Sheep facial recognition software is in the offing, suggests an October 22, 2019 news report in the New Zealand Herald: The world’s first sheep facial recognition software, developed in Dunedin, is set to be prototyped this year. Sheep NN, a project created by artificial intelligence and machine learning company Iris Data Science, has received a […]
Tag: sheep
Named-cow researcher recognizes merit in research on sheep recognizing people
“I was asked if, as an Ig Nobel laureate myself, I thought this recent Cambridge sheep study would be a contender for an Ig Nobel award, the prize for science that “first makes you laugh, then makes you think”. Celebrity-spotting sheep might sound funny but the science involved in this study actually isn’t sniggerable.” So writes Catherine Douglas […]
Becoming with sheep (art project)
Danish artist and researcher Charlotte Grumm explores (amongst other things) the constitutive relationship between subjectivity and materiality and the mattering and un-mattering of reality. With this in mind, the artist relates what she did in 2015 as part of this exploration : “I, Danish artist Charlotte Grum, connected myself to a sheep for 5 weeks […]
Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep Over Various Surfaces
“An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces” is a research study that won the 2003 Ig Nobel Prize in physics for its co-authors — Jack Harvey, John Culvenor, Warren Payne, Steve Cowley, Michael Lawrance, David Stuart, and Robyn Williams, of Australia. John Culvenor, one of the authors, has just boarded an airplane (that’s him, there, […]
Sheep Also Yawn (contagiously)
The 2011 Ig Nobel Physiology Prize was shared by Anna Wilkinson (of the UK), Natalie Sebanz (of the Netherlands, Hungary, and Austria), Isabella Mandl (of Austria) and Ludwig Huber (of Austria) for their study ‘No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise.’ (published in Current Zoology, vol. 57, no. 4, 2011. pp. 477-84.) Since then, […]
Sheep are a fluid (as will be explained tonight in Washington)
Nicole Sharp explains, in FYFD, how sheep are, more or less, a fluid: Not all fluids are, well, fluid. Traffic, flocks of birds, ants, and even sheep can behave like fluids. This video shows an aerial perspective on sheep being herded, and despite the four-legged nature of these particles, they have a lot of fluid-like characteristics.… […]
Demonstration of the physics of sheep through a bottleneck
A physics experiment of sheep passing through a bottleneck, which we featured some months ago, has now been formally published, and the researchers have released a video of the experiment. The study is: “Flow and clogging of a sheep herd passing through a bottleneck,” A. Garcimartín, J. M. Pastor, L. M. Ferrer, J. J. Ramos, C. […]
The physics of squeezing sheep through a bottleneck
The meeting on Física de sistemas fuera del equilibrio, on November 20, 2012 in Madrid, featured a talk by Iker Zurigel about sheep flowing through a bottleneck, a phenomenon which in some ways is like ketchup flowing through a bottleneck, and in some ways is not. Here’s the abstract (thanks to investigator Mason Porter and colleagues for […]
One Should Not Taser a Pregnant Police Officer or a a Methamphetamine-intoxicated sheep?
It has been suggested that someone, somewhere might question the assumption that it’s an excellent idea to taser a pregnant police officer,and that someone—perhaps someone else—might question the assumption that it’s an excellent idea to taser a methamphetamine-intoxicated sheep. These two studies investigate those possibly related questions: “The Pregnant Officer,” Fabrice Czarnecki [pictured here], Clinics In Occupational and Environmental Medicine, vol. […]
The Further Adventures of The Meat Industry Research Institute of New Zealand
Lively, if not entirely cheerful, debate can be provoked by mentioning this study done by a researcher at the Meat Industry Research Institute of New Zealand: “Effect of Stress-Related Changes in Sheepmeat Ultimate pH on Cooked Odor and Flavor,” T.J. Braggins, Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 1996, 44 (8), pp 2352–2360: “In this study […]