Dogs Watch

[Terpsícore Deckelman]

Thiswatch exists because, in order for the crew to rotate through all the watches, it is necessary to have an odd number of watches in a ship's day. Splitting one of the watches in half allows the sailors to stand different watches instead of one team being forced to stand the mid-watch every night. The choice of time also allows both watches, if there are only two, to eat an evening meal at about the traditional time.[1]

The traditional watch system arose from sailing ships of the late 19th century and was used by the Royal Navy and many other Commonwealth navies. It consisted of 5 four-hour periods and 2 two-hour periods. Those members of the crew whose work must be done at all times of the day were assigned to one of two divisions: the starboard or the port division. These can be further divided into two parts, e.g., First Port, Second Starboard.

If your dog can hear, a verbal marker or clicker is perfectly fine. Then, once your dog has the hang of it, you can add your verbal cue or hand signal (mine is two fingers pointing towards my eyes for look aka watch me) and do the exercise several more times.

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Does your dog watch television? Does he have a favorite program or style of programming? These are the kinds of questions that a research team, headed by senior researcher Freya Mowat from the School of Veterinary Medicine of the University of Wisconsin at Madison has been asking.

I became interested in dogs watching television when I had my Cairn terrier, Flint. I believed that dogs often don't pay great attention to television because the TV screen is normally raised off the ground and thus goes relatively unnoticed. However, in my home, if my dog was on the sofa with me, the television, which sat on a wooden tea table, was closer to his eye level and easily observed.

Over time, I noticed that Flint appeared to have a favorite TV show: "The Littlest Hobo." This was a low-budget series starring a dog, a German Shepherd, who wandered around the countryside, befriending various people and heroically getting them out of trouble. When the dog would appear, Flint's attention would immediately be caught and he would track Hobo's movements across the screen.

In the genes of every terrier is the ability and desire to eliminate rats and other vermin. While cats are certainly more efficient at killing mice, where stealth and patience are the most important qualities for the hunt, rats may be too large and vicious for some cats to handle; hence, terriers were bred for the job.

I no longer remember the name of the film that was being shown on TV that night, but I remember bits of the content. The critical events began in some kind of tunnel or cave, and the sequence began with a close-up of a mass of rats. When Flint saw this image of apparently giant rats filling the screen, he started to quiver and growl.

Meanwhile, the rat scene had drawn to a close. The squeals were now gone and no rodents were visible on the face of the tube. Flint backed off and looked up. He snorted once or twice through his nose, and then with tail erect and legs stiff, he proudly walked out of the room, pausing only once to glance at the TV to make sure that his job of saving us from the onslaught of vermin had been well done and was truly finished.

I was somewhat surprised to find that 72 percent of the dogs actively watched TV or computer screens at least once a day. However, the dogs did seem to have a short attention span, and most tended to view the video images for only one to five minutes at a time. Very few dogs focused their attention on televised content for more than 20 minutes.

When attracted to images on the screen, the most commonly observed behaviors of dogs involved turning their head to track the image, moving their ears, approaching the screen, or uttering sounds like barks, growls, or whimpers.

Program content seemed to be critical when it comes to canine viewer preference. The most engaging subjects were animals, and within the animal category, perhaps unsurprisingly, dogs were the most popular animal and attracted several viewers.

This was confirmed in the second phase of the study. Here, about half of the participants showed specially prepared short video clips to their dogs on their television, their computer, or their phone. The clips included a dog, a large cat, a bird, and highway traffic. Reinforcing the questionnaire responses, it was the dog video that attracted the highest interest.

Overall the data showed that dogs have a broad bias toward paying attention to animal content. It is of some interest that the sight of humans was not particularly appealing as programming for dogs. Videos containing humans ranked ninth out of 17 predetermined categories, just ahead of cartoons or animations.

A dog's breed also predicts the likelihood that he will watch a video screen. Herding and sporting breeds were the most likely to be TV watchers, while nonsporting and working dog breeds were least likely to become couch potatoes addicted to television.

I am certain that some readers are beginning to wonder why serious scientists would be engaging in an investigation looking at dogs' television viewing preferences. After all, even aggressive marketers recognize that dogs are not consumers who will go out and purchase items advertised on TV programs.

Freya Mowat, the senior researcher on this study, explained that she anticipates that these results can be tuned and expanded to help design methods to measure the visual status of dogs and determine the effect that processes, like aging, have on canine vision. In a press release, she says:

I love a spot of virtual tourism, me. During the pandemic, I would scratch my travelling itches with some nice big sessions on Google Earth VR, where I would retrace my steps from holidays of old or explore new places I've always wanted to go.

But those little imaginary expeditions pale in comparison to being able to actually wander around fully realised virtual worlds as a tourist, which is basically exactly what I did in this week's VR Corner thanks to a brand new update for Luke Ross' REAL VR mod. By the way, REAL stands for 'Reality Enhancement Augmentation Layer' if you've ever wondered!

I've featured plenty of Luke's mods on VR Corner before, but my favourite ones of his are always the ones with open-worlds that feel almost like real places. Thanks to the level of detail in the Chicago map that Ubisoft built for it's open-world hack-em-up, Watch Dogs, it's easy to imagine that you're really there. There's so much variety to the environments and buildings and so many lovely little details for you to lean towards and inspect. These range from the first person interiors of the game's cars, through to some of the most delicious looking muffins I've ever seen and even Aidan Pearce's teeth!

Luke's R.E.A.L. VR mod for Watch Dogs can be found on his Patreon page and as always it's incredibly simple to install and get running (it has to be if I'm able to do it!). There are a few wonky cutscenes here and there and, as you'll see in my video, sometimes the light sources can be a bit bright, but in general driving around Chicago in a lovely sports car and then getting out to explore the scenery up close any personal is just so much fun!

Once you're in there, bar a few UI issues, it really does feel like the game was made for VR and honestly, it kind of makes me sad that it wasn't. Ubisoft has created so many amazing recreations of cities from the past, present and even the future over the years like, say, Assassin's Creed Syndicate's London. Many of these are now just locked away on discs, gathering dust on people's shelves after new console generations have come in to pull players away from them. What Luke Ross is doing here then is freeing those worlds and giving VR owners the opportunity to explore and enjoy them all over again (or for the first time) in brand new ways. And you can watch me doing just that in the video above!

On occasion, Angel will become engrossed in a television show. (Her most liked shows seem to be the ones with barking dogs in them.) Yet, at other times, she pays the TV absolutely no attention. Once something on television catches her undivided attention, she will watch for quite a while.

Research has shown that watching TV may not be easy for dogs. Images on a television screen are refreshed 60 times per second, making them appear as a continuous picture to humans. However, dogs can detect a flicker of light that refreshes as quickly as 70 times per second, meaning those images on TV appear jumpy and less real to them.

David: - When we look at a picture on TV or the film in the cinema, it seems that we are seeing a complete flowing image. But actually, what we're looking at is lots of individual frames. They seem to flow together because our eyes don't notice the change from one image to the next. Old fashioned TVs and films produce images at about 24 frames every second and that's fine for people because we have what we called a 'flicker fusion frequency' how quick the image needs to change of about 16 to 20 times a second.

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle []).push();But when we looked at dogs, we looked at them behaviourally. It's shown that their flicker fusion frequency is a lot higher than ours, maybe 40 to 80 frames a second. That means that when a dog's looking at an old fashioned TV or a movie, it would see it to be flickering a lot.

If you look at modern plasma screens and digital TVs, they renew their images a lot faster, maybe up to a thousand times a second. So, theoretically, our pets should be able to see things a lot better on more modern TVs, but that's just a theory.

Science needs the evidence, doesn't it? What's the evidence? If you type in dog watching TV onto YouTube online, you'll find nearly 4,000 results and most of them will convince you that actually, most dogs certainly react to animals easily on a TV screen, sometimes quite dramatically.

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