Ig Nobel Awards 2003

prostoalex writes "The Ig Nobel awards for 2003 were presented at Harvard University. Hold your breath for the winners of this year's awards from Annals of Improbable Research. Engineering: the inventors of the Murphy's law. Physics: authors of 'An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces' report. Medicine: the scientists, who discovered that London taxi drivers are smarter than average London residents. Psychology: authors of the 'Politicians' Uniquely Simple Personalities' report. Chemistry: a Japanese scientist who studied a bronze statue strangely ignored by pigeon population. Literature: the author of more than 80 scientific reports on amusing statistical information. Economics: the man, who viewed the entire country of Liechtenstein as a large convention center. Interdisciplinary: authors of 'Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans' study. Biology: first documented case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck species. Links and pictures are available from the official Web site, linked above."

Comments

Slashdot-proof copy of article

[Anonymous Coward]

The 2003 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
The 2003 Ig Nobel Prize winners were announced on Thursday evening, October 2, at the 13th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was telecast live on the Internet. (The winners will give free public talks on Saturday, October 4, at the Ig Informal Lectures, at MIT room 54-100.)
Click here for details.

ENGINEERING
The late John Paul Stapp, the late Edward A. Murphy, Jr., and George Nichols, for jointly giving birth in 1949 to Murphy's Law, the basic engineering principle that "If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, someone will do it" (or, in other words: "If anything can go wrong, it will").
REFERENCE: "The Fastest Man on Earth," Nick T. Spark, Annals of Improbable Research, vol. 9, no. 5, Sept/Oct 2003.]
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: (1) Author Nick T. Spark , on behalf of John Paul Stapp's widow, Lilly. (2) Edward Murphy's Edward A. Murphy III, on behalf of his late father. (3) George Nichols, via audio tape.

PHYSICS
Jack Harvey, John Culvenor, Warren Payne, Steve Cowley, Michael Lawrance, David Stuart, and Robyn Williams of Australia, for their irresistible report "An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces."
[PUBLISHED IN: Applied Ergonomics, vol. 33, no. 6, November 2002, pp. 523-31. A copy is available at http://www.culvenor.com/]
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: John Culvenor.

MEDICINE
Eleanor Maguire, David Gadian, Ingrid Johnsrude, Catriona Good, John Ashburner, Richard Frackowiak, and Christopher Frith of University College London, for presenting evidence that the brains of London taxi drivers are more highly developed than those of their fellow citizens.
[PUBLISHED IN: "Navigation-Related Structural Change In the Hippocampi of Taxi Drivers," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 97, no. 8, April 11, 2000, pp. 4398-403. Also see their subsequent publications.]
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Eleanor Maguire.

PSYCHOLOGY
Gian Vittorio Caprara and Claudio Barbaranelli of the University of Rome, and Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University, for their discerning report "Politicians' Uniquely Simple Personalities."
[PUBLISHED IN: Nature, vol. 385, February 1997, p. 493.]
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Philip Zimbardo.

CHEMISTRY
Yukio Hirose of Kanazawa University, for his chemical investigation of a bronze statue, in the city of Kanazawa, that fails to attract pigeons.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Yukio Hirose.

LITERATURE
John Trinkaus, of the Zicklin School of Business, New York City, for meticulously collecting data and publishing more than 80 detailed academic reports about specific annoyances and anomalies of daily life, such as: What percentage of young people wear baseball caps with the peak facing to the rear rather than to the front; What percentage of pedestrians wear sport shoes that are white rather than some other color; What percentage of swimmers swim laps in the shallow end of a pool rather than the deep end; What percentage of automobile drivers almost, but not completely, come to a stop at one particular stop-sign; What percentage of commuters carry attache cases; What percentage of shoppers exceed the number of items permitted in a supermarket's express checkout lane; and What percentage of students dislike the taste of Brussels sprouts.
REFERENCE: 86 of Professor Trinkaus's publications are listed in "Trinkaus -- An Informal Look," Annals of Improbable Research, vol. 9, no. 3, May/Jun 2003.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: John Trinkaus.

ECONOMICS
Karl Schwarzler and the nation of Liechtenstein, for making it possible to rent the entire country for corporate conventions, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and other gatherings.
REFERENCE: and
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Karl Schwarzler.

INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
Stefano Ghirlanda, Liselotte Jansson, and Magnus Enquist

Re:Sheep?

[JKR]

Which shows how much you know! Come to an Aberdeen fixture some day & listen to the opposing fans singing "Sheep shagging bastards, you're all sheep shagging bastards..." and waving inflatable sheep.

Jon

Re:I knew it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you looked at the official website of the report? The guy who did it watched the duck making sweet sweet love to the corpse for seventy-five minutes!

more Nobel than Ig

[barakn]

I'm not certain why the London Taxi Driver study received an Ig Nobel. It was a beautifully done study. For those who don't know, people who want to be black cab taxi drivers in London take a 3 year course (3/4 drop out) to pass an exam. They have to memorize essentially every street in a 6 mile radius (street names sometimes change block by block) and significant landmarks along those streets. All this information they refer to simply as "the knowledge." It was shown that the hippocampi of these taxi drivers are larger than normal and are larger in drivers who have been driving longer. This study helped change medical opinion on the 'plasticity' of the adult brain and has important implications for brain damage and diseases like Parkinson's.

It'a an active field of reasearch. A similar study found that the hippocampus of the chickadee increases by 30% in the fall when it needs to memorize the locations of all the food stores it is busily hiding,

Pictures

[henrygb]

While the ducks get /.ed or worse, here are some pictures of a taxi driver's brain and even the original article.

The study was biased as women (and left-handed men) were left out. Similar to the ducks.

Re:Dead man walking

[enjo13]

He actually tried that and more:)

In an effort to prove that he was alive (it took something like 15 years) he did all sorts of funny things, like demanding a widow pension for his wife, invading government gatherings (to get arrested), racking up an insane number of contempt of court charges, etc...

All under that same principle.. he wanted to force the government to recognize his existence by forcing them to do things that you can only do to a live person.

Re:Sheep?

[Anonymous Coward]

Alternate URL for Sheep Report:
http://www.gov.mb.ca/agriculture/livestoc k/sheep/p df/bsa01s58.pdf

It's not the entire report, but page ten talks about the results.

Re:I knew it.

[nullard]

That's not an implication, it's in the report. They actually say that the ducks will copulate with a dead mate. They've also identified a small percentage of gay mallards. This is just the first time that the two populations have intersected in front of a scientist that was willing to write a paper about it.