Dog-Poop DNA Bank, The
By REBECCA SKLOOT
About three years ago, the mayor of Petah Tikva, a city near Tel Aviv, called the veterinarian Tika Bar-On and said, “I can fix al-most everything in this city, but I don’t know how to fight dog poop.” He asked Bar-On, the city’s director of veterinary services, if it was possible to use DNA fingerprinting to identify which dogs pooped on his city streets and — most important — which owners didn’t pick up after them. As a result, this year, Bar-On introduced the first-ever forensic dog-poop DNA unit.
Naturally, the project faced several hurdles. For one thing, it requires a searchable database of DNA fingerprints from local dogs. But why would owners voluntarily donate the DNA samples that could be used to penalize them for not scooping? Bar-On’s answer: Positive reinforcement. Instead of penalizing those who don’t scoop, she plans to reward those who do. As a pilot project, the city has placed special trash cans and bag dispensers throughout one particularly poop-filled neighborhood. Officials will regularly test samples from those cans; when a specimen matches a dog in the city’s DNA bank, the dog’s owner gets a reward — a colorful poop-bag carrier, perhaps, or a bag of dog food.
Bar-On also recruited a small army of 12-year-olds from a local grade school and taught them about the project. The students then went door to door, persuading dog owners to donate samples and explaining the drawbacks of poop (worms, bacteria, general grossness). Bar-On began collecting samples as part of annual pet exams and organized a DNA-donating festival featuring music, performing dogs and a booth for saliva collection.To date, the Israeli dog DNA bank contains more than 100 samples. According to Bar-On, about 90 percent of owners agree to donate samples when asked. But if the pilot proves successful, Bar-On says she hopes to make DNA banking mandatory for all dog owners (something the Freakonomics guys called for three years ago). At that point, instead of a practice of positive reinforcement, she imagines a system involving sidewalk poop patrols and penalties for nonscoopers.
For Bar-On, this is about more than waste elimination: “We can use this DNA database for important things like genetic re-search on dog diseases,” she says. “We could also use DNA to identify strays and return them to their parents.” But until then, she’s focusing on feces because, as she says, “when you go to the park with your kids and they meet dog poop, it’s not very pleasant.”
Drone-Pilot Burnout
By AARON RETICA
On its face, it seems like the less stressful assignment. Instead of being deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq, some pilots and other crew members of the U.S. military’s unmanned Predator drones live at home in suburban Las Vegas and commute to a nearby Air Force base to serve for part of the day. They don’t perform takeoffs and landings, which are handled overseas. But the Predator crews at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada “are at least as fatigued as crews deployed to Iraq,” if not more so, according to a series of reports by Air Force Lt. Col. Anthony P. Tvaryanas.
When Tvaryanas and colleagues surveyed crews who “teleoperate” drones in war zones a few years ago, they found an alarming result: crew members had “significantly increased fatigue, emotional exhaustion and burnout” compared with the crew of a craft that does have a pilot on board, the Awacs surveillance plane. In response, the Air Force implemented a new shift system, in which the number of days off in a row was increased. This year, in March, Tvaryanas released a fresh survey but the results were no better. There was “a pervasive problem with chronic fatigue,” Tvaryyanas writes, which “can be expected to adversely impact job performance and safety.” The survey also showed that Predator crews were suffering through “impaired domestic relationships.”
Why is this? Part of the problem lies in what Tvaryanas calls the “sensory isolation” of pilots in Nevada flying drones 7,500 miles away. Although there are cameras mounted on the planes, remote pilots do not receive the kind of cues from their sense of touch and place that pilots who are actually in their planes get automatically. That makes flying drones physically confusing and mentally exhausting. Perhaps this helps explain the results of another study Tvaryanas published with a colleague in May, which examined 95 Predator “mishaps and safety incidents” reported to the Air Force over an eight-year period. Fifty-seven percent of crew-member-related mishaps were, they write, “consistent with situation awareness errors associated with perception of the environment” — meaning that it’s hard to grasp your environment when you’re not actually in it.