From Giant Panda Bear Diplomacy to TikTok

Come to think of it this was a very smart long term move by the Communist Party of China. Perseverance pays off!

Chinese time scales are very different from Western time scales!

Patience versus impatience to reach a goal!

Then in 1984, the clever Deng Xiaoping changed from gifting to leasing great panda bears.

The West was lulled to believe China was cuddly! Greetings from The Art of War (500 BC) by Sun Tzu.

Then came TikTok!

Under Xi Jinping China has advanced into a great hegemon.

Panda diplomacy - Wikipedia

Credits: Wie die Pandabären China dabei halfen, zur Weltmacht aufzusteigen Früher warb China mit Pandas um die Gunst des Westens. Heute zeigen sie das Selbstbewusstsein der neuen Supermacht. Eine Geschichte über die wohl einflussreichsten Tiere der Welt.

Madam Chiang and John Tee-Van of the Bronx Zoo, USA, with the baby Panda in Madam Chiang's yard in Chongqing, November 9, 1941

Wild panda population nearly doubles in 40 years as China steps up conservation efforts

Good news!

Given all the funny short Panda videos Chinese people watch every day! Myself, I have been shown at least a dozen of such cute short panda videos in the past six weeks or so.

"China’s National Forestry and Grassland Administration said on Jan 25 there are now around 1,900 pandas in the wild from some 1,100 in the 1980s.

This has been due to China’s efforts to protect the specie, considered a national treasure, said Mr Zhang Yue, an official with the administration.

The Giant Panda National Park was established in October 2021, covering a total area of over 22,000 sq km and providing a home to around 72 per cent of the wild giant panda population.

Protected areas for giant pandas have grown from 1.39 million ha to 2.58 million ha since 2012.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature has adjusted the status of giant pandas from “endangered” to “vulnerable”. ..."

Wild panda population nearly doubles as China steps up conservation efforts | The Straits Times

Credits: Human Progress Weekly Progress Roundup

Panda Jealous Of Colorful Peacock

Just learnt from my special lady that the original Chinese video circulating on WeChat contained the scene where the Peacock plaid dead, but apparently, the YouTube video below was edited etc.

This is a very hilarious video shared with me by a very special lady! 

The plot:

Peacock successfully steals food form Panda. 

Angry Panda can not catch Peacock at first, because it flies away and lands high up on a wall. 

Panda gets smarter next time, finally after a pursuit catches Peacock and plucks all his pretty feathers.

Naked Peacock only survives playing dead.

Then Panda discovers that the pretty feathers make for a good toothpick! 👍😊👏

I was stunned to see the Peacock fly. I learnt in childhood or so that zoos etc. generally would clip peacocks to prevent them from flying.

Giant Pandas In Love And What It Sounds Like

Andrew Ng, a renowned AI researcher, reports in his latest The Batch newsletter (2/12/2020):
"What Love Sounds Like
Female giant pandas are fertile for only 24 to 36 hours a year: Valentine’s Day on steroids. A new neural network alerts human keepers when a panda couple mates.

What’s new: Panda breeders are struggling to lift the creatures' global population, and tracking success in mating helps maintain their numbers. WeiRan Yan of Sichuan University, with researchers from Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding and Sichuan Academy of Giant Panda, developed CGANet, a speech recognition network that flags consummated unions based on panda vocalizations.
Key insight: Prior work discovered the relationship between panda calls and mating success. A preliminary model used hand-crafted features to recognize calls meaning, “Wow, honey, you were great!” CGANet uses features extracted through deep learning.
How it works: The researchers trained CGANet on recordings of pandas during mating season labeled for mating success.
The model divides each recorded call into pieces and computes a frequency representation of each piece.
It uses convolutional, recurrent, and attention layers in turn to find patterns that predict mating success in different aspects of the pieces and their interrelationships. 
It computes the probability of mating success for each piece, then sums the probabilities to generate a prediction for the call as a whole.
Results: CGANet’s predictions were 89.9 percent accurate, a new state of the art compared with the earlier model’s 84.5 percent. CGANet also substantially improved AUC (area under curve, a measure of true versus false positives).

Why it matters: Tracking a panda’s love life once required obtaining its hormones — a difficult and time-consuming feat. CGANet allows real-time, non-invasive prediction so keepers can give the less popular pandas another chance while they’re still fertile.

We’re thinking: For pandas, a happy Valentine’s Day is essential to perpetuate the species. Tools like CGANet could help save these unique creatures from extinction."

Not to be trifled with, this is serious academic AI research using state of the art generative adversarial networks (GAN):
Audio-based automatic mating success prediction of giant pandas

What the AI researchers may have overlooked here is what sounds does a female giant panda make when she is ready?

The Batch: Hotter Dating Profiles, Pandas in Love, Compute for Coronavirus, Deepfake Detection, Self-Driving Cars Run Amok: