Teenager invented a low-cost tool to spot elephant poachers
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
Edit: having dabbled in this field myself during my studies, I know from research that one of the biggest problems is simply corruption among rangers. It doesn't really matter if you can spot a poacher if a whole group of rangers will decide to not do anything about it (because for them the financial incentive of doing nothing can be HUGE). Of course the corruption problem stems from very low incomes and poor living conditions in those countries. If your monthly income is $100, it's quite tempting to accept a $10.000 bribe.
Edit 2: I worked on this: https://www.hackthepoacher.com/. We tried it with cell phone detection.
I always wonder if the better solution isn't to re-legalize ivory and rhino horn. All the game farms have room full of the stuff. Dumping that onto the market will kill the price, at the same time there is suddenly a financial incentive to keep the animals safe. Currently its $10k a horn on the black market vs a bit of tourism money to incentivize keeping the parks safe.
The saddest part is that horn and tusks grow back so it could be a renewable resource if farmed properly. The poachers only kill.
Until that stock runs out and then it is back to square #1.
To paraphrase CGP Grey it turns out the best evolutionary advantage is being useful to humans.
If any of the execs of Panda Express are reading this give me a call I got a big idea for your brand.
[1] https://www.worldwildlife.org/press-releases/demand-for-elep...
[2] https://asiatimes.com/2022/05/japan-sends-wrong-message-on-i...
[3] https://us.eia.org/campaigns/wildlife/elephants/japan-ivory/
Yeah that would totally not endanger(more than they already are) indigenous people living there. After all everyone knows how poachers look like.
It's either that or potentially corrupt park rangers doing it - it's not like the existing system works great for anyone involved.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
Forbidding agriculture would not solve any of our problems.
Unless you are trying to say that hum "all sentient beings are equal, but some are more equal than the other".
Every animal known, every fungus known and of course every plant and algae known by us are sentient.
This is not an honest move, in my opinion.
Is just a pseudo-religious term to upgrade some organisms that we like to demigod level --and-- justify retaliation, (because the real underlying force under all this rhetoric is power acquisition; is exactly the same construction as "If you eat pork you will be punished because god says that I'm allowed to punish you").
As for the part of your comment that claims using the word “sentient” is pseudo religious and used to wield power over others… I think you’re reading far, far too much into it. I don’t think anyone is using sentience as a tool to justify punishment over anyone else. In fact, it tends to be the people that deny sentience that end up punishing others, for merely belonging to different species!
TL;DR Let’s not commercialize anyone that can suffer. Historically it hasn’t gone well.
If you find a single scientist claiming the opposite, she/he is probably a genius in some field, but I grant you that is illiterate on basic biology.
The global scientific consensus is that plants and fungi react --very fast-- and accurately to any changes in the environment and take complex and strategic decisions all the time about what they perceive. There are zillions of examples that prove that.
Lets take for example this tiny fish moving its tail fast toward a light spot in the sea bottom and then deciding if it likes the place or just jump and go away. It this a sentient organism? Most people would say Yes.
Well, this is not a fish, in fact is a young Kelp deciding where to settle.
Do you want to argue semantics or do you want to discuss the actual content?
I read a story a while back that some folks are dumping synthetic ivory onto the market to make prices fall.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w22314
Statistics Canada has reported that after the legalization of weed, the black market has actually grown quite substantially (in absolute terms).
https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/drugs-medica...
At any rate, the point is that making things legal or available can often paradoxically significantly increase demand for the illegal product and in the process make it much easier for the black market to operate.
And just to add in some controversy to the discussion, the same is true of prostitution. Almost all places that have legalized prostitution also have significantly higher rates of human trafficking including underage prostitutes.
I always found it funny, how journalists manage to take something a kid did, without knowing the specifics, and inflate the story, just because a kid did it.
Even if it's useless in real world, and the people working on that professionally, could already tell you that...
Sometimes it's even a direct scam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otjvUz7qKXc
The world needs more feel good stories. Also if she's doing AI on infrared images at 17 she's probably going to be really impressive work later on.
So then, are we celebrating the potential growth of a teenager more than that of the potential growth of a middle-aged person, on the grounds of potential, or are we celebrating that she managed to achieve this at 17?
I'm trying really hard to see beyond age. I don't care if someone is 16 or 36. Both can have the same years of experience (say 8-10 years of programming), and yet the former sounds more romantic and sellable to headliners because it's easier to dream big about achievements someone in their 25 will do than someone in their 45. Why?
Did you just describe the stock market?
It's rare for a previously unremarkable 36-year-old to suddenly turn in to Jeff Bezos (for a lot of reasons, not least that cognitive power peaks at age 25 so learning and adapting to novel situations gets harder with age).
I'm a thoroughly average 33-year-old, for what it's worth :) I don't mean to imply that we shouldn't continue strive for growth and development as we age, but I certainly am not as mentally quick or energetic as I was ten years ago. There is very little chance I will suddenly transform into jwz or John Carmack or <insert name of legendary hacker here>.
On the bright side, I am a better communicator and strategic decision-maker, and am more satisfied with my life as it is.
Sure, you'll be delivering slower than what you would if you were 25 but slower is better than not delivering whatever unique you have to offer at all.
I mean it along the lines of "at 17, she is doing AI on IR images, at 30 she will be fixing bugs in traffic sign detection code for a big car company, with no mention of her name except in commit logs".
And it is not a bad thing! We need people to fix bugs in traffic sign detection code, and she may have a nice pay, in a reputable company, with a good work-life balance. It may not be impressive work, but it is work that needs to be done.
It may not be a feel good story for the press, but I believe living a mundane life certainly feels good to the one living it.
Yes of course but your well-meaning reply is missing the argument made by gp: for some topics, the readers don't have enough background knowledge to know that it's a mundane story because the journalists are (possibly inadvertently) inflating the significance.
E.g. compare 2 different examples:
- "Teenager builds ramp to help nursing home patients in wheelchairs." <-- Readers already have enough background to know that "ramps" are common solutions to "wheelchair mobility" so the significance can easily be categorized as "mundane feel-good story". We can easily discount the ramp in the title and therefore properly appreciate that it's actually a human-interest story of a teenager doing something nice.
- "Teenager invents tool to spot elephant poachers." <-- Most readers have no existing knowledge of what technology is already in use to judge the significance of that type of story.
Why does it matter? The press does context-free puff-pieces all the time, even for professionals allegedly at the very top of their game (off the top of my head: Steve Jobs, Elizabeth Holmes[1], Elon Musk, Jeff Dean, and Sanjay Ghemawat to a lesser extent). Typically the template is "Genius expert invents X all by himself" without providing additional context for people outside of tech.
Food for thought: do you suppose journalists are exclusively wrong in tech reporting only? Or is this an area you have enough context to understand the nuances?
1. Sometimes the "revolutionary tech" is not just plain evolutionary, but fake. But a layperson reading the hagiography can't tell the difference
Yes, I'm very aware of the meta-game around "puff pieces" which I've explained before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30881420
It seems your "Why does it matter?" was just a rhetorical question as prelude to your comment about puff pieces already existing in abundance ... But I'll answer it as if you had asked that question earnestly: It matters because readers would like to know how to gauge the significance of unfamiliar tech mentioned in the article.
So we have 2 interpretations of this thread's article:
(a) this poacher detection tool is a true breakthrough -- and the inventor also happens to be a teenager; the tech itself is not hype. The idea is truly a game changer and while the inventor's age is very young, that's a footnote to the tech invention.
... or ...
(b) the tool's tech (machine learning) is not significant and may not even work in the real world -- but the teenager's attempt at problem solving is showing promise of future things to come; let us celebrate this young person's effort.
A previous example of the first (a) type of story is this one a teen discovering a new classical algorithm comparable to a quantum algorithm: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17654220
That wasn't some pure human-interest puff piece about teenager Ewin Tang. Instead, a respected computer scientist (Scott Aaronson) said it was legitimate new work that advanced our understanding of the field.
>1. Sometimes the "revolutionary tech" is not just plain evolutionary, but fake. But a layperson reading the hagiography can't tell the difference
Right ... and readers don't want to mistakenly interpret the story as type (a) when it was actually type (b). The gp (Avalaxy) of the subthread tried to give us some extra perspective about this story that the journalist did not.
I agree with you on principle: and it should happen across the board and not just reserved for science fair submissions, but the press seems incapable of that, for reasons good and bad. For one,evaluating new tech is subjective (and difficult), and for another, sone news puff pieces are mostly written by PR firms.
> Eikelboom cautions that Puri’s model still needs to be tested on raw video footage to see how well it can detect poachers—the accuracy of Puri’s model was tested using figures already determined either human or elephant. He also says other barriers already exist to using drones in parks, such as the money and manpower to keep them flying.
They also explain the technology choices and some of the other challenges.
Your issue is with the headline.
If all you read is the headline, then fine, let's play that game.
> It can be about “mundane” stories of “this young person did something” too. "Yes of course"
Okay, that's it. You agree with the previous comment.
Good work, more than I achieve for the most part, and something to celebrate in someone so young.
The whole system needs a reboot. Without good journalism, democracies can’t survive
I think it's much more interesting than a guy in yesterdays HN home page making a lisp machine that almost nobody uses for RISC-V which is missing a lot of more important software that needs to be written by somebody.
Handwave away that most of the cost in the drone is going to be in getting it decent range, not a decent FLIR camera. Add in a 5x bonus to media coverage because you're young, 5x bonus because you're a woman in STEM, say something about how important skin colour, demographics, and chromosomes are for doing some mediocre programming:
> “What I really realized from this is how important it is that women, people of color, all sorts of minorities in the field of technology are at the forefront of this kind of groundbreaking technology.”
And you've got some journalists writing about you and not something far more interesting and useful, because A. The journalists can somewhat understand it, B. You're under the age of 20, C. You're a girl in STEM, D. You're a minority, and E. It's about good animals being protected from evil poachers, giving it a nice simple narrative.
And I'm sure her winning that competition was totally about merit and not because they've got a mandated 50% women winning (and she's a minority, extra points!) and probably 5% of submissions are by women. Or maybe it's not? Maybe it was merit. Either way, implicit and explicit quotas mean that it's more likely than not, and my knee-jerk reaction to this is one of "she's there because she's a girl" and not "she's there because of merit". What fantastic efforts to get rid of stereotypes, right?
I'm around her age, I'm tempted to try to send something similarly useless to that competition and get $10 000. But why bother, when the first, second, and third place will inevitably be taken up by girls with useless projects going "It was so difficult to get here, all I had was exclusive help in the form of courses, programs, special treatment, and mentors all along the way and competing against 10% of the people for 50% of the spots"
It doesn't cost much and can be helpful for society in 10 years when she's going to be the next Elizabeth Holmes.
> If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it
> If you flag, please don't also comment that you did
Even this article was posted a day late for slow news day.
1. Teenagers can build cool things too! We need more kids interested in STEM and females are underrepresented, so these "puff" pieces are great inspiration for the next kid who happens to come across it.
2. All that was needed for her solution was a cheap FLIR camera connected to an iPhone 6, meaning you don't have to be rich/VC funded to experiment with hardware solutions.
This is Smithsonian Magazine, not the Wall Street Journal. I say bring on more stories like this!
There's not a hell of a lot of value in a constant barrage of hyperbolic articles telling us that the world has changed.
It's about as useful as parents telling their kids that they're the best and smartest that the world has ever seen, only to have reality tear the carpet from under their feet.
You can be encouraging and realistic at the same time.
However as opposed to most articles of this type, this one isn't as "THIS IS GONNA BE WORLD CHANGING!!!!!" and more "look at this cool thing this kid did" which is so much more acceptable, especially if it helps get more _people_ (no matter who they are) into STEM.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/faking-elephan...
Also, why don't we just take all the elephants and rhinos from them, establish them in the American west? We can deal with the ecological issues.
This is a refrain heard so often (as a wild herd of fifty thousand elephants goes trumpeting through downtown Salt Lake City).
"But, but the bounty? Poacher heads go for ten times what ivory goes for."
"That, look, scary stories that the government has to tell to make the voters think that they're doing something to help those poor defenseless elephants. Scare tactics. Think about it, if they really were going to do anything about the poachers, then they wouldn't be putting up some bounty against poaching. It's an admission that they can't and they won't do anything to stop us. Besides, factory has been shut down for three weeks and isn't opening any time soon. You want to put food on the table or not?"
<LATER>
A rifle shot rings out across the early morning plains. An elephant collapses to the ground and breathes its last breath.
"Change of plans Fred, we've got video evidence that you just poached an elephant. I hear poacher heads go for ten times what ivory does."
"You said the bounty was nothing but propaganda!"
"Yeah, good thing there's no bounty on liars."
A second rifle shot rings out across the early morning plains. "Now, sure would be a shame if all that ivory goes to waste."
A man kills an elephant with a rifle and then shoots the rifle with another rifle. He brings in the first rifle and gets a reward. Then he sells the ivory and gets a second reward. I'm not convinced that this situation is any improved (and certainly not a 50% success) if instead of this farce he instead tricks someone who wasn't going to shoot any elephants into shooting an elephant.
Poacher Hunter to the paying authority: "Bob was a poacher. I didn't shoot him while he walked home from work. I promise."
Also, like corruption, poaching also stems from very low incomes and poor living conditions in those countries.
Maybe it's not the most effective way to hunt for poachers, but it seems to be *one* way that poachers are hunted, and a way that has some obvious room for improvement by sprinkling on a bit of ML magic.
I find the chance of that to be roughly zero though - clearly a bunch of the guides have been paid off. This isn't a problem tech can solve.
If the radios can be trusted, you feed bad data to specific people and see when the poachers show up. Seems like there are some solutions.
When I was in South Africa, the anti-poaching crews were clearly underpaid judging by their cloths, demeanor, and gear (old radios, and the ratty shotguns). If the job is so important it should be better paid.
I’ve become a bit skeptical of these stories on kids doing what normally experienced professionals do (research, startups). I’d understand if a kid accidentally discovered or invented something cool that no one else thought of. I wish kids focused on fun and learning in school. Some of these stories seem like ‘spike’ projects to help the kids college application standout.
Kids have the disposable time to dedicate to grind stuff like this out. All they really need is the spark of interest, then everything else takes care of itself.
This kind of system is what you'd expect to see in maybe a graduate level ML/DL class, maybe even Bachelors thesis.
Whether or not it actually works for catching poachers isn't all that important IMO, even though they're marketing it that way. As many have mentioned, for it to really work, you'd probably need a small fleet of drones - and more likely, data from satellite providers. In my area of work (surveillance / intelligence), we do a lot of similar stuff - students like these are awesome to work with for summer internships / thesis projects.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220829-france-taxman...
The gist of it was that the drones were not that effective at spotting poachers (8 cases in two years of operations), and even if you spot them they will likely be gone by the time someone can arrive there.
A project I've worked on is Trailguard AI, ran by resolve.ngo, the principal is Eric Dinnerstein who is the former chief scientist at WWF. I can say they our running a start up in every sense of the word but the result is beautiful: a satelite/ gsm connected, battery powered AI enabled cryptic trail cam that can be used as a swiss army knife from animal censuses, to poacher detection, illegal logging truck detection and preventing human wildlife content (detect tiger + sound alarm).
Good article on trailguard: https://globalconservation.org/news/tech-parks-trailguard-ai...
Life lesson. If an activity can generate income, someone will do it. Law notwithstanding.
I was surprised because I thought all drones had that annoyingly loud hum.
That said, I agree the whiz kid articles are dumb, but not for the reasons you listed. More just “yea, let’s see how they do when they don’t have infinite time and zero responsibilities”.
With regards to that musical kid... I've got resting bitch face. When I'm focused on a difficult task, it's way worse; I call it "thinking murder face." I'm a musician, and if I'm playing a complex piece, I couldn't smile if I tried, even though I'm loving every second of what I'm doing.