The 2010 Ig Nobel Awards
October 23rd, 2010This year’s Ig Nobel prizes were awarded on September 30th. Once again it was a fairly weak field, but here are some of the better ones (see the linked article for the full list):
- Management Prize: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy, for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random. [Related: The Peter Principle]
- Peace Prize: Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston of Keele University, UK, for confirming the widely held belief that swearing relieves pain.
- Medicine Prize: Simon Rietveld of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Ilja van Beest of Tilburg University, The Netherlands, for discovering that symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller-coaster ride.
Link: http://improbable.com/…
(via Slashdot)