Why did we vibrate earthworms?
October 23rd, 2020The winners of the 2020 Ig Nobel Prize for physics wrote about their work, in The Conversation: “We vibrated earthworms to learn about safely connecting human brains to computers”
Research about con men
October 22nd, 2020A selection of research about con men. features in the special Liars & Con Men issue of the magazine (vol. 26, no. 5).
Lying in Politics and Business [research studies]
October 20th, 2020The special Liars & Con Men issue of the magazine (vol. 26, no. 5) includes a selection of research about lying in politics and business.
Pocket-Sized #1038: “Ice Cream & Sluggo”
October 19th, 2020In this special Pocked-Sized episode #1038, Marc Abrahams extracts some some flash-frozen bits of history from techno-sociologist Gus Rancatore, proprietor of Toscanini’s Ice Cream.
Today, Gus shares with us the tale of Sluggo and the ice cream flavor that manifested thereafter.
Remember, our Patreon donors, on most levels, get access to each podcast episode before it is made public.
Seth Gliksman, Production Assistant
BONUS (unrelated): The research study “Comparative Efficacy of Mollusk Baits Containing Metaldehyde (SlugFest and Deadline) and Iron Phosphate (Sluggo) Against the Gray Garden Slug, Deroceras reticulatum Occurring on Artichokes“
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Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Google Podcasts, AntennaPod, BeyondPod and elsewhere!
‘RoastMe’ [study]
October 19th, 2020The RoastMe practice emerged in 2015 on the online platform Reddit. Devotees of RoastMe post pictures of themselves (i.e. the Roastee’) whilst holding a placard (of some kind) with the phrase ‘Roast Me’ written on it – with the idea of attracting amusing insults (as comments)
The first academic review of the practice appeared in the Journal of Pragmatics, Volume 139, Pages 1-21.
In this paper, we aim to give a socio-pragmatic account of RoastMe against the backdrop of scholarship on humour and impoliteness. Having discovered the phenomenon, we set out to investigate its workings and general characteristics, which could be done only by poring over copious amounts of data (both Roasts and their underlying rules) on the original website, namely the RoastMe subreddit; as well as on other social media, notably Imgur, that repost select specimens of RoastMe. These are also the sources of the examples given in the course of this article. This bottom-up analysis of RoastMe, based on inductive reasoning, yielded the hallmarks of RoastMe.
The full open access paper, replete with roastee photo examples, can be perused here : Risum teneatis, amici?☆: The socio-pragmatics of RoastMe humour
( ☆ Latin: “Can you help laughing, friends?” )
Research research Martin Gardiner
