Talk:Chicken sexing

old comments

the caption is too informal. Secretlondon 22:05, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

The caption made me chuckle. The article's factual yet a little light-hearted, the flippant caption doesn't jar. TB 22:24, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

They actually are called chicken sexers JeffBobFrank 06:04, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

"This method is obsolete"

In the 1950s, several machines were invented that illuminated and magnified the cloacas of newborn chicks, and chicks could be sexed by inspecting them with this machine. This method is obsolete.

Why is it obsolete? Marnanel 23:05, 24 Jun 2004 (UTC)

This was mentioned on one of the external links. The people who made the equipment are no longer in business. Smerdis of Tlön 14:08, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)

That doesn't really make it obsolete, just difficult. This article is great, by the way. --Ben Brockert 01:56, Dec 11, 2004 (UTC)

Yes it does. Since those people are the only people that had the machines, it makes it obsolete since they are out of business. --Carl 9:21, Aug 15, 2005 (PST)

Wow.

This is, wow.

Anyone who can read this entire thing without laughing should be shot for not having a sense of humor.

I have one of these old machines dated 1959. It still works but the insertion needles got lost at some stage. It was made by Secura, Carslisle, England. Does anyone have spare needles? Peter Glaum - pkglaum@realnet.co.sz

Vent Sexing

Okay, maybe I'm wrong... I don't have a degree in avian medicine or what-have-you... but I didn't think that birds had rectums! There's the cloaca, internally, and the external opening is called the vent... but this article refers to a rectum. Could someone please explain where a bird has a rectum? EthanL (talk) 12:21, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

Interesting Story in AI

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, American chicken hatchers faced a problem that threatened to destroy their industry. They needed a way to tell the difference between female chicks, which could be sold for profit as layers, and male chicks, most of which were commercially worthless. The obvious methods, including raising the chicks to maturity, were economically unfeasible.

Willing to try anything, the industry brought in five Japanese "chick sexors," and to their delight, one of them, Hikosoboro Yogo, proved able to accurately sex 1,400 day-old chicks per hour with 98 percent accuracy. Oddly, Yogo selected the female chicks without even looking at their sexual organs; after handling three to four million chicks, he just seemed to know which was which. Further, he couldn't really explain how he did it. Fortunately for the poultry industry, American chicken sexors were able to pick up his uncanny skill by watching him for three months.

Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus, in Mind over Machine (Free Press, $16.95), argue that Yogo's expertise is precisely the sort that machines, including computers, will never--that's never--attain. Using clearly reasoned arguments, they conclude that the goal of the artificial-intelligence, or AI, movement, trying to make computers work out solutions to problems the way that human experts do, is both a philosophical and a practical impossibility. FROM: Mind over machine. - book reviews Psychology Today, July, 1986 by Jeff Meer

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Chicken sexing should be Chick sexing

The proper term is "Chick sexing." Chick sexing is the method of distinguising the sex of a chick, not a chicken. According to the Dictionary of Occupational Titles, the job title is "Chick Sexer." Also, not that the show "Dirty Jobs" is the greatest resource of information, but the episode that featured this profession was called "Chick Sexer."

I am not against having both terms mentioned in the article, but there should be some clarification.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Kcoutu (talk • contribs) 21:28, 26 March 2007 (UTC).