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The internet runs on cats: what the research says

18 questions · by Quizbun

Cats are the internet's unofficial mascot, and the programmer with a cat on the desk is a stereotype. But do tech people really prefer cats? Along the way you'll meet the neural network that learned "cat" without anyone telling it what a cat was, a survey of nearly 7,000 people about why they watch cat videos, an Ig Nobel prize for asking whether cats are liquid, and software that locks your keyboard when a cat walks on it. Each Question sorts the fun claim from what the evidence supports.

Questions

  1. Not answered. Is there solid evidence that people in IT like cats more than other people do?
  2. Not answered. What kind of study could show whether IT workers like cats more than other people do?
  3. Not answered. A 2014 study reported that self-described "cat people" were more introverted than "dog people". Which of these limit what it can tell us about programmers?
  4. Not answered. In 2012, a Google network learned to detect cats from YouTube stills. How many of its training images were labeled "cat"?
  5. Not answered. What hardware did Google's 2012 cat-detecting network train on?
  6. Not answered. The cat test set was about 35% cat faces and 65% other images. What accuracy, in percent, does a lazy classifier get by answering "not a cat" every time?
  7. Not answered. Besides cat faces, which concepts did the 2012 paper report neurons responding to?
  8. Not answered. In 2015, media researcher Jessica Myrick surveyed nearly 7,000 people about watching cat videos online. How did the survey reach them?
  9. Not answered. What did respondents in Myrick's survey report about how they felt after watching cat videos?
  10. Not answered. Many respondents watched cat videos at work or while studying. How did they describe the guilt of procrastinating?
  11. Not answered. According to Myrick's survey, who was more likely to watch cat videos?
  12. Not answered. A physicist asked whether cats are liquids. What decides the answer?
  13. Not answered. Suppose a kitten takes about 1 minute to settle into the shape of a box. If you watch it for 10 seconds, is it a liquid or a solid?
  14. Not answered. PawSense is software that notices when a cat walks across your keyboard. How does it tell a cat from a person?
  15. Not answered. PawSense won the Ig Nobel Prize in Computer Science in 2000. What are the Ig Nobel Prizes for?
  16. Not answered. The Unix cat command isn't named after the animal. Type the word it's short for.
  17. Not answered. GitHub's mascot, the Octocat, began as stock clip art. What had its designer, Simon Oxley, called it?
  18. Not answered. Which of these claims does the evidence in this Quiz support?