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Nobel Prizes Awarded
imrdkl writes: "Looks like Cisco has done a deal with CNN to present a nice overview of the Nobel Prizes this year. The Science awards that have been presented so far include one for singing atoms in Physics, as well as others linked from the URL above for medicine and chemistry. It's worth noting that the physics article was already covered here on slashdot, but now it's official for all."
The Maths equivalent of the Nobel prize is the Fields medal.
... but I suspect that's just a rumour put about to make maths look interesting :-)
My professor at university claimed that there isn't a Nobel prize for Mathematics because Alfred Nobel's wife ran off with a mathematician
Nobel's direction for his money was pretty clear so it's unlikely there will ever be new prizes. But Math has the Fields Medal and CS has the Turing Award. I'm guessing you're just trolling about the other two.
It may be worth noting that Norway recently set up a rather large fund for an international mathematics prize, in memory of mathematician Niels Henrik Abel. Information here.
...regarding where the Internet might take us in the next 20 years.
More information can be found here.
-k
Well actually, the medecine prize was given to 2 people who work for the Imperial Cancer Research Foundation which is a UK based charity, and one person who works in the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center which is also a non-profit organisation.
(same AC not that it matters)
It actually does follow.
The economics prize is not a true Nobel prize. It's "The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel" and NOT funded out of Nobel's estate. Bank of Sweden put up the money. However, the same organization to award the other prizes was given control of handing out the economic prize.
And singing, what's up with that?
One assumes there was slightly more to their theories than this!
There's more. A lot more. The best "dumbed down" explanation is that of a used car sale. There's a buyer and a seller. Typically, the seller will know a lot more about the vehicle than the buyer. If the seller offers to sell a $15,000 car for $10,000, is this because the seller knows something the buyer doesn't, is the seller looking to unload it quickly, or is the seller just an idiot?
It's a relatively simple concept, but one with profound impacts as far as markets go. Consider the dotcom bubble. Was it because the companies were really worth it, was it "irrational exuberance", or was it asymmetric information? The basic theory is that there's always going to be a certain degree of asymmetric information, but that in the extreme, the market breaks down.
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
As noted above, the research essentially codifies the "market for lemons" theory of economics: a description of how asymetric information effects markets.
The classic example is of used cars: where each car can either be a "lemon" (a bad one that will break down quickly) or a "plum" (good one that'll run fine). But while dealers know which each car is (knowing its history), consumers don't.
Without some remedy, what the theory predicts will happen in this situation is this: consumers will only be willing to pay the _average_ value of both lemons and plums (to hedge their risk), which means that the prices they are willing to pay for a used car are usually below the value sellers are willing to get for their "plums." This has the effect of making dealers much more willing to offer lemons for sale than plums. Eventually, this means that the market for used cars becomes almost all lemons, and consumers lower their willingness to pay even further to reflect this. This is, needless to say, a sub-optimal outcome, so clearly defining it, as the Nobel Prize winners have, is truly useful for people who seek to identify and fix such problems.