To the best of our knowledge, no academic has followed Ig Nobel Prize winner John Trinkaus’s lead in carefully, relentlessly documenting things that annoy them, tallying exactly how frequently those things occur. It’s enjoyable to look back, now and then, at the work of John Trinkaus. Trinkaus died in 2017, at which time we gave […]
What might you gain (or lose) by interrupting someone? The question has been experimentally examined by Professor Sally Dew Farley, of the Psychology department at the University of Baltimore, US. Experimental subjects who had been asked to discuss an article were systematically interrupted by confederates – revealing the following : • The Upside for […]
Wikipedia currently lists [as at July 2015] something in excess of 60 emotions. And ‘Annoyance’ is one of them. If you have ever been annoyed, and/or enjoy exploring annoyance(s), can we recommend a new paper in Ratio (an international journal of analytic philosophy), Volume 27, Issue 2, pp. 190–204, June 2014, ‘On Being Annoyed’. Author, […]
Humans who answer the phones in call centers are, in many organizations, requested or even required to smile, smile, smile. A team of researchers at Goethe-University Frankfurt in Germany and the University of Denver ran an experiment to see what this forced smiling does to the forced smilers…. —so begins today’s Improbable Innovation nugget, which appears in its entirety on […]
I’m going to be on NPR’s Science Friday program today. We’ll talk about one professor’s fascination with things that annoy him. That professor has published nearly 100 reports about things that annoy him. The reports themselves are not annoying — each report is short (typically just one or two pages) and clear. This segment will be at […]
“There exists no gold standard for the measurement of snoring.” But a joint research project from the Human Sleep Research Laboratory at the Stanford Research Institute in the US and Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, Germany has recently made progress. With research towards quantifying snoring annoyance which asked – “Is the annoyance of snoring a reliable tool for […]