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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."
Biology: first documented case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck species
I always was suspicious of those damn mallards.. Their "Oh, I'm just an innocent duck" quacks and what not..
Trolling is a art,
the scientists, who discovered that London taxi drivers are smarter than average London residents
Makes sense to me. They charge a small fortune to go a small distance, and we still pay it. : )
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.
That's what marketing people do when they do a market study!
That's so unfair. Beautiful people have an advantage in everything.
That was less of a "who wants to know?" study than a "Surely that has been proved already?" study...
/clothes/ made of that stuff dammit (and a car)! That's damn useful...
And what's wrong with studying statues that pigeons ignore? I want
[ cruise / casual-tempest.net / xenogamous.com / transference.org / quantam sufficit ]
PEACE
Lal Bihari, of Uttar Pradesh, India, for a triple accomplishment: First, for leading an active life even though he has been declared legally dead; Second, for waging a lively posthumous campaign against bureaucratic inertia and greedy relatives; and Third, for creating the Association of Dead People.
Why do I h8 apple?
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
Believe it or not, they actually have pictures of the act as well. That's the Internet for you, nothing but pr0n.
in GNUin GNUin GNUin GNUin GNUin GNUin GNUin GNUSegmentation fault
...the scientists, who discovered that London taxi drivers are smarter than average London residents
I think memorizing every single street in the city of London does make you pretty darn smart.
Though, London cabbies are certainly not short on opinions. Maybe memorizing every street also makes one think they know everything about anything.
Biology: first documented case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck species. Links and pictures are available from the official Web site, linked above.
Maybe not quite the juxtaposition that was intended.
Wonder if he can refuse to pay bills, citing death as the reason.
'An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces'
Let me guess, these were Scottish researchers, right?
We trained chickens to react to an average human female face but not to an average male face (or vice versa). In a subsequent test, the animals showed preferences for faces consistent with human sexual preferences (obtained from university students). This suggests that human preferences arise from general properties of nervous systems, rather than from face-specific adaptations.
I think you need to see if people prefer beautiful chickens before you can jump to that conclusion.
Hey, I consider it useful that Trinkaus discovered that woman in vans don't stop for stopsigns. I've never liked those minivan driving soccer moms.
Observations were made at the same 4 T-junction intersections in a residential community in the suburbs of a large northeastern city. Two characteristics were selected for viewing: type of vehicle and sex of driver. Data for 8 90-min observations suggest an overall compliance rate of about 6% with stop signs in a residential community. Women driving vans were the least compliant--approximately 1%.Link
I have blog like everyone else
I'm suprised that SCO's McBride isn't on this list somewhere, for his spectacular achievement in Chemistry: Turning bullshit into gold.
There was also a study of sado-masochistic bestial necrophilia by jockeys, but it turned out the researcher was just flogging a dead horse.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Literature: the author of more than 80 scientific reports on amusing statistical information.
80 reports? That should be enough to write an 81st scientific report on amusing statistical information about these 80 reports.
I'd like to see the result if the site wasn;t /.ed.
--- Ban humanity.
...not that there's anything wrong with that!
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
On 5 June 1995 an adult male mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) collided with the glass facade of the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam and died. An other drake mallard raped the corpse almost continuously for 75 minutes. Then the author disturbed the scene and secured the dead duck. Dissection showed that the rape-victim indeed was of the male sex. It is concluded that the mallards were engaged in an 'Attempted Rape Flight' that resulted in the first described case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard.
75 MINUTES! Talk about not knowing when to quit! Not even a, "Honey, are you awake?"... sheeesh.
BTW, the pictures of the ducks are quite tasteful, while the beautiful chicken photos border on hard-core pornography.
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,
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
The study was biased as women (and left-handed men) were left out. Similar to the ducks.
Can I accept for you when you are honored with a Darwin Award?
"If you're thinking what I'm thinking, you're right." -
...I've found that many geese like to dress themselves up as mallards and parade about. Don't get fooled like I did!
AIR devoted a significant chunk of an issue to Trinkaus a while ago, and as I started the article, I sniggered. After a page or so, I was tittering with him, not at him. By the end, I was awestruck This guy is great. He's spent years doing exactly what the rest of us do, only he's been counting and writing at the same time. The guy is a true scientist, and one that's shown us that yes, the world is indeed slowly but surely going to hell in a handbasket. Most people say 'people used to stop at those stop signs'; he proves it.
So he doesn't work in a supercollider. BFD. Very few people do. He's a gentleman scientist, who over the years has amassed a huge body of research that, while most of the world will find trivial, may one day prove useful to someone. Which is what science is all about.
I, for one, welcome our new homosexual necrophiliac Mallard duck overlords.
Having a platonic fondness for ducks, I was intrigued by Dr. Moeliker's report. Reading the paper left me pondering the nature of a universe in which:
Perhaps Dr. Moeliker's work stands as a monument to the curiosity of the human mind, and the need to laugh even as we ponder insane questions. At least he didn't duck the issues...
All about me
homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck species. Links and pictures are available...
I got spam with that same line in the header yesterday.
...and no, the links didn't work.
This is only a test Sig. If this were a real Sig, it would be witty, pithy, or rude, just like all the other Sigs.
Q: Why do the Scotts wear kilts?
A: Sheep can hear a zipper a mile away.
Q: Why do the English wear pants?
A: Goats are deaf
-Ab
Nothing fails quite like prayer.
> Biology: first documented case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck species.
"I am not a homosexual necrophiliac!" said Tom in dead earnest.
The article states that the researchers got the informed consent of the men who did the dragging. Nowhere does it mention if the sheep gave their informed consent.
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Sure enough, in addition to copper, lead and tin, the statue was found to contain gallium -- not enough gallium to be dangerously toxic, as it turned out, but enough to repel birds. This has led Hirose to work on experiments to develop a metal that will keep birds away from bronze statues for good.
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