The TV crew that visited today to interview me did something different—something that may mark the end of an era. This was, perhaps, the first TV crew that did NOT ask to film me typing at a computer. Maybe the trope of “science writer typing on a computer” is no longer assumed to be exotically […]
Tag: TV
Analysing Pointless Banter
‘Pointless’ is a popular TV quiz-show series currently aired in the UK by the BBC. It’s hosted by Alexander Armstrong and Richard Osman, whom, along with the contestants, often engage in a spot of banter. [If you’re not familiar with the show, here’s an episode.] This banter specifically features in (what the publishers say is) […]
TV commercial ‘zapping’ – its driving factors (study)
If you’re in the business of advertising – especially TV advertising – you might be keen to identify the driving factors behind so-called ‘zapping’ (viewers changing channels with the specific intent of avoiding commercial breaks) A 2017 study in the Journal of Advertising Research presents an extensive analysis of the subject and pinpoints a ‘significant […]
Is your dog watching TV?
If you’d like to scientifically determine whether your dog (or any other dog) is watching TV, you could try using a high-quality method of face tracking (from a Human Computer Interaction [HCI] standpoint) as suggested by PhD researcher Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas and Prof. Janet C Read from the Animal Computer Interaction Design (ACID), a research group […]