Regarding 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.
orbital-decay · 3h ago
I'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 · 18m ago
So it's basically Mongolia's answer to the Finnish sauna
qq66 · 5h ago
Agree - 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 · 2h 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.
What’s the point of citing unspecified “LLMs”? Do you expect this to be persuasive? And why more than one?
umanwizard · 34m ago
The 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.
ty6853 · 1h ago
I'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.
throwup238 · 2h ago
Mongolia 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.
Cthulhu_ · 5h ago
It 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?
snickerer · 1h ago
The 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 · 1h ago
Do they build some kind of foundation for them?
AlotOfReading · 54m ago
Depends. Permanent ones, and tourist gers, yes. Actual nomadic gers are just placed on the grass with rugs.
decimalenough · 1h ago
PSA: 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 · 24m ago
Just create another account.
bz_bz_bz · 2h ago
There are zero yurts in Mongolia using machine learning.
bogtog · 37m ago
I assumed a yurt was a type of person/job, so I initially read the title the same way
9dev · 2h ago
I 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?"
umanwizard · 32m ago
I’m a native speaker and the original phrasing was fine and sounds like completely correct idiomatic English to me.
Yes, the syntax is ambiguous, but ambiguously-parseable sentences happen all the time in all languages and we resolve the ambiguity using context clues, which in this case is easy to do.
jvanderbot · 9m ago
Ambiguity is the soul of wit, in this case
dahart · 1h ago
The phrasing is correct and pretty normal, it’s just potentially ambiguous. English is like that sometimes. I’m not a grammarian, but I think “I counted all the yurts in Mongolia using machine learning” would normally be interpreted correctly by most people, with ‘using’ referring to the subject ‘I’. The way you’d write the other interpretation is “I counted all the yurts in Mongolia that use machine learning”. Your proposed alternative is also correct and less ambiguous.
wrp · 2h ago
Just add a comma. "I counted all of the yurts in Mongolia, using machine learning"
bogtog · 36m ago
Better yet, "I used machine learning to count all the yurts in Mongolia"
umanwizard · 31m ago
This definitely doesn’t flow better in English.
hn_throwaway_99 · 1h ago
As another commenter said, the phrasing isn't wrong, just ambiguous. I would add the word "by" to make it unambiguous: "I counted all of the yurts in Mongolia by using machine learning."
pbhjpbhj · 1h ago
I'd bet quite highly that it's non-zero.
shermantanktop · 51m ago
The yurts themselves? Seems unlikely. Someone living in a yurt? Absolutely.
p00dles · 2h ago
thank you for this
*edit (I mean this sincerely, it made me laugh and I did not see it at first)
sorokod · 23m ago
"In total I found 172,689 yurts with a prediction score of greater than 40%."
How should one interpet the "prediction score"?
heyitsguay · 13m ago
Object 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 · 7m ago
Ok, then "prediction score" is the confidence score? And the confidence threshold for an artefact being a yurt is 40%?
icameron · 5h ago
Intrigued by this. What was the rate of false positives? For example are there storage tanks, silos, above ground pools mistaken for yurts?
shpx · 5h ago
It 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
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.
biorach · 5h 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.
No comments yet
pmontra · 1h ago
My quick estimate before clicking the link was:
From my memory: 3 million people, 1.5 living in the capital.
Let's say 1 million are living outside cities.
4 people per yurt.
250,000 yurt.
Add some extra yurts because there will be people having more than one or people living in a house with a yurt in the garden or yurts used as warehouses, etc
300,000 which is almost the double of the count from the ML app.
rsynnott · 5h 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 · 5h ago
Wikipedia 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 · 4h ago
I'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.
tboyd47 · 1h ago
Keeping an eye on the steppe nomads is always a good idea.
amelius · 3h ago
They 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 · 3h ago
Nice, thanks for sharing! What would be the best way (and data source) to observe the number of yurts over time?
xenophonf · 1h ago
It'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 · 45m 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.
proxysna · 5h ago
Nice write up, also great to see Docker Swarm being used.
MangoToupe · 5h ago
Nice! Now how will you validate the result?
pimlottc · 3h ago
Ideally 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.
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.
> 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.
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#:~...
Ulaanbaatar - https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?params=47_56_7_N_1...
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.
Yes, the syntax is ambiguous, but ambiguously-parseable sentences happen all the time in all languages and we resolve the ambiguity using context clues, which in this case is easy to do.
*edit (I mean this sincerely, it made me laugh and I did not see it at first)
How should one interpet the "prediction score"?
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.
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.
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.
No comments yet
From my memory: 3 million people, 1.5 living in the capital.
Let's say 1 million are living outside cities.
4 people per yurt.
250,000 yurt.
Add some extra yurts because there will be people having more than one or people living in a house with a yurt in the garden or yurts used as warehouses, etc
300,000 which is almost the double of the count from the ML app.
172k of them? That still seems like quite a lot of yurts; certainly more yurts per capita than anyone else has.
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.
I'm curious what the topology/architecture of the DL model is like. And are there better ways to approach this problem?
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.
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.