Improbable Research

Troy Hurtubise (1998 Ig Nobel Prize winner for creating and personally testing a suit of armor he hopes will protect him against grizzly bears) has a new project, which seems to be called Blue Collar Iron Man. In this brief video, Troy and his wife and others explain, more or less:

BONUS: Brian Gibson’s essay “Project Schmucky — A Dinner Game Gets Grizzly” about Troy’s cameo appearance in the movie Dinner for Schmucks.

BONUS: Some of Troy’s previous adventures (with links to some others)

BONUS: The entire feature-length documentary film Project Grizzly, about Troy

German and Austrian researchers analysed what happened to pianist Armin Fuchs when he spent more than a full day playing over and over again, nonstop, an oddly-named piece of music by a French composer. They also analysed what happened to the music. This was a tour de force of artistic and neurological repetition.

The research team – Christine Kohlmetz, Reinhard Kopiez and Marc Bangert of the Hanover University of Music and Drama, and Werner Goebl and Eckart Altenmuller of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, in Vienna – published a pair of monographs in 2003 describing what they measured in the pianist.

The study titles, like the performance, are lengthy. One, in the journal Psychology of Music, includes the phrase “Electrocortical Activity in a Pianist Playing ‘Vexations’ by Erik Satie Continuously for 28 Hours“…

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

A display of Yankee ingenuity, and perhaps of other things as well: a remote-control flying mechanical turkey designed to drop pies on people’s heads. (Thanks to investigator Caroline Cox for bringing it to our attention.)

The November issue of mini-AIR just went out. Topics include: Tea Survey: The Agony of the Leaves; The Date of the Next Ig; Blue Alert — Dyed But Not Dead; Accuracy-of-100.4% Competition; Xenoturbella  Acoelomorph Poet; Coefficient of Obliviousness; etc.

Mel [pictured here] says, “It’s swell.”

(mini-AIR is the simplest way to keep informed about Improbable and Ig Nobel news and events. Just fill in the wee form, and mini-AIR will be emailed to you every month)

What Does Answering the Phone Mean? And further: are mobile-phone users exploiting new resources for customizing their ringtones with an orientation towards the management of the interactional problems which the development of ‘ubiquitous summoning’ may entail?

Christian Licoppe, Professor of Sociology of Information and Communication Technologies and head of Research Groups at Telecom ParisTech believes they are. His soon-to-be published research paper explains that –

“Musical ringtones are chosen or designed by users, so that the shaping of the summons becomes a personal project of the recipients. They are shaped as ambiguous cues inviting two kinds of responsive actions, that is, treating them as a summons (inviting their being answered to) or as a music (inviting their being listened to).”

The professor goes on to demonstrate that musical ringtones are chosen (or sometimes created by) phone users as a kind of  ‘treat’