

More Than 300 Sharks In Australia Are Now On Twitter - RougeFemme
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/01/01/258670211/more-than-300-sharks-in-australia-are-now-on-twitter

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paul9290
This is a very cool!

I wish something slightly similar could be done to eliminate road kill.

One idea I've thought of to eliminate roadkill/keep them in the woods is to
have some type of high pitched sonar attached to the outside of your car. You
turn it on and or it activates itself based on location. Animals would hear it
coming from a quarter mile away and run in it's opposite direction.

HA that's probably not the greatest solution, but road kill is costly and
unpleasant. It would be neat to see someone come up with a good solution!

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madeofpalk
We have them in Australia...

Shoo Roo! [http://www.shuroo.com](http://www.shuroo.com)

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WA
These should be in rental cars. I think I've never seen as many dead animals
next to the road as in West Australia. Glad I didn't hit one in 4 weeks.

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schappim
The Internet of Things that bite you.

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caprad
Would rather see a rss feed that could be used in an app, with details of the
shark locations. But I guess you would have the problem of some yahoo tracking
down the shark and killing it, although it is a protected species.

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userbinator
I'm a little surprised it's not GPS-based, with prices on GPS modules these
days easily below $20. Make it powered by water movement and you can have
receivers nearby to pick up the signals, so that you can see exactly which
sharks are where, how fast they're moving, their depth, etc. The signals just
have to be strong enough to be receivable when the shark is reasonably near,
any since any that are farther away are of less concern. Even better if they
show them on a big screen at the beach.

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mathattack
I wonder about the predictability of this. There are 100s of millions of
sharks out there. (Maybe more?) How much can the location of 300 predict? Is
it that sharks travel in packs, so where there is one, there is many?

To the extent that this moves us away from viewing sharks as monsters, it will
be useful.

We kill 100s of thousands of them (maybe even millions?) for every one of us
that they get, despite their natural advantage in water. Killing them is a
shame.

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Namrog84
I read the article looking for one thing. Them mentioning the potential for
false sense of security. I was very pleased and Happy they mentioned it. As it
was my first thought. After reading what they were doing. I may have
overlooked it but did they mention any estimates about how many sharks there
are in that area? Even if a wild guess? To reflect are there only 300 of
10,000 sharks tagged or 100,000?

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jfoster
A sense of security from shark attacks is probably not false, given the
unlikelihood of it.

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danso
This is cute, but it kind of falls under the "Let's do this thing we've done,
but with new social media technology!" category rather than something
genuinely useful.

 _Not_ being attacked by a shark is a real-time scenario... A shark that is
0.75 miles away could easily be 0.5 miles away by the time you've checked your
phone, got off your towel, and tip-toed into the water.

I'm not dismissing the program by making it keep promises that it hasn't
made...it just highlights how technology needs to be a _strategy_...to have
these signals out in a public API is very cool, but for it to serve its
ostensible safety purpose, the beaches need to be equipped with a public-
announcement system that keys off of that data (whether it be a Twitter feed
or whatever the scientists were using before).

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blasphemous
100% agree, a solar powered siren connected to the GSM phone network in the
middle of the beach you'd think would be more useful.

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yaeger
No no no. No Siren, they must play the Jaws theme!

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semerda
Nice step forward. This really needs to be all around Australia not just
Western Australia. With the majority of the population on the East coast,
something like it or even an app like California has "Shark Net" would be
super.

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zik
I swam at the pictured beach - Gracetown beach in WA - only two days ago.
Fortunately there were no sharks that day, although it does have the highest
shark death rate of any beach in the country.

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Zigurd
#tastysurfers

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snorkel
[https://twitter.com/TheAverageShark](https://twitter.com/TheAverageShark)

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sirkneeland
Just think of the opportunities for marketing promos with the next "Sharknado"
movie!

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midas007
If they had lasers or Fonz jumping over them, that would be impressive.

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timdiggerm
That's about 300 Shark Fin Soups with a really easy hunt.

