Ig Nobel Prizes

It's Nobel Prize time again, and that always reminds me to check out the Ig Nobel prizes, a parody of the Nobel Prize. I haven't  read much about the real winners of the Nobel Prize yet, but I did look up the 2012 winners of the Ig Nobel prizes. The Ig Nobel prizes go to scientist for achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.

I picked the three I liked the best to share here.

The prize in literature went to the US government accountability office for a report called "Actions Needed to Evaluate the Impact of Efforts to Estimate Coasts of Reports and Studies." As the Ig Nobel people said
"for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports." Sounds like the government to me.

The prize in neuroscience went to five psychologists for the paper titled: Neural Correlates of Interspecies Perspective Taking in the Post-Mortem Atlantic Salmon: An Argument For Proper Multiple Comparisons Correction  for "demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere — even in a dead salmon." I have extensive experience with dead salmon, and also thanks to my statistics classes, know the importance of correcting for multiple comparisons. This paper was a smart way to point out how important those statistical corrections are when you are doing science.

My favorite prize was the anatomy prize. It went to a couple of researchers from the US and the Netherlands who published a paper with the gripping title: Faces and Behinds: Chimpanzee Sex Perception. They showed that 'chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends." I'm a sort of armchair anthropologist with a slight obsession with primates and human evolution so I found this article really thought provoking. I actually recommend reading this one, especially the introduction and discussion.