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 […]
Tag: dog
Joseph’s Rube Goldberg machine for roasting a turkey
Here is Joseph. Joseph built a Rube Goldberg machine to roast a turkey. Joseph made a video of his Rube Goldberg machine roasting a turkey. This is that video: (Thanks to Sarah Smith for bringing this to our attention.) NEXT POST: Why did they smell the unwashed jeans?
Identifying one’s pet(s) by how they smell
It’s (more or less) a given that dogs can reliably identify individual humans by their smell. But what about the other way around? To find out, Dr Deborah Wells and Professor Peter Hepper of the Canine Behaviour Centre, School of Psychology, at Queen’s University Belfast, UK, conducted a set of experiments. A 1m square blue […]
Unresolvable human mental states (based on a parallel universe theory)
“A mental state with respect to a situation composed by multiplying two situations equals the sum of mental states for each situation. A mental state with respect to a situation composed by dividing two situations equals the difference between mental states for each situation.” So explain professor Changsoo Shin and colleagues at the Department of […]
“If it smells like meat…” a ‘Rule of Thumb’ for dogs
Although you might think (as many have) that dogs have a strong preference for eating meat, things may not be quite so clearcut. Authors Anandarup Bhadra and Anindita Bhadra of The Dog Lab (doggedly observing dogs at the Department of Biological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Kolkata, India), propose instead that dogs’ […]
‘Social jetlag’ between dogs and humans across Europe
“People choosing a pet have a number of factors to consider. The important one is whether a pet can synchronize with humans in sleep timing.“ – explain a pan-European [Germany | Poland | Spain] research team in a 2015 paper for the scholarly journal Time & Society. The investigators reasoned that pet dogs and their […]
Putting words into dogs’ mouths – ventriloquistically
Professor Sirpa Leppänen of the Department of Languages, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, has a paper in Discourse, Context & Media (Volume 8, June 2015) about the ventriloquistic authentication of the human voice, as found in dog blogs. “It approaches dog blogs as an example of the strategic use of pervasive but contentious anthropomorphic western discourses […]
Discarded dog-poop bags – a photo essay
It was somewhere around 2007, that Dr. John Darwell, who is a senior lecturer in photography at the University of Cumbria, UK, began researching and photographically documenting the phenomenon of ‘ddsbs‘. “Over the past two years I have observed with increasing fascination the growing number of discarded dog shit bags (ddsbs) I encounter whilst out […]
‘Dog Stories’ (their value for journalists)
How can professional journalists draw public attention to important news stories? A team of investigators from the University of California and the University of Miami have a word of advice. And the word is ‘Dogs’. Their findings are published in PS: Political Science & Politics, (Volume 47, Issue 04, October 2014, pp 819-823) under the […]
Predators vs artificial prey: Greyhounds & mechanical bunny
What happens if racing greyhounds not just chase, but actually catch the mechanical rabbit? This video documents one such occurrence: (HT Brendan Koerner)