TED Video Review - Joshua Klein on the Intelligence of Crows

One of my weird characteristics is that I hate bouquets, especially the ones made with real flowers. I also hate live octopus or any kind of sashimi. I have this abnormal love towards animals and plants, especially the ones that are not taken good care of. Flower bouquets are the primary reason why so many plants are killed everyday, and innumerable christmas trees that are cut every year is a massacre to me.

 

Joshua, in this video, talks about similar topic using his interest in crows and others animals that are always around us and perfectly adapted to human environment.

http://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intelligence_of_crows.html

     In this 10 minute long video, what he basically talks about is how intelligent the crows are compared to other wild animals. He presents several quite interesting experiments that can prove his theory and also says that the brains of crows are very balanced just like those of chimpanzees'. The high intelligence of crows was well known since humans started researching on wild animals. One of the hilarious examples he gave is about university students catching a few crows on campus and making them irascible by measuring their heights and weights and then releasing them. After repeating the exact same procedure a several times, crows not only became more and more skeptical and developed animosity towards those certain students, but these crows also began to instigate these students constantly, by pecking them and keep on flying around them all the time. Eventually, the crows were infamous among the university students who wanted to research on the crows. Inevitably, the students had to acquiesce to the crows. One pivotal thing to point out, is that, later, even after these students graduated, the crows remembered the students and kept on following the same students. This anecdote, according to Joshua, proves that the crows have enough intelligence to be trained by 'a vending machine for crows'.

    
     Joshua spends quite a long time explaining how the crow vending machine works and how the crows' thoughts change thoughout the process. Basically, the crows can be trained to pick up coins around the vending machine and put them into the machine in exchange of the peanuts. Normally, provincial people would just carefully scrutinize the crows to see if there are any tricks in the machine, get surprised and then just look away since picking up coins is a peripheral thing. After all, what does that matter unless we're the beggars waiting for a few coins to gather? However, here, Joshua suggests that this unprecedented machine of crows can be applied in diverse ways if we use our imagination. For example, the crows can pick up trash after a game at such a voluminous stadium, or maybe search for people in distress exhaustively around the disaster areas. Apart from these, thousands of laudable ideas can be used to utilize the machine effectively.
     What Joshua was trying to say in this video was not just about crows and their vending machines. He wanted to emphasize how we could enhance the relationship between humans and other animals. As we all know, humans are trying their best to annihilate other species of animals and destroy the Earth as much as possible. We have done such terrible things to our environment for our own goods. Because of this, the media from all over the world are emphasizing the importance of keeping our environment healthy and clean, and now as a solution, we can look for ways to save both humans and the Earth simultaneously. And Joshua Klein just made himself the start point of the project.

But then I was shocked to see this comment on the TED site:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/magazine/12letters-t-CORRECTIONS-1.html

Vending Machine for Crows

Published: April 12, 2009

An article in the Year in Ideas issue on Dec. 14, 2008, reported on Josh Klein, whose master’s thesis for New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program proposed “a vending machine for crows” that would enable the birds to exchange coins for peanuts. The article reported that beginning in June 2008, Klein tested the machine at the Binghamton Zoo, that the crows learned how to use it and that after a month the crows were actually scouring the ground for loose change.

The Times has since learned that Klein was never at the Binghamton Zoo, and there were no crows on display there in June 2008. He performed these experiments with captive crows in a Brooklyn apartment; he told the reporter about the Brooklyn crows but implied that his work with them was preliminary to the work at the zoo. Asked to explain these discrepancies, Klein now says he and the reporter had a misunderstanding about the zoo.

The reporter never called the zoo in Binghamton to confirm. And while the fact-checker did discuss the details with Klein, he did not call the zoo, as required under The Times’s fact-checking standards. In addition, the article said that Klein was working with graduate students at Cornell University and Binghamton University to study how wild crows make use of his machine, which does exist. Klein did get a professor at Binghamton to help him try it 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.

These discrepancies were pointed out to The Times by the Binghamton professor several weeks after the article was published; this editors’ note was delayed for additional reporting. These details should have been discovered during the reporting and editing process. Had that happened, the article would not have been published.

• Vending Machine for Crows(December 14, 2008)

     Although I'm a little skeptical on the practicality of the vending machine, I'm still quite sure that, if we work hard enough, we will be able to engender amiable atmosphere between wild animals and us! ;)