Improbable Research

The 2015 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded to the winners tonight in a gala ceremony at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre, with a sold-out audience of 1100 in the theatre, and many more watching the live webcast.

The ten new winners and their achievements are now included in the list of all Ig Nobel Prize winners.

Here’s a photo of the Physics Prize acceptance speech being terminated at the persistent request of an eight-year-old girl (photo by Mike Benveniste / Improbable Research):

Here’s video of the Biology Prize-winning experiment:

The Twenty-Fifth 1st Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony happens
Thursday, September 17, 2015, at 6:00 pm (US eastern time).

Watch the live webcast.

And…

Simultaneously follow the action on Twitter:

We will be live-tweeting at @ImprobResearch

Lots of other people (maybe including you?) will be live tweeting with hashtag #IgNobel

Please spread the word!

Ps. Tickets to physically attend the ceremony are sold out. But… a few tickets might become available shortly before the ceremony. If you’re willing to take a chance on that, check the Harvard Box Office web site, or, late in the afternoon, come to the ticket window at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre.

Download your own copy of IgBill, the printed program that is handed out to the audience members in Sanders Theatre. It contains a who’s who, and also the complete libretto to “The Best Life” — the new mini-opera that will be part of the ceremony:

The secret of why onions make people cry; the scientist who ate and excreted a shrew; the one-armed man who was arrested for applauding; the question of when cows lie down and stand up; and surgical management of an epidemic of penile amputations in Siam; and a cat unexpectedly taking over the podcast — all these all turn up in this week’s Improbable Research podcast.

Click on the “Venetian blinds” icon — at the lower right corner here — to select whichever week’s episode you want to hear:

SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free.

This week, Marc Abrahams tells about:

• The 2013 Ig Nobel Prize winners – PART 2. (List of the 2013 Ig Nobel Prize winners, with links to their research. Featuring a dramatic reading by Jean Berko Gleason, whose cat, Foster, also entered into the doings.)  Here’s the study “Surgical Management of an Epidemic of Penile Amputations in Siam“: 
• The 25th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony (and webcast), which will happen on Thursday, September 17, 2015.

The mysterious John Schedler perhaps did the sound engineering this week.

The Improbable Research podcast is all about research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK — real research, about anything and everything, from everywhere —research that may be good or bad, important or trivial, valuable or worthless. CBS distributes it, both on the new CBS Play.it web site, and on iTunes and Spotify).

Artists of all kinds often tend to cluster together (think Montmartre etc.) bringing the benefits of collaboration, interaction and inspiration. But what if there are just too many? For composers, in Paris or Vienna for example, there could be competition for limited resources such as concert halls. In other words they might incur high stress levels, and accumulate ‘frenemies’, a situation which could, conceivably, in some cases, prove fatal. “[…] A one percent increase in the number of composers reduces composer longevity by ∼7.2 weeks.” – say authors professor Karol Jan Borowieckia (Department of Business and Economics, University of Southern Denmark) and Dr. Georgios Kavetsos (Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics) who have performed an in-depth analysis of just such a scenario, published in: Social Science & Medicine, Volume 134, June 2015, Pages 30–42. ‘In fatal pursuit of immortal fame: Peer competition and early mortality of music composers’

“We extract data for 144 music composers born in the 19th century and calculate four measures that approximate peer competition: (1) the average number of peers residing in the same location and time; (2) the lifetime average share of peers located in the same location and time; (3) the share of a composer’s life spent in one of the main locations for music, where peer group size – and thus competition – is potentially at its highest; and (4) the quality of fellow composers (calculated as the sum of quality indices of all composers located in the same location and time).“

Based on the findings :

“One could calculate the longevity loss as a result of a one percentage increase in the number of composers located in the city; this would imply a sensible, yet non-negligible shorter duration of life by 10 weeks.”

Their paper may be found in its entirety here.

Note: The picture shows composer Vincenzo Salvatore Carmelo Francesco Bellini who spent time in both Paris and Vienna, and who died at the early age of just 34.

Ig Nobel Prize winner Frans de Waal speaks his piece about the newly-discovered early-human-relative fossil, in an op-ed piece in the New York Times.

The 2012 Ig Nobel Prize for anatomy was awarded to Frans de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny for discovering that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends. (Their study about that: “Faces and Behinds: Chimpanzee Sex Perception” Frans B.M. de Waal and Jennifer J. Pokorny, Advanced Science Letters, vol. 1, 99–103, 2008.) The new essay begins:

Who Apes Whom?

WHEN I learned last week about the discovery of an early human relative deep in a cave in South Africa, I had many questions. Obviously, they had dug up a fellow primate, but of what kind?

The fabulous find, named Homo naledi, has rightly been celebrated for both the number of fossils and their completeness. It has australopithecine-like hips and an ape-size brain, yet its feet and teeth are typical of the genus Homo.

The mixed features of these prehistoric remains upset the received human origin story, according to which bipedalism ushered in technology, dietary change and high intelligence.…