The 2016 Ig Nobel Peace Prize winners explain about people’s craving for bullshit, in their Ig Informal Lecture, as you see in this video: The prize was awarded to Gordon Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek Koehler, and Jonathan Fugelsang for their scholarly study called “On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit”. The details of […]
Year: 2017
January issue of mini-AIR
The January issue of mini-AIR just went out. (mini-AIR is a wee little supplement to the magnificent magazine Annals of Improbable Research.) Topics include: The P-p-p-p-Power of the Words, Words, Words News about the upcoming events in NYC, Boston, and Europe “PPP versus PPPP — What is Wrong in Denmark?” and more It also has info about […]
Is your dog watching TV?
If you’d like to scientifically determine whether your dog (or any other dog) is watching TV, you could try using a high-quality method of face tracking (from a Human Computer Interaction [HCI] standpoint) as suggested by PhD researcher Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas and Prof. Janet C Read from the Animal Computer Interaction Design (ACID), a research group […]
“Japanese toilet industry agrees to standardize complex bidet controls”
User interface issues are not glamorous — but they do matter. Many irksome problems linger for years or decades. Sam Byford reports, in The Verge, on a cleansing case: Japanese toilet industry agrees to standardize complex bidet controls The Japan Sanitary Equipment Industry Association, a consortium of companies producing plumbing products including Toto, Panasonic, and […]