ON THE CUTTING EDGE: The 2008 Ig Nobels
The 18th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony was held at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre on Thursday. The winners, chosen by the editors of the Annals of Improbable Research, are “intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative -- and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology.” This year’s winners – who travelled to Cambridge, MA, at their own expense - were bestowed their awards – which looked like they had been made by junior high school woodshop students – by honest-to-goodness Nobel laureates.
The winners of this year’s Igs include:
† Biology Prize: Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert, and Michel Franc of Ecole Nationale Veterinaire de Toulouse, France for their 2000 study, “A Comparison of Jump Performances of the Dog Flea, Ctenocephalides canis (Curtis, 1826) and the Cat Flea, Ctenocephalides felis felis (Bouche, 1835),” which demonstrated that fleas that live on a dog can jump higher than fleas that live on a cat.
† Economics Prize: Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur and Brent Jordan of the University of New Mexico, USA, for their 2007 study, “Ovulatory Cycle Effects on Tip Earnings by Lap Dancers: Economic Evidence for Human Estrus?,” which determined that a lap dancer gets higher tips when she is ovulating.
† Medicine Prize: Dan Ariely of Duke University (USA), Rebecca L. Waber of MIT (USA), Baba Shiv of Stanford University (USA), and Ziv Carmon of INSEAD (Singapore) for their 2008 study, “Commercial Features of Placebo and Therapeutic Efficacy,” which showed that expensive sugar pills work better than cheap ones.
† Nutrition Prize: Massimiliano Zampini of the University of Trento, Italy and Charles Spence of Oxford University, UK, for their 2004 study “The Role of Auditory Cues in Modulating the Perceived Crispness and Staleness of Potato Chips,” which proved that the louder the crunch made by a potato chip the crisper and fresher people think it is.
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