No vending machine for crows

Remember the story about the vending machine for crows in the NY Times Magazine’s Year in Ideas issue from December? Turns out that there were all sorts of things wrong with that story.

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.

Update: I had forgotten…Klein did a talk at TED last year about his crow vending machine. I wonder if there’s a retraction forthcoming from there as well. (thx, michael)

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