"Until recently, oh, maybe still now… libraries have been boring and uncool place for most Japanese people."
This is the perception of libraries in many places. Libraries are a tremendous public good that is underutilized. If we can make them "cool" people would take advantage of this resource.
This is even a challenge for bookstores. In the UK, James Daunt successfully built Daunt Books, an independent bookshop in the age of Amazon by making it "cool" and personalized. Most recently, he became the CEO of Barnes and Noble to make that large chain bookstore a place people want to be. https://www.modernretail.co/operations/barnes-noble-ceo-jame...
I very much want libraries and bookstores to be a part of our society, so I'm a huge fan of "making them cool" so that more people will use them and they will continue to exist, and thrive, in our society.
We exposed wild crows to a novel ‘dangerous face’ by wearing a unique mask as we trapped, banded and released 7 –15 birds at five study sites near Seattle, WA, USA. An immediate scolding response to the dangerous mask after trapping by previously captured crows demonstrates individual learning, while an immediate response by crows that were not captured probably represents conditioning to the trapping scene by the mob of birds that assembled during the capture. Later recognition of dangerous masks by lone crows that were never captured is consistent with horizontal social learning. Independent scolding by young crows, whose parents had conditioned them to scold the dangerous mask, demonstrates vertical social learning.
This is tangential but our monk parakeets make a special sound when they see something they don't like. We have learned to identify it, and hilarously, our dogs did too.
Now when they see something weird (recently, a bird of prey in street light they saw through the window) they sound the alarm and the dogs go absolutely crazy.
Tangent to your tangent, but this is one reason why a guard llama works so well together with guard dogs for protecting livestock.
A llama is much more alert to potential danger than, say, sheep. Which actually is an understatement: sheep have the added problem of not making any noises when attacked or eaten by predators, and therefore not alerting guard dogs.
Dogs can teach themselves to interpret the llama's body language and pro-actively chase away coyotes or foxes or whatever it is that the llama spotted.
I've seen this in action on a family friend's sheep farm.
That is fascinating. The parakeets are basically providing an early warning system, and the dogs have figured out enough of their "language" to subscribe to it.
My in-laws had a Chihuahua as the alert dog and a Doberman as the guard dog. Yip yip yip WOOF WOOF WOOF. Took the Dobie on a lot of walks in natural areas where sketchy people were around. Funny enough, nobody tries anything when you have an 85-lb/40 kg dog. They saw me put her on a leash when I saw them and they knew I could just drop it.
There's a more complicated example with fork-tailed drongos and meerkats. The drongos can mimic the meerkat alarm calls in order to panic them at strategic moments (and swoop in to take food), along with a high percentage of genuinely helpful alarm calls to keep them malleable.
What gets me is that it is not just "crows remember faces". Apparently the information can outlive the original encounter entirely. You can end up on the neighborhood crow blacklist without some of the crows ever having met you before.
Apparently they can also tell other crows if they like you. Or their car. There's reports of them chasing off other birds away from people they like (and their vehicle or house).
Even if this initiative is effective at reducing crime, I don't want to lose privacy or see a chilling effect in society where people are afraid because they know they're being watched.
But most of it, the overwhelming majority, comprises standalone installations at best networked into a corporate HQ but most commonly just recorded on site.
It's not like in police drama programmes where they can switch from the camera in the Tube station to the one in the newsagent outside for seamless real-time tracking.
Yes, the "Big Scary Numbers" listing CCTV cameras per capita include private cameras, which can outnumber "public" (government, council and police) cameras by orders of magnitude. In the UK these include those owned by businesses and individuals, even things like ring doorbells cameras. There's no real equivalent numbers including that I can find for the USA. In 2024 there were some 16 thousand council operated cameras in London total [0] - well below the ~700k often touted including private cameras.
If you restrict it to just those public cameras, London would barely be in the top 10 of USA cities in public cameras per capita.
Sure, it's not good, but implicit in many comments here is "I'm glad it's not that bad here" (presumably the USA for most commentors), but in reality it is happening "here", has been happening "here" for some time, and in many ways is already much worse "here" already.
While I think many of the UK's actions around this are massive mistake, certainly don't read me as supporting it, at least understand that the big headlines and pointing away from home towards "Orwellian UK" is a misleading distraction.
This is the perception of libraries in many places. Libraries are a tremendous public good that is underutilized. If we can make them "cool" people would take advantage of this resource.
This is even a challenge for bookstores. In the UK, James Daunt successfully built Daunt Books, an independent bookshop in the age of Amazon by making it "cool" and personalized. Most recently, he became the CEO of Barnes and Noble to make that large chain bookstore a place people want to be. https://www.modernretail.co/operations/barnes-noble-ceo-jame...
I very much want libraries and bookstores to be a part of our society, so I'm a huge fan of "making them cool" so that more people will use them and they will continue to exist, and thrive, in our society.