Do you own a mobile phone? Do you sometimes think there’s a call when actually there isn’t? If so, that might well be a Phantom Phone Sensation (PPS). Leading, perhaps, to the question :’What are the determinants of phantom phone sensations?’ These (fairly) ubiquitous phenomena have been formally investigated by a research team at the […]
Tag: phone
From tumbling toast to falling phones
The physicist who won an Ig Nobel Prize for analyzing whether buttered toast usually falls on the buttered side has now examined the similar question: what happens when you drop a mobile phone? The Digit web site reports: Why do phones always seem fall with their screen facing down? While most people would be satisfied […]
Phoning during a thunderstorm – Unrecommended
“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 […]
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 […]