2011 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

Even in the serious world of academic research, scholars and scientists sometimes produce results that leave the rest of us wondering why they wasted their time studying such nonsense.

That’s part of the thinking behind the annual Ig Nobel Prizes, which recognize unusual discoveries and research.

The “21st Annual First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony” was held at Harvard last week and Peter Kerwin from the Rhode Island Higher Education Assistance Authority, joined The Rhode Show to talk more about it.

Who offers these awards and why do they do it?

I always look forward to reading about these awards every fall in the Chronicle of Higher Education. There’s a publication called “The Annals of Improbable Research” and they organize this event every year with the tagline “For achievements that first make people LAUGH then make them THINK”.

And the best part is, they get actual Nobel prize winners to come and hand out the awards to recognize what may not be the most useful but is certainly the most unusual discoveries and research taking place out there.

Some of the awards are done in a backhanded way, to make fun of things which traditional science doesn’t like. For example, they’ve offered awards to people involved in homeopathic medicine and the Kansas and Colorado school boards which attacked evolution.

Other times, the awards are highlighting research that has a funny or unexpected aspect.

Who were the big winners this year?

The big winner was a philosophy professor from Standford University who was recognized for an essay he did called “How to Procrastinate and Still Get Things Done”, which laid out the idea of “structured procrastination”—that you can get a procrastinator to do difficult and important tasks as long as they think they are avoiding something even more important.

Of course, the essay was written 15 years ago, so it’s only fitting they only honored it now.

A team of Japanese scientists won the Chemistry Prize for determining the ideal density for airborne wasabi and for inventing the wasabi alarm, which awakens sleeping people in the event of a fire or other emergency.

The Physiology Prize went to a trio of European scientists for their paper “No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise”. The Biology Prize winners were university professors from Canada and Australia who discovered that certain beetles will try to mate with certain kinds of Australian beer bottles.

The Prize in Peace went to the Mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania for demonstrating that the best way to deal with scofflaw drivers who park their luxury cars illegally in his city is to run them over with a tank. The Physics Prize went to scientists from the Netherlands and France for their paper on why discuss throwers become dizzy but hammer throwers don’t.

And the Mathematics Prize went to several people who made awful predictions, including Harold Camping who predicted the world would end on September 6, 1994 and came back for more to predict it would actually end on October 21, 2011. They were recognized for teaching us to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.