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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.
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.
I don't know if the 1989 laureate would be eligible for selection again, since he has already been honoured with the prize. Perhaps they are more worried about a leader of some other ethnic group, lest their receipt of the award draw the world's attention to the fact that the Tibetans aren't the only persecuted ethnic group in China.
...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.
Ok let's haggle. How much do you want for that spare "example"?
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.
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/
Except that the judges were from the "medicine, chemistry and physics committees" (note, link is TFA), not the peace committee.
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.
Wow, I had no idea! Thanks for educating me. I just lost all respect for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Links for the lazy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Peace_Prize_Laureates
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Kissinger#Accusations_of_war_crimes_and_legal_difficulties
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.
Well to be fair the guy he won it with, Le Duc Tho, actually turned it down. (Sounds like he had more sense than the committee.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Minor nitpick: Ahtisaari is Finnish, not Norwegian.
Steve MacIntyre = Hockey player
Steve McIntyre = Scientist
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.
The Nobel Jury awarded a peace prize to Fidel Castro. A peace prize for Fidel Castro is like a humanitarian award for Adolf Hitler. Fidel is a Marxist, and the stated goal of Marxists is using violent means to install world-wide Communism. Fidel Castro used military force to keep Cubans prisoner in Cuba, attempting to flee Cuba is punishable by death... how is that different from slavery?
Jimmy Carter was a clown... Not that he intended to be, he set out with good intentions. His fault was that he focused on being a man of peace, bad people used this as leverage against him. Instead of crying to the UN, he should have offered Iran total destruction. The Persian people were supremely embarrassed by the Ayatollah and would have over-thrown him upon an American invasion.
I think in the near future, we are going to see the beginning of Iranian sponsored nuclear catastrophes, and we can follow the trail back to the weakness of "a man of peace".
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
For the favor of a pint or two of a nice smokey Porter, perhaps, I could think up some nice awards for your excellency...
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
Fidel Castro has never received a Nobel peace price.
Cuba placed a moratorium on the use of capital punishment in 2001. The rest of your post is just ridicululous.
"A couple of years ago they picked some writer in England because he was a leftist."
I take it that you are referring to Harold Pinter who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005 the last male British writer to win this prize. This comment just shows how little you know about English literature. Pinter is indisputably the greatest living British playwright and in the view of many including myself, who has been seeing his plays since I was a child, the greatest living playwright in the English language. This indeed does qualify him as a leading contender for the prize which he so deservingly won.
The political controversy over the prize arose because while hospitalized by a serious infection he videotaped his Nobel Prize acceptance lecture "Art, Truth & Politics" from a wheelchair. It was a scathing attack on US war of aggression against Iraq. Any suggestion that the award was made for political reasons is both erroneous and unwarranted. The criticisms of Pinter were that he used his award as a vehicle to put forward his political views. But this comes from those whose job it is to viciously denounce anyone who condemns US foreign policy so in fact it is a compliment. What is a public intellectual for but to criticise the wrongdoings of those in power.
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.
Actually, Marx merely postulated that revolution to overthrow oppression was inevitable, and that a classless society would also be inevitable. He never said that this was a way to "install world-wide Communism", merely that it was inevitable on a society-by-society basis.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
Hey - that's not fair! You're refuting the poster's claim by referring to the works in question, instead of simply making a knee-jerk, utterly uninformed ejaculation. That's debate, not invective! Why can't you bloody intellectuals stick with facts like the poster's assertion that the Iranian people would welcome an American invasion. They're practically certain to welcome such with blow-jobs and home-baked cookies, just like the Vietnamese did in the late 1950s, like the Afghanistanis have since 2001, and like the Iraqis have in succeeding years. If you keep up talking down the successes of American military interventions, then where are you going to be able to get your poor male population killed off?
Very old joke : Why do the Romanian Secret Police go around in 3s? One can read, one can write, and one is there to keep an eye on those two suspicious intellectuals.
Newer joke (3 weeks old, and which got a laugh from a New Orleans area crane operator, who'd been Tasered last time he was at home) : same joke, but it's the American police, they go around in 4s and the 4th officer is there to provide covering fire.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I take it that you are referring to Harold Pinter who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005 the last male British writer to win this prize. This comment just shows how little you know about English literature. Pinter is indisputably the greatest living British playwright and in the view of many including myself, who has been seeing his plays since I was a child, the greatest living playwright in the English language. This indeed does qualify him as a leading contender for the prize which he so deservingly won.
The political controversy over the prize arose because while hospitalized by a serious infection he videotaped his Nobel Prize acceptance lecture "Art, Truth & Politics" from a wheelchair. It was a scathing attack on US war of aggression against Iraq. Any suggestion that the award was made for political reasons is both erroneous and unwarranted. The criticisms of Pinter were that he used his award as a vehicle to put forward his political views. But this comes from those whose job it is to viciously denounce anyone who condemns US foreign policy so in fact it is a compliment. What is a public intellectual for but to criticise the wrongdoings of those in power.
There's a trend with the Nobel committee to nominate people who are anti-American and anti-Zionist. This man fit the bill pretty well--a great writer and a Chomsky-esque, frothing at the mouth idiot.
Consider these pearls from his Nobel "speech", which had little to do with literature:
"The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law."
"How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand?"
"The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them."
The United States "also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain."
OK, moderators will probably rate this posting "troll" as they did my previous one, but that doesn't alter the fact that this man is twisted.
If he could devote one iota of his intellect to addressing the "systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless" crimes of Saddam Hussein, of Osama Bin Laden, of the Islamist imams who brainwash young men into killing themselves and hundreds of innocents along with them--if he displayed the slightest evenhandedness, I would say fine, he was a great playwright who had political opinions.
But he took the low road. The Nobel Prize is, or used to be, a highly prestigious award, and it is a shame that some of its recipients stoop to trashing their political opponents in their acceptance speeches.
Consider another "great" writer, Jose Saramago, who won the Nobel for literature in 1998. From a blog on the subject:
That a talented artist can display such an astonishing a lack of wisdom and understanding is dismaying, but even more dismaying is the fact that the Nobel committee looks past these issues, or perhaps agrees with them and uses them to promote their own, similar world view.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.