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Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat

bbc.com

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Re: Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat

#31

Post by ks2048 »

ballooney wrote: post #8

I don’t like this site’s obsession with reducing everything to market opportunities, but… it’s extremely well documented that land mines, white truffles, cancer, diabetes, chemical weapons, etc can all be ‘sniffed’ by animals and it’s a mechanism that is almost always ‘better’ (cheaper, quicker, more deployable in the field) than human-engineered solutions. Surely there’s some vebture capital opportunity here for bet…

There has certainly been work on it, but not sure what the status is. Of course, it could be very useful.

From Google, 2019,

https://research.google/blog/learning-to-smell-using-deep-le...

Re: Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat

#32

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

salad-tycoon wrote: post #13

Wonder how hard it would be to train for diabetes? My under 10yo was just diagnosed with T1DM, a pocket rat sounds like fun and cheaper than a dog which is priced at unobtainium prices for us. Animals are awesome, land mines are not. I hope we can avoid ever bringing that to our shores. Sadly, I know we now have air-mines (drones) so guess someone has to come up with drone sniffing pidgins or something (though obviou…

From what I've read from rat owners, the worst thing about owning a rat is their short lifespans.

Re: Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat

#33

Post by caycep »

jampekka wrote: post #28

Sadly demand for such heros may increase in the future. Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine and Finland withdrew from the Ottawa Treaty banning personnel mines. And probably more countries will follow.

Is that their fault or is there maybe a giant reason nearby why they are doing this?

Re: Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat

#35

Post by BurningFrog »

jampekka wrote: post #28

Sadly demand for such heros may increase in the future. Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine and Finland withdrew from the Ottawa Treaty banning personnel mines. And probably more countries will follow.

With an expansive Russia next door it's hard to forego effective defense measures.

Re: Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat

#36

Post by lapetitejort »

sonofhans wrote: post #24
lapetitejort wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like the obsession of reinventing trains and trees. Surely training a rat is cheaper than a portable real-time NMR device, right?

Rats are sentient beings. If we have a choice, it’s not ethical to risk their lives to meet our own goals.

Before focusing on rats, who are too light to set off mines and live long pampered lives, I would focus on the 73 million pigs and 87 million cows in factory farms [0].

[0]: https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estima...

Re: Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat

#37

Post by jampekka »

caycep wrote: post #33
jampekka wrote: post #28

Sadly demand for such heros may increase in the future. Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine and Finland withdrew from the Ottawa Treaty banning personnel mines. And probably more countries will follow.

Is that their fault or is there maybe a giant reason nearby why they are doing this?

Whatever the reason, this will increase the likelihood of landmine casualties in the future. And not necessarily (only) in this area, but it weakens the treaty in general.

Part of these kinds of treaties is to accept some additional difficulty or expenses in defence for a more widespread benefit. I'm living in Finland and I would have accepted these.

Re: Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat

#38

Post by fmbb »

dtsykunov wrote: post #17
gavmor wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does one rat mentor another?

My guess, first they send them links to confluence wiki.

All deprecated pages with outdated info of course. But the comments have links to Slack threads about the incorrect info.

Re: Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat

#39

Post by jampekka »

BurningFrog wrote: post #35
jampekka wrote: post #28

Sadly demand for such heros may increase in the future. Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine and Finland withdrew from the Ottawa Treaty banning personnel mines. And probably more countries will follow.

With an expansive Russia next door it's hard to forego effective defense measures.

I'm in Finland and I would have forgone this measure. It is not a critical, or even an important, part of the defence strategy.

Re: Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat

#40

Post by yzydserd »

gavmor wrote: post #16
dtsykunov wrote: post #7

> Magawa retired from bomb sniffing in June 2021 owing to his old age, as is standard for APOPO's HeroRATs. > He spent a number of weeks mentoring 20 newly-recruited rats before ultimately retiring to a life of "snacking on bananas and peanuts". > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magawa End to life worthy of being envied.

How does one rat mentor another?

Human in the loop reinforcement learning
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