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I counted all of the yurts in Mongolia using machine learning
- furyg3 1y agoRegarding the discussion of ger/yurt districts in cities, it's also important not to underestimate the cultural significance of the nomadic lifestyle and yurt culture. Changing climate (desertification) and economic conditions have meant that a lot of people have given up their nomadic lifestyle and moved to cities or their outskirts (mostly Ulaanbaatar). They often are reluctant to do so, it's a big step, and they often hope it is a temporary one. They set up their yurts not only because of housing shortages, but many are also hesitant to move into apartments or other permanent structures as it's seen as the last step in giving up this nomadic lifestyle. Often they are setting up their yurts next to permanent structures, either because they are living in the 'yard' of relatives or to expand their residences and stay connected to their culture. You can see examples of this in the first images.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoIt also sounds like they would already have one, and / or that it would be relatively easy to move if they want or need to. Don't they go back to their more rural homes for special events, for example?
- AlotOfReading 1y agoMoving a ger can be a significant effort, especially a large one. Most urban dwellers find owning the trucks and vans that can hold these things pretty impractical if they're not moving regularly. There's a fairly large domestic tourism industry catering to urban city-dwellers who want to go live in a nice ger for a couple weeks to feel connected to their history.
- qq66 1y agoAgree - ger living is not necessarily a failure of public policy, it could just be a cultural decision. Even Genghis Khan lived in a ger. Of course, for some people, it's likely to be a matter of necessity, for others, a matter of choice, but it's not prima facie bad. > When ineffective policy results in a large chunk of the populace generationally living in yurts on the outskirts of urban areas, it’s clear that there is failure. That's not at all clear.
- aaron695 1y ago> That's not at all clear. LLMs agree with OP. It's a failure, with important culture. Steelmanning it, it's better than a corrugated metal shanty town. Although they would die in the cold. The rich in the gers burn coal, the poor plastic. There is no water or sewerage. It's one of the most polluted capitals in the world - https://www.unicef.org/mongolia/environment-air-pollution#:~:text=one%20of%20the%20most%20polluted%20capitals%20in%20the%20world https://www.unicef.org/mongolia/environment-air-pollution#:~... Ulaanbaatar - https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?params=47_56_7_N_106_52_38_E https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?params=47_56_7_N_1...
- ty6853 1y agoI'm not sure about Mongolia, but elsewhere I've seen wooden platforms for yurts under which water and sewage is ran, much as you would do with a crawlspace type house.
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- TimorousBestie 1y agoWhat’s the point of citing unspecified “LLMs”? Do you expect this to be persuasive? And why more than one?
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- School-Cotton 1y agoThe most annoying thing about modern life is people citing LLMs to try to win arguments about subjective questions. They are biased to agree with anything you ask them, and will do so unless it’s blatantly factually untrue.
- orbital-decay 1y agoI've traveled across Mongolia on a motorcycle many years ago, and one thing I never expected is how absolutely everyone living in a permanent house also has a yurt in their backyard, regardless of how good the house is. This made no sense to me as an outsider (like, do you really need a second house?) so I asked a local about this, and was given a funny look. Yurts are just hardwired into the culture, it's a status symbol, it's where you invite a guest, it's what you use when living outside, it so many things at once.
- sfn42 1y agoSo it's basically Mongolia's answer to the Finnish sauna
- helpfulclippy 1y agoOne of my best Airbnb experiences was staying in a yurt in the backyard of a Mongolian woman…in Wisconsin. It was great. They also had a huge fire pit with tons of chairs around it, and I could tell they loved having tons of people over and just hanging out.
- throwup238 1y agoMongolia is also really struggling right now with a mass migration off the plains because of several very cold winters that have decimated their flocks. There just isn’t enough room for them to move into permanent buildings even if they wanted to.
- codesnik 1y agoI've been in a Uzbekistan palace, I think it was Khiva. And it was, well, a palace, with courts and richly decorated rooms. But at certain fully enclosed by walls court there was a circular place where yurt have been standing. Khans were tracing their lineages back to Genghis Khan, and it was unbecoming for the khan to spend nights under the firm roof, even if it's in a middle of the city with long sedentary life style traditions. All the visiting relatives wouldn't approve. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshhovli_Palace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshhovli_Palace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshhovli_Palace#/media/File:KhivaTach_Khaouli_reception_yard_Iwan.JPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshhovli_Palace#/media/File:K... that circular spot.
- andrewstuart 1y agoYurt is a lot of fun to say. Great word.
- iLemming 1y ago'yurt' is a Turkic word (don't confuse with Turkish), means "dwelling place", also commonly used for "home country" in languages like Uzbek. Yurt for the nomads was far more than just a place to sleep. Mongols I believe use a different word - 'ger'. Fun fact - Turkic languages were lingua franca of the Mongol Empire. Mongols perceived their language as "sacred" and wouldn't let non-mongols teach it freely. That could be one of the reasons why we have Turkic languages spread across the vast territory instead of Mongolic. Just so you know, Turkic languages span an enormous landmass from Turkey in the west, across the Caucasus, Central Asia, Russia, China, parts of Iran, Afghanistan and Mongolia. This represents one of the largest continuous language family distributions on Earth - spanning roughly 13,000+ kilometers east-west across Eurasia.
- shpx 1y agoIt seems like a waste that you didn't use the 89,259 yurts that are already outlined in OpenStreetMap as input, though you would've probably had issues aligning the outlines with google maps imagery https://taginfo.geofabrik.de/asia:mongolia/tags/building=ger https://taginfo.geofabrik.de/asia:mongolia/tags/building=ger I'm also guessing your model doesn't handle yurts that are on the border of a tile. Finally, that's a much smaller number than I expected for a country of 3 million.
- rsynnott 1y ago> Finally, that's a much smaller number than I expected for a country of 3 million. 172k of them? That still seems like quite a lot of yurts; certainly more yurts per capita than anyone else has.
- shpx 1y agoWikipedia says 30% of 3.5 million are "nomadic or semi-nomadic", which would be 6 people to a yurt. I couldn't figure out what percentage of the country was done, but if he did 270,559/37,258,617 zoom 17 tiles then there could be another 100k in the other 99% of the data. Living away from other people and not next to anything in particular is what I associate with nomads, the heuristic of searching a radius around landmarks doesn't make sense to me. I scrolled around a random remote desert area in Mongolia on Google Maps and found a yurt every couple of minutes.
- shiandow 1y agoI'm confused why you wouldnt just do some random sampling to get some statistical bounds. At least then you'll know if you are close.
- biorach 1y ago> Finally, that's a much smaller number than I expected for a country of 3 million. 172.7k yurts. Assuming that these are family residences for the most part, if we take an average occupancy of 4 (which is probably too low - the fertility rate is still quite high there) gives ~691k people living in yurts - approximately 20% of the population of 3.5 million - sounds reasonable.
- MangoToupe 1y agoNice! Now how will you validate the result?
- bigbacaloa 1y ago[dead]
- pimlottc 1y agoIdeally you’d verify against an in-person count of yurts over some control area. Otherwise this is just based on an assumption of what yurts look like on satellite.
- proxysna 1y agoNice write up, also great to see Docker Swarm being used.
- icameron 1y agoIntrigued by this. What was the rate of false positives? For example are there storage tanks, silos, above ground pools mistaken for yurts?
- amelius 1y agoThey use a semi-commercial solution (free for educational use). I'm curious what the topology/architecture of the DL model is like. And are there better ways to approach this problem?
- tomtomistaken 1y agoNice, thanks for sharing! What would be the best way (and data source) to observe the number of yurts over time?
- bz_bz_bz 1y agoThere are zero yurts in Mongolia using machine learning.
- 9dev 1y agoI chuckled a little, but as a non-native speaker: what would be the correct phrasing? "Using machine learning, I counted all the yurts in Mongolia?"
- NickDouglas 1y ago[dead]
- wrp 1y agoJust add a comma. "I counted all of the yurts in Mongolia, using machine learning"
- bogtog 1y agoBetter yet, "I used machine learning to count all the yurts in Mongolia"
- School-Cotton 1y agoThis definitely doesn’t flow better in English.
- davio 1y agohttps://www.amazon.com/Eats-Shoots-Leaves-Tolerance-Punctuation/dp/1592402038 https://www.amazon.com/Eats-Shoots-Leaves-Tolerance-Punctuat...
- rendang 1y agoUnfortunately, that isn't a correct use of a comma
- wrp 1y agoIn this case, "using machine learning" is an independent clause, so the comma is required. Without the comma, it modifies "yurts in Mongolia".
- hkon 1y agoCool, how can this be used for taxation purposes?
- snickerer 1y agoThe gers are standardized. There is a big daily market in Ulaanbaatar where you can get all spare parts and complete gers. In 2017, the price for one ger was something like $1000. For that money, you get a well-isolated easily movable tiny house in a country where you are allowed to settle everywhere (but if you have 2000 sheep with you, you should better discuss the usage of the pastureland with the locals) without paying rent (outside the city). Choosing a ger for housing is not only about tradition and culture. It is quite rational in that situation.
- ty6853 1y agoDo they build some kind of foundation for them?
- AlotOfReading 1y agoDepends. Permanent ones, and tourist gers, yes. Actual nomadic gers are just placed on the grass with rugs.
- amy214 1y agoJust to clarify for some people, in polite company, a turkish house-tent is what we call a yurt, whereas a house-tent in mongolia is not a yurt but a ger. In France these are called shabadoos, in canada we call house-tents plumbuses, and in the US these are called fleebs. I personally get offended when locals see my shabadoo and refer to it as a ger.
- xenophonf 1y agoIt'd be a lot more accurate—not to say more honest—to say the author _estimated_ the number of all the yurts in Mongolia using machine learning. ML algorithms are stochastic; their outputs are whatever the algorithm deems the most probable of the options generated from the given inputs. They barely give a thought to all the ways their count could be wrong—no error analysis, no confidence intervals. There's a meaningless prediction score of 40%, and they blithely add "a hundred or so" to the count. This is anti-information. People reading this uncritically will come away with completely wrong ideas about the number of yurts in Mongolia, about machine learning algorithms, about data science in general.
- shermantanktop 1y ago> People reading this uncritically will come away with completely wrong ideas about the number of yurts in Mongolia Who is harmed by carrying around a mistaken number for this, especially if they notice the 40% confidence? As to the rest, I read it as an application of tools for an interesting question, not a comprehensive or authoritative how-to. It’s scaled napkin math, and napkin math is very useful.
- xenophonf 1y agoAssuming you selectively quoted me in good faith before asking "who is harmed", you should read the whole SEP entry on the ethics of manipulation, and then you should review the works it references. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-manipulation/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-manipulation/ But to answer you directly: - Whoever hires the author for their software engineering or data science expertise in part because of this blog post will pay for substandard work. - By deceiving their audience as to the accuracy and precision of the demonstrated techniques, the author undermines the audience's ability to make good decisions about when to use or how to reason from the results of machine learning algorithms. - The author disrespects their audience when they misrepresent themself, their work, and their results.
- tboyd47 1y agoKeeping an eye on the steppe nomads is always a good idea.
- decimalenough 1y agoPSA: Downloading Google Maps satellite imagery tiles is forbidden by the TOS. This is enforced, too, and I'm quite surprised the OP managed to download tiles for all of Mongolia without getting banned.
- Nextgrid 1y agoJust create another account.
- throwaway314155 1y agoRight? Who gives a fuck.
- bigyabai 1y agoMaxar et. al
- datameta 1y agoI don't understand the reasoning behind that besides market exclusivity.
- ViscountPenguin 1y agoI don't think google owns lots of their tiles. If you view google maps on desktop you can see the copyright of an individual area, and it's often random aerospace companies.
- datameta 1y agoAh, makes sense! Thanks
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sorokod 1y ago"In total I found 172,689 yurts with a prediction score of greater than 40%." How should one interpet the "prediction score"?
- heyitsguay 1y agoObject detectors output detection bounding boxes along with confidence scores. The higher the score, the more confident the model is that the associated bounding box is a correct detection. When used in applications (like this one), the user typically establishes a confidence threshold and then every detection above that threshold is treated as a positive detection, the rest are discarded. The choice can be arbitrary or (sorta) principled.
- sorokod 1y agoOk, then "prediction score" is the confidence score? And the confidence threshold for an artefact being a yurt is 40%?
- appapappa 1y ago[flagged]
- appapappa 1y ago[flagged]
- unholyguy001 1y agoNo validation versus some kind of ground truth . His training data set is very small and geographically limited. His model is likely pretty inaccurate
- nixass 1y agoWhere was this when Morrowind came out? :)
- cpufry 1y ago[dead]
- rnhmjoj 1y agoAll very cool, but wouldn't it be a lot easier to just detect circles within a certain range of size and color using some basic computer vision, like a circle Hough transform?
- AlotOfReading 1y agoOne potential issue with this is that gers actually leave circular patterns once they've been removed, where the soil is disturbed and the grass is light-starved or dead. It takes a couple years for those to fully disappear after the ger is removed. Gers themselves can be any color. White is traditional (from a time when white wool was more expensive), but not mandatory.
- mrlonglong 1y agoMaybe I missed it but did the article give an answer for the number of yurts?
- _9ptr 1y agoIt's in the article, second to last passage: "In total I found 172,689 yurts with a prediction score of greater than 40%."
- mrlonglong 1y agoTa. Missed it due to tiredness.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- caycep 1y agothis is 1 step above yak shaving i suppose
- timewizard 1y agoYou estimated. This is not at all a "count."
- eirikbakke 1y agoWith one extra step, you could get a lower bound with very high confidence. Just take a random sample (N=100) of the detected objects, and determine manually what percentage are really yurts. Then multiply that percentage by the number of detected objects.
- michaelhoffman 1y agoUsing machine learning, he counted all of the yurts. Counting all of the yurts that happen to be using machine learning is a way more difficult problem.
- ludicity 1y agoMan, I had almost forgotten how much fun it was to read about ML projects of the variety I studied in university, before all the discourse shifted to plain English prompts. I know of some government entities in Australia doing similar work, but the effectiveness/quality level of the author's work do make me despair for our government a bit. They're blowing years of Very Expensive Consultant spend and they can't even classify an entire parcel of land correctly, let alone count some little yurt-shaped blobs.
- anitil 1y agoI was just about to mention that there's a local developer/improv artist with similar experiences and then I saw your username
- m0llusk 1y agoSo hop on the bandwagon before you get left behind by Mongolians in yurts.
- djmips 1y agoWhat would this have cost?
- Andr2Andr 1y agoHow much approximately does it cost to rent these amounts of gpu + server?
- danhodgins 1y agoI thought the headline was discussing all of the yurts in Mongolia that are using machine learning.