Crow Machine | Hacker News Reader

Crow Machine

josh.is

27 pointsmxfh9 comments

"Klein did get a professor at Binghamton to help him try [the machine] out twice in Ithaca, with assistance from a Binghamton graduate student, and it was not a success. Corvid experts who have since been interviewed have said that Klein’s machine is unlikely to work as intended."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/magazine/12letters-t-CORRE...

If I'm not mistaken, the grad student is one of my friends on FB, and I've quoted her in a separate reply.

How is his claim holding up, or is he promising too much? Since it's the last news of the thing for captive crows were from 2012 and there is also [thecrowbox] and a correction of the correction [2].

There is still no working version for wild crows[3]. I just still don't know what to make of this since I can hardly see bad intentions other than being a bit overly enthusiastic about the whole thing while producing somewhat underwhelming results in practice. If it would have been some sort of hoax or stunt he probably would have said something by now, like it was an art project or some media hack or anything else along those lines.

[1] http://www.thecrowbox.com/

[2] http://www.josh.is/correction/

[3] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/CrowBoxKit/AyG7nmlbk...

Bonus: Here is another guys, Steve Joy, vending machine (mentioned in the thecrowbox user group) which seem to actually work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qSsVBPh9Lo

One of the researchers involved in the original experiment: "The machine was never successfully used by the wild crows. They were always too afraid to get near it and when the mechanics were on, forget it, they wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. Our wild crows never dealt with it and the box itself certainly never, ever saw our captive zoo crows (as implied in later articles). We ended up parting ways with the TED speaker because we felt that he was jumping the gun on the results, and the multiple media articles with false claims really put us off."

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1wac0p/howdy_unidan_he...

Josh Klein is the man - he once brought together models and wearable hardware engineers to put on a wearable tech fashion show.

I wonder if this can be extended to train crows to collect trash, such as cigarette butts and plastic bags.

I've wondered that for years!

I love the design of that site.

It's down.

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