Chick Sexing, Wire Rope and AI
Chick sexing is a core concept for an experienced engineer. Fortunately, maritime engineers do not have to perform chick sexing, but the concept is extremely important and ties into engineering intuition and experience.
We all know engineers and mechanics who have an amazing ability to diagnose certain problems that completely elude solution by the rest of the community.
It is often called intuition, but there is actually no such thing as intuition; it is actually related to learning and experience. Learning and experience, especially in a feedback loop can result in incredible human powers.
Which bring me back to chick sexing. Chicken breeding is a weird world. Chicken breeders have very little use for roosters. Roosters are needed for inseminating female chickens but for the rest are useless; they fight and they do not lay eggs.
Therefore, chicken breeders want to get rid of male chicks as soon as possible. However, newborn male and female chicks are virtually indistinguishable from each other and in the old days a chicken breeder had to wait until the chicks matured to get rid of the males. Naturally it would save a lot of money if only the sex of the chicks could be determined right after they were born.
This is where Professors Masui and Hashimoto come in, who in 1933 published a paper noting that there are very slight differences in the anal vents (cloaca) of male and female hatchlings.
In 1933, a gentleman by the name of Hikosaburo Yogi was sent to the U.S. to demonstrate the vent sexing technique at experiment stations and universities. He was a very accomplished chicken sexer with a reputed accuracy rate of 100%. Yogi trained American chick sexers and his technique became widely established in the United States.
His training method was very interesting. A new trainee would be given a tray of chicks and was told to check the vent of the chick and to drop the chick into a male or a female tray.
All Yogi would do was tell the trainee whether the choice was right or wrong. The difference between male and female chick was so insignificant and fuzzy that initially the trainee was just guessing, but by repeating this process, the trainee would develop a subconscious selection ability that eventually resulted in very high levels of accuracy.
Trained sexers can sex chicks in about 3 seconds resulting in the ability to sex thousands of chicks per day.
Some will call this intuition but it is actually expertise. Expertise in all its forms is what makes the world run, and all expertise results from a form of chick sexing training.
Just last week I was asked to take a look at a machinery damage, it started with a collection of photos of a damaged crankshaft, conrods, counterweights, pistons and connecting rods. I was not even half way through the photos and said: Loose counterweight. Later in the damage description it was clear that the majority of the other inspectors after exhaustive follow up investigations also had reached the tentative conclusion that it was a loose counterweight.
I don’t know what photo detail tipped me off on a loose counter weight. Those photos really were just a mess of loose parts, but a number of years before I was involved in an equally exhaustive engine failure where, after many many hours, we established the cause was a loose counterweight.
Due to the experience of that earlier inspection, something tipped me off and I managed to look like a real-life expert.
Expertise is fun. There are many expertise jokes out there, and most come down to the same concept. Somebody calls an expert with a problem, the expert provides the answer immediately and then the client wants to know how he knows that is true. The expert then says: “I gave you the answer for free, if you want me to explain how I know it, it is going to cost you.”
I Iove working with true experts. They don’t even cost me a lot of money, because I generally am not stupid enough to ask for the “why” after they gave me the “what”.
Experienced surveyors can board a vessel and will know in seconds whether a ship is going to be OK or not. The rest of the time is spent on figuring out what is OK or not.
But that does not mean an experienced surveyor is expert on everything. One thing that continues to frustrate me is wire rope inspections. There are many guides and instructions for wire rope inspections but, especially to an engineer, they are fuzzy and inexact and even inconsistent from guide to guide.
The effect is strange because, for example, a wire rope is not supposed to have rust on it, but does a light rust spot in one location condemn an entire wire rope or not? And what if the wire rope is greased or coated? Can I actually see where there is rust or not beneath the grease?
This is where AI comes in and there are various efforts at using AI to inspect wire rope. Some efforts use a device that travels along the wire rope and measures and scans the wire rope. That is nice, but not real chicken sexing. Hopefully there will be an effort soon where wire ropes of different sizes, ages and conditions are scanned in the presence of a real wire rope expert and build into an AI data base. I can then scan a wire rope with my cellphone camera and if it fails, I can send it to the tray of male chicks.
Although, I expect it will become more difficult to find a tray of male chicks. The chicken industry is huge, and chick sexing is a core cost. Therefore, there are very impressive AI efforts in chick sexing and some of those efforts focus on in-egg sexing rather than hatchling sexing. This apparently makes some animal lovers happier, but eliminates human sexers. All technology is good and bad, and the evaluation of technology always raises complicated questions. Does a chick’s life begin after hatching, or in the egg?
Regardless, safer wire ropes is a win/win!
For every column I write New Wave Media makes a small contribution to an organization of my choice. For the foreseeable future I am selecting SL7Expo. An industry wide effort to develop a Smithsonian level exhibit center for commercial maritime.
