Professor John Trinkaus did several studies documenting the prevalence of indifference or fear among kids visiting Santa Claus in a shopping mall, we remind you. Professor Trinkaus was awarded the 2003 Ig Nobel Prize in literature for for meticulously collecting data and publishing more than 80 detailed academic reports about things that annoyed him (such as: What […]
Tag: Santa Claus
Xmas code crackers
The ‘Santa Claus Problem’ (outlined above) was first described by Professor John A. Trono, (of Saint Michael’s College, VT, US) in his paper ‘A new exercise in concurrency’, SIGCSE Bulletin, Vol. 26, pp. 8-10, 1994. Despite its apparent first-glance simplicity, the problem presents robust concurrent programming complexities when using ‘traditional’ computer programming languages such as […]
Santa Claus on the couch
CLICK-CAUTION: the following may contain spoilers regarding the ‘reality’ (or otherwise) of Santa. Santa is an essential part of Christmas. But can Santa be understood through the psychoanalytic concepts of fetishism, ambivalence and narcissism? Some say yes, he can. Take for example Dr. Robert Cluley PhD, currently Lecturer in Marketing at Nottingham University Business School, […]
“Towards a Theory of Santa”
Now that Christmas is approaching, there may be no better time to ask such questions as “Is Santa Claus under threat?” – maybe, say, from the ‘Audit Culture’, which involves an inversion of his benign characteristics in terms of suspicion and surveillance? And just such questions have been examined by Professor Ian Stronach (Liverpool John […]