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Nobel Jurors Facing Bribery Probe
RockDoctor writes "A report is circulating that in the run-up to the selection of prize-winners for 2006 and 2008, some members of the Nobel jury accepted an expenses-paid trip (or trips) to China to 'explain the selection process.' That's not, in itself, an incriminating event ('Is there something that we're doing incorrectly, or not doing?' is a valid question), and if there was dishonorable intent, it doesn't seem to have worked too well (the last Chinese Nobel Laureate was in 1957). There does seem to be embarrassment about falling into an obvious conflict-of-interest mantrap."
PhysOrg mentions that a corruption prosecutor is also looking into a Nobel-related sponsorship from a pharmaceutical company that was linked to one of the winners for this year's Medicine prize.
Haven't read TFA, but apart from potential selected winners, there might be potential losers: i.e. the Nobel laureate in 'peace' from Tibet??
Almost from the first prize awarded, there have been controversies. This latest round is nothing new, but perhaps remarkable only for its apparent blatentness.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
"So what?"
A meaningless prize has been made more meaningless!
If a politician working on development aid extends an offer to a select number of journalists to travel with him, all expenses paid, on the understanding that they will write about the aid work, should this be considered corruption as well, and an attempt to influence the journalists to write more positively?
I ask because the government of Norway recently did it.
I thought everybody already knew that anything's for sale. It's just a question of haggling the price.
For example, you can for example buy an international standards organization, if you'd like one. Ask M$.
Too bad there's no nobel award for resisting corruption.
...Al Gore jokes and conspiracy theories.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
How about a movie about that? Oh, and I already have the idea for the sequel. A movie about the movie about the hollywood conspiracy and how the movie didn't get a single Oscar nomination despite great reviews.
All rights reversed.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Sounds like the jury got nobled!
No wait. Nobbled. The jury got nobbled. ...
Okay this joke didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped.
apterous.org
Meanwhile, I "explained the selection process" to your mom last night. ;)
But really, there needs to be a bit more transparency for stuff like this.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
Modern "Portfolio" Theory has received at least three Nobels. Yet MPT has lead directly and predictably (no fat tails) to the financial crisis.
I'm very unimpressed and becoming highly cynical on what passes for "accepted science." There seems to be a strengthening political element. Quite obvious in the case of Global Warming.
With the advent of corporation, awards for achievement aren't nearly as useful as they used to be.
We should do away with all awards and base everything on how much money corporations make, at least that way everyone's on the same page.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
The wingnuts have already started, saying that Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, and Yasser Arafat must all have paid for their Nobel Peace Prizes. Funny how they don't accuse Kissinger, Andrei Sakharov, Begin, Rabin, and Peres, or Lech Walesa.
Oh, and the word is cue.
Did somebody buy his award, or was the committee having a joke like when they gave awards to Kissinger and Arafat?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Meh... the Swedes will launch a corruption investigation if a kid gets a penny toffee without paying for it.
And it's no secret that the selection committees have made mistakes in the past (the icepick lobotomy, anyone?) that only become clear with the benefit of hindsight.
In either case, never ascribe to corruption what can be adequately explained by incompetence.
-- Yep. It's me again.
Nobel wanted to direct attention away from his role as an armaments manufacturer and the inventor of dynamite, so he came up with the prize. The prize hasn't exactly got a squeaky-clean image even from the beginning.
-- http://ninthagenda.com/
Remember that the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to a lot of people who clearly didn't deserve it, among them people like Henry Kissinger and Mother Teresa. Unless it can be shown that they obtained their prizes with bribery I think the committee should take a good look at the failings of the selection process itself first.
If there were any attempts from China at shaping the judges' selection, why does it have to mean that they were trying to GET an award? Couldn't it be possible that they were trying to PREVENT one? If that's the case, it seems they could have been successful. (that is, if Hu Jia would have been a contender against Martti Ahtisaari)
I mean damn, no shit there's bribery involved. That piece of shit Kissinger went to town for Nixon and many other corrupt and violent leaders.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Hilleman
I mean how does a guy that does all that and is still having a huge effect today not win?
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Because of that I've logically concluded that I am also a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Here's my proof
I've done nothing for peace
That's more than Arafat who's fought against peace
Arafat has won a peace prize
If an award was given to someone and someone else actually did more to deserve it then the other person must have won it as well
Therefore since I've done more for peace than Arafat has ever done I must also be a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
I still haven't gotten it yet though. (I've got 2 hypothesises on that. 1 is that it was lost in the mail. The other is the committee is working alphabetically and hasn't even gotten out of the 'A' yet.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
"I'm very unimpressed and becoming highly cynical on what passes for "accepted science." There seems to be a strengthening political element. Quite obvious in the case of Global Warming."
Indeed. If there was a Nobel prize for upholding the fundamental values of science - openness, curiosity, independence, experiment and the Popperian concept of falibility, that prize would surely go to Steve MacIntyre, who has spent ten years of his life in a battle with the entire scientific establishment in an effort to get them to do proper science.
Along the way he has disproved fundamental tenets of Global Warming, exposed fraud and collusion, and improved our knowledge of real climate statistics immensely. He has spent thousands of his own dollars on replicating experiments which were misleading, but which the establishment relied on and didn't want exposed as wrong. Single-handedly, he has opened up dendrochronology and shown how many influences other than temperature can affect the rings. He has fought scientific statisticians at the highest level and won. He was responsible for the Wegman committee investigation into the hockey-stick, at which all his accusations were justified.
Given the way establishment prizes are awarded, I susopect Steve would turn down a Nobel if offered by the current regime...
The last people we'd expect bribery and government corruption from is China, right? /sarcasm
But... who better to explain how to win a Nobel prize than members of the Nobel selection committee? Obviously, this could be misconstrued as a conflict of interest, but this sounds more like information gathering than anything all that nefarious.
China's government is obviously interested in stepping up it's cultural and political clout in the world. That's what hosting the Olympics are all about for them (and Government sponsorship of athletes ensures they take home more medals than anyone else). The Nobel prizes are very prestigious, and naturally China would like to claim this prestige for its own, and are interested in finding out how they can maximize their chances for winning a prize.
I doubt it's anything more than some bad judgment, but I guess we'll see.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Winning a Nobel prize in any field makes someone pretty much a guaranteed celebrity for the rest of their life. You want your future books to become best sellers? You want a tenured professorship at Harvard with your own research team, plum grad students, no undergraduate teaching duties, and dinner with the President and members of Congress? Win a Nobel.
I would say, the process is guaranteed to be flawed because they can't possibly single out the one person in every field who most deserves such an honor. In the arts, it's a rather arbitrary pick and seems to be colored by politics.
A couple of years ago they picked some writer in England because he was a leftist. They gave Jimmy Carter a prize for supposedly stopping the North Koreans from working on a nuclear bomb, and they just kept right on doing it. It doesn't hurt that Carter hates Israel and regularly visits groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. Oh, for Israel haters it's probably fine but for those who are a bit more skeptical of Carter's intentions and methods, it has greatly demeaned the award.
The sciences are a bit different. But even there, it's difficult to tease out who exactly made complete and original innovations without relying heavily on the brilliant but unsung work of others. The most famous example is Watson, Crick, and Wilkins' discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. Their colleague Rosalind Franklin, who unfortunately died of cancer in 1958, played a key role in this discovery but is virtually unknown today because the Nobel prize is not awarded posthumously.
Einstein said that his accomplishments were "on the shoulders of giants" who came before him. Surely he was being humble but still, that is how science works, and Nobel encourages a notion in the general public's mind that scientists operate in a vacuum.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Minor nitpick: Ahtisaari is Finnish, not Norwegian.
NOBEL PROMOTES SCIENCE NOT PEOPLE!
AWARDS ARE SYMBOLIC PROMOTIONS of industries, careers, and/or ideals.
NOBEL is more important now more than ever; corrupt or not, we live in an age that idolizes karaoke singers, sports people, actors, and war heroes. Science types complain that we need science to be "cool" and well, this is about all we get.
If you want a wider reaching better award you should look at the "Alternative Nobel" http://www.rightlivelihood.org./ This award promotes the important yet unrecognized causes without restriction to a few sciences; which arguably are the least important factor to bringing peace to mankind (ex: "The Apple Orange Award".)
I wonder if children ever learn the purpose of scholastic achievement awards? It seems the same psychology works on adults. Different package, same trick. If that doesn't blow your mind, start applying the aspects of this to academia, political offices, or cultural rituals like marriage.
Doesn't matter if some baseball cheater gets in the hall of fame; outside the fanatics, nobody will remember or care except for the few stand outs on the long list of award winners. The symbolic meaning will be maintained and carried on by continually hyping up the new award winners. Sure, too many bad winners hurt the symbol but it takes a lot and people forget quickly...
Parent misses the all the points including his ad-hom attack on Jimmy Carter.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
As someone mentioned above the judges that went to China was for "medicine, chemistry and physics committees", not peace. RTA
The bankers conspired to leverage the symbolic POWER of Nobel to promote their economic agenda to the world by creating a FAKE NOBEL for economics. The kind of economics that most benefit themselves (bankers) is their motivation in its creation and that bias remains in their selection of winners.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Oh, and the word is cue.
I thought he was employing a little spanglish and asking a question. "Que Al Gore jokes and conspiracy theories?"
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Is anyone surprised ? Check out this year's Physics Nobel prize. Disgusting publicity stunt for LHC, so that it will continue to get funding despite the setbacks and the fact that it will most probably find nothing at all. When the most powerful machine was able to reach only about 40GeV, all the theoretical models were showing irefutable evidence that the top quark had a mass of about 45GeV. The 2004 Nobel Prize (Physics again) ? The idea belonged to Sidney Coleman who was honest enough not to put his name on a paper where all the work was done by his student (Politzer), but David Gross had no problem stealing the idea and adding his name to the paper written by his student (Wilczek). Not to say that Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered the pulsars, but it was her advisor Antony Hewish who got the Nobel Prize even though he was incapable to recognize the value of her work and just discarded her data as just plain wrong. There are other examples, bu these are the most obvious ones I know about. Is anyone surprised about the bribery probe ? I certainly am surprised that this was not kept under the wraps and was made public.
Ahtisaari is Finnish though.
Jimmy Carter does not hate Israel. Instead he is simply trying to understand the root of the problem by talking to BOTH sides. Its a really novel concept for most people who seem so involved in what is really a mutual fuck-up. If the world had more people like that this conflict would have been solved years ago. Instead the world is full of people who think like you do- that one side is morally better.
Sorry, Castro was nominated for a Nobel, not awarded http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1225478.stm
Three Afro-Cuban men were executed for "illegal departure" in 2004 http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/americas/04/11/cuba.execution
Yes Cuba does execute political dissidents http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE7DC123FF931A15752C0A964958260
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
Did somebody buy his award, or was the committee having a joke like when they gave awards to Kissinger and Arafat?
That's not the same committee as we are talking about here. The Norwegian parliament hands out the Peace Prize, the Swedes have all the others.
It's all explained here.