“Is it dangerous to make a landline phone call during a thunderstorm?” It can be. Background is provided by Emeritus Professor Mat Darveniza, AO, FTSE, BE, PhD, DEng, Hon DSc (Eng), FIEAust (Hon), FIEEE (life), FTSE, LIVA, from the University of Queensland Australia – who is a leading authority on lightning strikes. In Australia alone […]
Tag: phone
The cost of a phone agent’s smile
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 […]
Inventions to detect and prevent annoying phone calls, documents, or people
Annoying phone calls and documents clog our telephone, email, and other communications networks. Inventors, and the institutions backing them, are trying to fight technology with technology. Here are three of their patent applications: “Detecting and rejecting annoying documents,” international patent application WO 2007070622 A3, Filed Dec 14, 2006 by Anurag Agarwal and Deepak Jindal (Google […]
Why do people say where they are during mobile phone calls? (Laurier #1 of 4)
These clips by UK comedian / journalist Dominic John Romulus ‘Dom’ Joly might suggest, to some, the question : “Why do people say where they are during mobile phone calls?” For answers, or at least steps towards answers, see a key paper in Environment and Planning D: Society & Space, volume 19(4) pages 485-504, by […]
Bye-bye bunny paper: Rabbit phone sex study retracted
Alexander Lerchl sent us this note: In 2010 you wrote a piece [in the Guardian] on a paper by Salama et al. about the effects of mobile phone electromagnetic fields on rabbits’ sex life. I read it just now since it was mentioned in Esowatch. Actually he published three papers with co-authors who were not informed about […]