Darryl Laiu of the BBC made a nice two-and-a-half-minute video documentary about B.F. Skinner‘s Ig Nobel Peace-Prize-winning pigeon-guided missile project. The BBC describes it: The WWII experiment to make pigeon-guided missiles During WWII, psychologist B F Skinner tried to use pigeons to guide missiles towards enemy ships. His study proved it was possible, and it […]
The Ig Nobel Japan Tour has its final event tonight, with an event at Ishikawa Prefectural University on Thursday, September 27. WHERE: Ishikawa Prefectural University, Hokkoku Shimbun Interchange Hall (2-1 Minami-cho, Kanazawa City). WHEN: 17:30 Marc Abrahams and Ig Nobel Prize winners Yukio Hirose, and Hidehiko Kumagai (who is also president of the university) & Shinsuke Imai will discuss the […]
Technology has moved beyond anything B.F. Skinner had available when he did his imaginative pigeon-behavior experiments. This study tells of the latest advance: “A Kinect-based system for automatic recording of some pigeon behaviors,” Damian M. Lyons , James S. MacDonall, Kelly M. Cunningham, Behavior Research Methods, December 2015, Volume 47, Issue 4, pp 1044-1054. (Thanks to Andrew Caines […]
Some might say that despite their popularity, Thai dove-cooing contests, which have now been held for more than 30 years, have not received the academic attention they deserve. Either way, things changed with the 2005 (#9) edition of the journal MANUSYA:Journal of Humanities (a publication of Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand) in which Professor Wanni […]