Thursday, December 23, 2004
And the winner is...
The 2004 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
Somehow I missed this, but even though a few weeks (!) old, it’s worth recording. In a year when the world was turned on its head, these awards seem oddly appropriate (and the projects were genuine).
MEDICINE: Steven Stack of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, USA and James Gundlach of Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama, USA, for their published report "The Effect of Country Music on Suicide."
PHYSICS: Ramesh Balasubramaniam of the University of Ottawa, and Michael Turvey of the University of Connecticut and Haskins Laboratory, for exploring and explaining the dynamics of hula-hooping.
PUBLIC HEALTH: Jillian Clarke of the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, and then Howard University, for investigating the scientific validity of the Five-Second Rule about whether it's safe to eat food that's been dropped on the floor.
CHEMISTRY: The Coca-Cola Company of Great Britain, for using advanced technology to convert liquid from the River Thames into Dasani, a transparent form of water, which for precautionary reasons has been made unavailable to consumers.
ENGINEERING: Donald J. Smith and his father, the late Frank J. Smith, of Orlando Florida, USA, for patenting the comb-over (U.S. Patent #4,022,227).
LITERATURE: The American Nudist Research Library of Kissimmee, Florida, USA, for preserving nudist history so that everyone can see it.
PSYCHOLOGY: Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Christopher Chabris of Harvard University, for demonstrating that when people pay close attention to something, it's all too easy to overlook anything else -- even a woman in a gorilla suit.
ECONOMICS: The Vatican, for outsourcing prayers to India. PEACE: Daisuke Inoue of Hyogo, Japan, for inventing karaoke, thereby providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other.
BIOLOGY: Ben Wilson of the University of British Columbia, Lawrence Dill of Simon Fraser University [Canada], Robert Batty of the Scottish Association for Marine Science, Magnus Whalberg of the University of Aarhus [Denmark], and Hakan Westerberg of Sweden's National Board of Fisheries, for showing that herrings apparently communicate by farting.
The 2004 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
Somehow I missed this, but even though a few weeks (!) old, it’s worth recording. In a year when the world was turned on its head, these awards seem oddly appropriate (and the projects were genuine).
MEDICINE: Steven Stack of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, USA and James Gundlach of Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama, USA, for their published report "The Effect of Country Music on Suicide."
PHYSICS: Ramesh Balasubramaniam of the University of Ottawa, and Michael Turvey of the University of Connecticut and Haskins Laboratory, for exploring and explaining the dynamics of hula-hooping.
PUBLIC HEALTH: Jillian Clarke of the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, and then Howard University, for investigating the scientific validity of the Five-Second Rule about whether it's safe to eat food that's been dropped on the floor.
CHEMISTRY: The Coca-Cola Company of Great Britain, for using advanced technology to convert liquid from the River Thames into Dasani, a transparent form of water, which for precautionary reasons has been made unavailable to consumers.
ENGINEERING: Donald J. Smith and his father, the late Frank J. Smith, of Orlando Florida, USA, for patenting the comb-over (U.S. Patent #4,022,227).
LITERATURE: The American Nudist Research Library of Kissimmee, Florida, USA, for preserving nudist history so that everyone can see it.
PSYCHOLOGY: Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Christopher Chabris of Harvard University, for demonstrating that when people pay close attention to something, it's all too easy to overlook anything else -- even a woman in a gorilla suit.
ECONOMICS: The Vatican, for outsourcing prayers to India. PEACE: Daisuke Inoue of Hyogo, Japan, for inventing karaoke, thereby providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other.
BIOLOGY: Ben Wilson of the University of British Columbia, Lawrence Dill of Simon Fraser University [Canada], Robert Batty of the Scottish Association for Marine Science, Magnus Whalberg of the University of Aarhus [Denmark], and Hakan Westerberg of Sweden's National Board of Fisheries, for showing that herrings apparently communicate by farting.
