Japanese aquarium urges public to video-chat with eels • Hacker News Board

Re: Japanese aquarium urges public to video-chat with eels

#41

Post by pvaldes » Sat, May 02, 2020, 4:17 PM UTC

TheChaplain wrote: post #31

rjtobin wrote: post #6

Although I think this is wonderful, I wonder is there a non-public outreach reason for not just showing pre-recorded videos of people? I’m also curious about how well these eels can perceive screens. Some animals seem to be able to process things on a screen while others seem to totally ignore it. Is there some biological difference here, maybe the frequencies of light emitted by a TV/monitor being designed for human…

Sure it could be done, but this is also a PR-event to advertise for the Aquarium and a way to show off the eels to people. At least it worked on me, I spent 2h digging through wikipedia and Youtube about Garden Eels.

Is part of the fauna of Europe and US. You can find native Garden Eels in tropical but also temperate areas. Cool creatures. I had seen them in the wild and it was a strange experience. Like seeing a lawn growing backwards.

There are more cheap and simple solutions than video-chat (figures printed on cardboard and cut for example), so we can safely assume that eel eye reaction to screen flickering is not the real point here.

Re: Japanese aquarium urges public to video-chat with eels

#42

Post by specialist » Sat, May 02, 2020, 4:35 PM UTC

goostavos wrote: post #10

DarthGhandi wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's absurdly common with news articles. They never link the stats/paper/organisation. I often wonder about the amount of collective time spent by individuals simply trying to find the data summarised in an article. For all the lamenting about the media's decline there's plenty of amateur blogs out there that manage to link their sources when writing an article.

This is my biggest pet peeve with news in general. Why does a high school paper have more rigor in terms of citations than the average post from a major news organization? It honestly drives me crazy. How in the world can a majority of major news organizations not overcome the hurdle of... adding links to what they're covering..? It makes digesting political news all but impossible.

One reason I heard, but have not verified, is that their content managements systems don't support links.

Pathetic, right?

Re: Japanese aquarium urges public to video-chat with eels

#43

Post by t0mas88 » Sat, May 02, 2020, 8:21 PM UTC

capableweb wrote: post #20

rjtobin wrote: post #6

Although I think this is wonderful, I wonder is there a non-public outreach reason for not just showing pre-recorded videos of people? I’m also curious about how well these eels can perceive screens. Some animals seem to be able to process things on a screen while others seem to totally ignore it. Is there some biological difference here, maybe the frequencies of light emitted by a TV/monitor being designed for human…

> Some animals seem to be able to process things on a screen while others seem to totally ignore it In my experience, it's more about the particular individual of animal rather than broadly "all eels can see screens", at least that's what I experience with my dogs. One of them ignore screens and seemingly can't see / don't want to see what's on the screen, even if prompted to look at it. The other one watches TV with…

My younger cat also completely ignores televisions and the mirror, just doesn't look at it any longer than a regular wall. The older one reacts to the "cat in the mirror" and also watches TV. Even goes as far as to go look at the other side of the wall that the TV is on if she sees something on TV she wants to hunt/eat.

Re: Japanese aquarium urges public to video-chat with eels

#44

Post by bartread » Sun, May 03, 2020, 8:27 AM UTC

andrewflnr wrote: post #39

bartread wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I should try not to because it takes readers away from our site, and they might not come back. > I suspect that many sites have the same line of reasoning. Not your fault, obviously, but FFS: this is the most vapid line of reasoning. If I want to find out more I'm going to leave your site anyway, so surely it's better if I'm not irritated by your lack of citations when I do inevitably go? Does Wikipedia worry about…

You're probably an outlier. Most people are lazy (in particular, unlikely to embark on research projects), and accustomed to newspapers not citing sources (no hyperlinks in the dead-tree version, after all). They probably have data showing the rate at which people leave the site via external links.

You may be right, but people leaving the site isn't really the key metric here. The key metrics are ad and subscriber revenue: in this case particularly ad revenue.

If the reason they're leaving makes it's more likely they'll come back again in future this may lead to an increase in ad revenue due to more sessions even though average session duration falls.

Obviously I don't know, and unfortunately I've learned not to trust that higher-ups in certain organisations have done their homework on revenue-affecting decisions, but you'd at least hope that they had some data to back up the thinking.