As reported in New Atlas and many other places, the 2023 Ig Nobel winners have been announced.
The Ig Nobel Prize celebrates the most trivial and ridiculous things our best and brightest have studied. The 2023 award winners are now world-class experts that have advanced mankind's knowledge on big questions. Questions like "how much do horny anchovies influence ocean water mixing?" Or "if a group of people stand in the street looking upward, does the size of the group influence how many unrelated passers-by also decide to look up?" Or that old chestnut, "do we need toilets that analyze our excreta and identify us by taking photos of our anuses?"
Just a couple of examples to raise the level of excitement...
Medicine Prize: Christine Pham, Bobak Hedayati, Kiana Hashemi, Ella Csuka, Tiana Mamaghani, Margit Juhasz, Jamie Wikenheiser, and Natasha Mesinkovska, for using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person's two nostrils. Don't miss their riveting work "The Quantification and Measurement of Nasal Hairs in a Cadaveric Population."
Education Prize: Katy Tam, Cyanea Poon, Victoria Hui, Wijnand van Tilburg, Christy Wong, Vivian Kwong, Gigi Yuen, and Christian Chan, for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students. If anything could be more exciting than boredom, it's surely their paper, "Boredom Begets Boredom: An Experience Sampling Study on the Impact of Teacher Boredom on Student Boredom and Motivation."
(Score: 2) by sigterm on Sunday September 17 2023, @12:47PM (2 children)
Amusingly, the "Education Prize" link points to the wrong paper, one entitled "Whatever will bore, will bore: The mere anticipation of boredom exacerbates its occurrence in lectures."
Which means we now have two papers proving that not only is boredom on the part of the teacher/professor/lecturer contagious and ruins the experience for the students, but the mere [i]anticipation[/i] that a lecture will be boring creates such a strong prejudice in students that it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Surely, this indicates that schools and universities should put great emphasis on the ability to show enthusiasm when recruiting teachers and professors? In addition to them having strong qualifications in their field, of course.
(Score: 3, Touché) by HiThere on Sunday September 17 2023, @01:44PM (1 child)
They don't even need "strong qualifications". At least not until the graduate level. Sufficient qualifications coupled with enthusiasm and good speaking ability should suffice. (Lecturing to the blackboard should disqualify almost anyone.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 18 2023, @09:51AM
The ones you need in quantity are the teachers who will teach those who still can't understand despite watching/rewinding the videos multiple times.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Ox0000 on Sunday September 17 2023, @12:48PM (1 child)
Before the masses come in here complaining about "who funds this stuff":
This is about research that makes laugh and then makes you think - with an emphasis on the thinking.
I highly recommend reading the actual papers because, while the title may make you laugh and question the sanity of the funders and researchers, the content typically is very concrete, applicable, and germane to the real world! And while you're at it, watch the prize ceremony when it becomes available, it's much, much better than the (non-Ig) Nobel Prize ceremony.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday September 17 2023, @02:51PM
This is both the interesting and the sad part of the IG Nobel prize. The general though should be that this is light science of some kind, fun stuff. But it turns out that a lot of them appear to be putting in a lot more work and scientific rigor then is put into a lot of actual or "serious" science papers. It's at least a step up of sorts from "Dance your PhD", where the future doctors interpret their thesis in the form of dancing ...
> "do we need toilets that analyze our excreta and identify us by taking photos of our anuses?"
That is a real thing? Is that one of those Japanese toilets? Or was it just someone putting some sort of upskirt camera in a toilet? I don't think I had or experienced any anus photography. That said a lot of things could be said about the human body and it's working by analyzing excrement, or what comes out of the man machine after processing. It's just not something we do unless the person is really sick. Cause nobody really like to poke around in poop, except those people at the lab that are really into it for some reason.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by looorg on Sunday September 17 2023, @03:06PM (1 child)
Not for people with Arachnophobia then. Also this sounds an awful lot like the beginning of some horrific scifi-horror-zombie-movie. But it is apparently research into hydraulic pressure.
As a subject this might sound stupid at first glance but it could actually be quite useful and interesting. How crowds react is always interesting in a lot of fields.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Opportunist on Sunday September 17 2023, @03:45PM
It's interesting how people behave in a crowd. There was a fascinating experiment about how people conform to a group without even belonging to it, and without having any reason to try to belong to it, where a group of people, who were part of the experiment, performed obviously nonsensical behaviour and got an outside person not only to conform to it but also to continue the behaviour when the group was gone, and even "teach" the behaviour to other outsiders.
You can watch that here [youtube.com]. Humans are quite fascinating social creatures.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday September 18 2023, @04:11AM
[poke]
Fourteen! Fourteen! Fourteen!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.