing the bug to suffocate. For manual insect killing, a spray bottle with soapy water is far better than an aerosol bottle of toxic chemicals or a laser.
I'm not entirely sure if this is sarcastic trolling or an actual belief of a sane individual but this, this is a load of garbage.
So what, if Malaria gets solved the whole continent will suddenly have functioning governments and economies? Do you know how big the continent is? It's history?
I hope you were trolling.
Malaria has an incredible suppressing effect on entire societies [2]. Many young children get sick with it monthly and miss school. Older children miss school to care for sick siblings. Parents miss multiple weeks of work every year because of it. And even after they're well enough to work again, they're not 100%.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Africa#Populat...
> I saw first-hand that women in poverty have many children but those with middle-class circumstances have fewer.
This is true everywhere. Even in super rich first world post industrial nations.
> Parents miss multiple weeks of work every year because of it.
Yes. Otherwise known as sick leave. What's your point?
If a country cannot afford to administer its own healthcare and economic policy, that has nothing to do with Malaria.
The anecdotal evidence is appreciated, and well worth looking into, but the claim that an entire continent's economic and development future hangs on the existence of a treatable disease is hogwash, ignorant and downright irresponsible. Theres work to do here, and spreading dangerously ignorant information does not help one bit.
Parents missing work leads to reduced wealth production. For the 65% of Africans who rely on subsistence farming [0], sickness at critical times (harvest) can result in drastic economic losses. Children frequently missing school end up with lower education levels and reduced lifetime wealth production. Malaria can also cause lifelong intellectual disabilities [1], which destroy lifetime wealth production.
> If a country cannot afford to administer its own healthcare and economic policy, that has nothing to do with Malaria.
This is a bold claim. Can you please explain?
It seems to me that a country's wealth influences its ability to address specific health problems. And when those health problems reduce wealth production, there is a vicious cycle. The question is, "How big is the effect of malaria on wealth production?" Gates Foundation says it's "billions of dollars per year" [1]. That is tiny compared to Africa's $2.6T GDP. I think Gates Foundation is oversimplifying. I believe multiplying effects exist, especially with education and childrens' health. This was seen with long-term deworming experiments [2] which showed that even the siblings of treated children, born long after the treatment period, also had higher lifetime earnings.
> is hogwash, ignorant and downright irresponsible.
Please try to disagree without insulting others personally.
[0] https://borgenproject.org/tag/subsistence-farming/
[1] https://www.gatesfoundation.org/what-we-do/global-health/mal...
[2] https://blog.givewell.org/2016/07/26/deworming-might-huge-im...
It seems that the project eventually failed to achieve anything of sufficient value. [1]
[0]: https://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_could_this_laser_z...
[1]: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/laser-shooting-mosqu...
I believe by now he's more famous for being the world's most damaging patent troll
https://entomologytoday.org/2020/03/19/when-a-mosquito-cant-...
I personally witnessed a mosquito being made to pop by tensing a muscle. Note that I'm not claiming any specific mechanism of action, or that this is a common human ability, or that more than one species is vulnerable. I've seen it once.
The case I witnessed was 31 to 35 years ago, in camp with a bunch of boys. To help you guess at the species, I can narrow down the location to one of three places. In summer of 1985 or 1986, it could have been in Oklahoma or northern Texas. In summer of 1987 or 1988, it could have been in southern New Hampshire. The boy had very well defined muscles and minimal fat. He got the mosquito to land right in the middle of his biceps. He saved his strength, waiting until the mosquito was almost full before tensing his muscle. The mosquito did not immediately explode; it took a good long time.
Anybody else witnessed it? Anybody able to do it reliably? If so, can you describe the type of mosquito or where it lives or anything else that might identify it?
[1]: Bui, S., Geitung, L., Oppedal, F., & Barrett, L. T. (2020). Salmon lice survive the straight shooter: A commercial scale sea cage trial of laser delousing. Preventive Veterinary Medicine, 181, 105063. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.prevetmed.2020.105063
As a side note if you would like to dispatch all the mosquito in your area, there are "mosquito donuts" that are safe to put in creeks and ponds that will get rid of them at the source. For the existing mosquito infestations, a large blower flan with a window screen on the intake side will catch tens of thousands of them per day. You can mix their carcasses into your plant fertilizer. You can attract more of the mosquito to your blower by opening 2 litter bottles of carbonated water 20 feet in front of the intake side.
I don't think 30cm distance is far enough for much usefulness, feels like commercial viability means at least 1m if not 2m. 30cm is 'put object by the food' use case and not much else, and mosquitos aren't really into food. Perhaps it could work by tent openings but not sure.
I toyed with the idea but it's hazardous in any usable setup.
If you'd like to do it moderately safe I'd stay away from lasers. Use a power LED and parabolic reflector to make the beam as incoherent as possible and then focus it with optics to create very narrow focal depth. Then it will still be able to burn the mosquito but won't be a blinding hazard as little as 20 centimetres from the focal point.
Thank you for your thoughtful explanation.
(And Australia’s laws here were decided based on safety standards, the figures of which uuidgen points out.)
https://www.wired.com/2010/02/death-star-laser-zaps-mosqitoe...
Let’s say the laboratory conditions are real world. To your point, killing ~10% of mosquitos is hardly ideal, but using lasers and computers to do it is cool.
6/10. Want to try.
Early on, I dismissed ultrasound - unless some kind of funky triangulation went on, I think the resolution would be far too low and risk of false positives too high - but I'd be interested to hear any thoughts you had on how that might work. That said, recognising the flight noises of certain bugs would make sense to me - only as a way to trigger a stop-and-sweep cycle though.
But as much as the idea excites me, "real" exploration of the space will only happen when I get lots of time and a fair bit of money - and maybe some land! Alas, I'm nowhere near that point yet.
The war against the mosquito goes on.
Combination of sound, vision, and drones that smell like blue cheese might bring fuckers down...
But, an even crazier idea, get a magnetron from a microwave oven connect it to a phased array antenna (PAA), that way you can scan much faster. Also, use a reduced power and radar returns to detect any insect then activate the PAA to to focus the power of the beam to kill the insect.
Much more impractical and dangerous.
Just a general question, what are the criteria for living organisms that do requires ethical approval? Is the threshold by organism size?
Nuclear War.
I think you're being a bit harsh.
Unfortunately it is true with at least academic articles typos and grammatical errors are it will be perceived as low quality article.
“Mr. Ildar Rakhmatulin South Ural State University“
Perhaps you should just go with your original thought and not read anything if you find any kind of grammatical error.
Why do you assume everyone in the world has native english speakers as friends, willing to do free proofreading?
Where did I do this?!?
I know people who do this, but I know many native english speakers. People in russia for example might not have that opportunity.
So you didn't write that? Ok.
The people who proofread my work aren't in my immediate circle of friends. My point is that you can find people out in the world that aren't in your current bubble.
I have access to people now who speak and read more languages than I ever will. Some of them are in Russia. I think you are inadvertantly placing limits where they may not really be.
So if you like reading this sort of thing, perhaps you'd also like seeing it 44 days before it premiers on HN. It was certainly one of the more interesting submissions.
It was kind of funny, because the author posted it a bunch of times. I think maybe they got confused that they were on the real HN, and were like "This is awesome! It's been on the front page forever!" and posted it more. Wish I knew how to contact him to let him know it's been picked up by the mainstream site.
He also posted "Neural network for automatic farm control", their previous work: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339105969_Neural_ne...
They really love using neural networks for farming. Or for cannons. Either way, it's a worthy endeavor.
Curious to hear why you're running a clone of HN, and why you assert that some cool stuff shows up there before it does on HN.
But maybe the hesitancy to link the site has more to do with this statement on it's Welcome page:
The initial impetus behind the site is a desire to try to recapture the early spirit of Hacker News. HN currently has about 5 million visitors a month. It's different than it was back in the day when it was a much smaller group of people.
I don’t think I’ve ever in my 40 and nine years on the planet seen numbers of this scale written in mixed numeric and textual form.
It’s not like 700 kilometers, where you could at least argue this is the case vs the SI unit, but where a kilometer is a useful unit for communication anyway. The natural unit here is a human life, not a thousand human lives.
There are a several other quality issues in the abstract making me wonder if this is a serious effort or a Markov-generated abstract. (“We developed a program for mosquito tracking in real.”)
> I don’t think I’ve ever in my 40 and nine years on the planet seen numbers of this scale written in mixed numeric and textual form.
In my 50 and nine years on this planet, I have.
> There are a several other quality issues in the abstract ...
It's a pre-print, and the author's first language is not English. Some people struggle with a second language, and I think it's commendable that someone is willing to make their results available.
"there are hundreds of different creams, devices, and other devices. "
As native-English-speaking academics have become a minority of those publishing in international journals (and fewer journals are doing serious copyediting anyway), there seems to be more and more toleration in science of different ways of writing things based on the author’s own native language.
And then I see comments that basically amount to: "haha, dumb foreigners can't speak english LOL"