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."

Comments

Re:Why not new Nobel Prizes? Math Prize and more..

[ukryule]

The Maths equivalent of the Nobel prize is the Fields medal.

My professor at university claimed that there isn't a Nobel prize for Mathematics because Alfred Nobel's wife ran off with a mathematician ... but I suspect that's just a rumour put about to make maths look interesting :-)

Cisco did a survey of Nobel Laureates...

[F250SuperDuty]

...regarding where the Internet might take us in the next 20 years.
More information can be found here.
-k

Re:applicability of Nobel Prizes in the modern wor

[ukryule]

Both the medecine and the chemistry prizes were awarded for proprietary research done in the interests of multinational pharmaceutical corporations.

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.

The CNN photo caption is wrong.

[Johnny Vector]

The CNN photo has Wieman and Cornell reversed. Eric is the one on the left. Not that anyone cares, but, y'know... I knew Eric Cornell, I worked with Eric Cornell, and Carl is no Eric Cornell.

And singing, what's up with that?

Re:Economics prize

[camusflage]

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.