The quest to more often communicate with one’s dog, if one has a dog, takes a big bounce forward with the invention of a tennis-ball-based dog-to-human internet communication system. A new study offers detail on how, and how well, it works: “Forming the Dog Internet: Prototyping a Dog-to-Human Video Call Device,” Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas, Roosa Piitulainen, […]
Tag: Internet
Recent progress in cat-video studies
The first peer-reviewed academic study to investigate and document the internet’s cat-video-proliferation-phenomenon might well [we think] be : ● Do Cats Know They Rule YouTube? Surveillance and the Pleasures of Cat Videos by Radha O’Meara, in the M/C Journal, Vol. 17, Issue 2, 2014. Since then, the prevalence of scholarly investigations which reference internet cat videos […]
Dog-to-dog technology-mediated interactions [new study]
Dr Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at Aalto University, Espoo, Finland, and specializes (amongst other things) “in building animal-driven technologies to explore what it means to interact as an animal (a non-human one) and how as system designers we can support this interaction.” She points out that : “As a […]
How much cybersecurity is enough to save the world?
Security? What kind of answer does that question really have? This paper gives an answer, kind of: “Cybersecurity is not very important,” Andrew Odlyzko [pictured here], University of Minnesota, Revised version, March 18, 2019. The author explains: “There is a rising tide of security breaches. There is an even faster rising tide of hysteria over […]
Governing cyberspace via ‘Constructive Ambiguity’ (and Schrödinger’s cat)
How can the vastness of cyberspace can be ‘governed’ in any practical way? Perhaps some ‘Constructive Ambiguity’ might help resolve such questions? A 2015 thesis by Professor Paul Cornish (Associate Director of Oxford University’s Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre and Research Group Director for Defence, Security and Infrastructure at RAND Europe in Cambridge, UK) suggests […]
Fujitsu promotes the Internet of Cows
Fujitsu devised this promotional video for what it calls “the Internet of Cows”: . Fujitsu’s more formal name for the innovation is “ox walk SaaS“. Fujitsu’s promotional activities turn on the phrase “I am the connected cow”, as you can see in this photo: Michael Byrne wrote a short essay about this cow news, for Motherboard. […]
The Allen-Alchian (theorem) Explains Why the Internet Is Made of Cats
Dr. Jason Potts Centre Fellow and Project Leader in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, Queensland University of Technology, Australia, explains in the special ‘cute’ issue of the M/C Journal, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2014) why the internet is made of cats (with reference to the Alchian-Allen Theorem). Supporting material here […]
Counting curses (on Twitter, in English)
Words can be tallied. Words were. This study gives details: “Cursing in English on Twitter,” Wenbo Wang, Lu Chen, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan [pictured here], and Amit P. Sheth, paper presented at CSCW’14 , February 15-19 2014, Baltimore, MD, USA. The authors, at Wright State University, explain: “In this paper, we examine the characteristics of cursing activity […]
New Internet search fails to turn up evidence of time travelers
Internet search engines are not yet reliable enough to find evidence of time travelers — if that information exists and if it’s findable. That’s what this new study suggests: “Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers,” Robert J. Nemiroff [pictured above], Teresa Wilson [pictured below], arXiv:1312.7128, December 26, 2013. The authors, at Michigan Tech, write: “Time […]
Hot potatoes to combat nuclear Armageddon
“Each message is regarded as a ‘hot potato’, and the nodes are not wearing gloves. Rather than hold the ‘hot potato’ the node tosses the message to its neighbor, who will now try to get rid of the message.” The paragraph above is describing aspects of the Hot Potato Algorithm, originally developed by (the late) […]