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19 November 2010

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Ig Nobel Awards Honour Questionable Research

 

A ceremony is held at Harvard University

each year to mirror the prestigious Nobel Prizes

to honour more dubious achievements

than those recognized in Stockholm

 

The motto of the annual Ig Nobel prizes is “first make people laugh and then make them think.”

 

Magazine Hands out Awards for Experimentation

The Annals of Improbable Research is a magazine based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that publishes six issues a year. According to the periodical’s website “It’s packed with genuine, improbable research culled from more than 20,000 science, medical, technical and, academic journals. We also publish original research, and some concoctions.”

 

While the approach is often humourous, the publication does have many serious academics advising it and contributing. The staff is self-described as a “vast, happy, open conspiracy of many volunteers.”

 

The much-anticipated Ig Nobel Awards issue recognizes off-the-wall activities in many fields.

 

Ig Nobel Awards Ceremony

In 2008, The Montreal Gazette described the event: “The Ig Nobels are, without question, the highlight of the awards season for aficionados of the absurd.”

 

The awards ceremony is held on the Harvard University campus and features real Nobel Prize laureates as guests and presenters. Past winners, such as Dr. Francis Fesmire, who devised the digital rectal massage as a cure for intractable hiccups, sometimes return for the festivities.

 

Each winner is allowed 60 seconds to deliver an acceptance speech, and 24 seconds to present lectures on their subjects. There is also a “Win-a-Date-With-a-Nobel-Laureate Contest.”

 

BBC News (October 2009) reports that the 2009 gala included “A 15-minute risk cabaret concert by the Penny-Wise Guys…during which the band paid special tribute to fraudster Bernie Madoff.”

 

The Ig Nobel Recipients for 2009

As the organizers themselves put it the 19th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony was held on October 1, 2009. And, the winners of the 2009 Ig Nobel Prizes are…The envelope please:

 

• Health – Dr. Elena Bodnar, who designed a brassiere that can be turned into a protective facemask. The device is such that a second mask can be handed to a needy bystander.
• Peace – Awarded to five scientists at the University of Bern, Switzerland for their discovery that, if a person is going to be whacked over the head with a beer bottle, it’s better that the bottle be full rather than empty. (It’s a moot point though because both full and empty beer bottles are easily capable of fracturing a human skull).
• Economics - The senior executive of four Icelandic banks “for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa - and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy.”
• Medicine - Donald L. Unger won for cracking the knuckles of his left hand every day for more than 60 years to find out if this could be a possible cause for arthritis. The results of this selfless experiment on behalf of humanity appear to be inconclusive.

 

Not Everyone Gets the Joke

In his 2003 book The Ig Nobel Prizes: The Annals of Improbable Research, Marc Abrahams recounts the story of a real, live Nobel Laureate attending his first Ig Nobels being interviewed by a British journalist.

 

She asked if the eminent scientist had enjoyed the affair. “ ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, eyes crinkling in delight. ‘Those people were so funny! Can you imagine if they’d really done those things?’

 

“The reporter gave a low chuckle. ‘They did do those things.’ ”

 

The scientist has returned to almost every prize-giving since. Not so Robert May, Baron May of Oxford.

 

In 1995, he was the chief scientific adviser to the British government. He was angered when a group of scientists from the University of East Anglia in England won an Ig Nobel for explaining why breakfast cereal becomes soggy. Lord May wrote a letter to the awards organizers demanding that scientists from the U.K. not be considered for prizes.

 

Traditionally, the Ig Nobel ceremony ends with the statement: “If you didn’t win a prize - and especially if you did - better luck next year!”

 

 

Sources

“Gas Mask Bra Traps Ig Nobel Prize.” Victoria Gill, BBC News, October 6, 2009

“Once again, the Ig Nobels Show that Human Achievement is Multifaceted.” Gary Rotstein, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 06, 2008.

 

© Canada and the World, October 2010

All rights reserved

 

 

British cartoonist Rowland Emett (1906-1990) would surely have been an Ig Nobel winner and he would have loved it. Emett was famous for creating improbable and whimsical  machines, the largest collection of which now resides in the Ontario Science Centre.

 

Among his animatronic contraptions are “The 'Humbug Major' Sweet Machine" and the “Far Tottering and Oyster Creek Railway.”

THE 2010 “WINNERS”

 

Among those who collected Ig Nobel Prizes for 2010 are:

 

“ENGINEERING PRIZE: Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin of the Zoological Society of London, UK, and Diane Gendron of Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Baja California Sur, Mexico, for perfecting a method to collect whale snot, using a remote-control helicopter.

 

“MEDICINE PRIZE: Simon Rietveld of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Ilja van Beest of Tilburg University, The Netherlands, for discovering that symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller-coaster ride.

 

“PHYSICS PRIZE: Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams, and Patricia Priest of the University of Otago, New Zealand, for demonstrating that, on icy footpaths in wintertime, people slip and fall less often if they wear socks on the outside of their shoes.

 

“MANAGEMENT PRIZE: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy, for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.”