Spoof on the Nobel prize sounds like a fun time…honoring those with some very strange but entertaining research. For example an fire alarm system that sprays a mist of wasabi into the air…wow…now that could reanimate the dead…but I prefer to use wasabi the old natural way…with sushi…
http://www.yepod.com/?p=13432
Pass it on,
Dr Anthony
This article titled “Scientists behind the wasabi fire alarm win Ig Nobel prize” was written by Alok Jha, science correspondent, for The Guardian on Thursday 29th September 2011 23.30 UTC
How do you wake a deaf person in the middle of the night if there’s a fire? Squirt a cloud of wasabi at them, of course. For the Japanese researchers who came up with the horseradish-based alarm system, it was a lifesaving piece of work, but on Thursday night they entered the history books with the award of the Ig Nobel prize for chemistry.
Their research was one of 10 areas celebrated at the 21st Ig Nobel prizes at Harvard University. The awards, a spoof on the Nobel prizes, which will be announced next week, honour achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think”.
Other winners included researchers who looked at whether people make better decisions when they have a strong urge to urinate, whether yawning is contagious in tortoises, and an analysis of why people sigh.
The Japanese scientists and engineers who came up with the 50,000-yen (£400) wasabi alarm tried hundreds of odours, including rotten eggs, before settling on the Japanese condiment – a favourite of sushi lovers. Its active ingredient, allyl isothiocyanate, acts as an irritant in the nose that works even when someone is asleep. “That’s why [people] can wake up after inhalation of air-diluted wasabi,” said Makoto Imai of the department of psychiatry at Shiga University of Medical Science, one of the team that won this year’s Ig Nobel for chemistry.
Mirjam Tuk of the University of Twente, winner of the 2011 Ig Nobel for medicine, investigated how well we make decisions when faced with painful or stressful situations, such as a powerful need to urinate. She found that people who are better at resisting the urge to urinate are also better at controlling their impulses on cognitive tasks. For example, her subjects were stronger-willed when it came to resisting a small reward promised for tomorrow, in order to receive a bigger reward further in the future.
Tuk’s work is part of a bigger question examining self-control. She shared her award with a team of American scientists that included Professor Peter Snyder, a neurologist at Brown University. “We did not expect this honour, but we are pleased by it,” he said. “We are most pleased because the goal of the awards is to nurture and increase interest in science by the public (particularly for students). It is important to show that science can be fun and entertaining, as well as important.”
Karl Teigen of the University of Oslo, winner of this year’s Ig Nobel in psychology, was celebrated for a paper that considered the question: why do we sigh? He wanted to give his students a project that would teach them about the research method. “We decided to choose a theme where we could do original work, and it turned out – to our surprise – that in psychology there were no empirical studies on sighs and sighing.”
They discovered that most people believe others’ sighs are a sign of sadness or disappointment. But they reported that their own feeling when they sighed was more often resignation. How did Teigen react to the award? “Surprise. Embarrassment. Amusement. A sneaking pride. And then, of course, I sighed.”
Academic research is often seen as trivial when viewed from the outside, he added. “It must be allowed to make fun of scientists, because they have a lot of fun themselves.”
Dr Anna Wilkinson of the University of Lincoln, winner of the 2011 Ig Nobel in physiology, spent six months training a red-footed tortoise called Alexandra to yawn on command. She then used the trained tortoise to work out whether other tortoises would yawn whenever Alexandra did.
Contagious yawning is common in humans and scientists think it might be controlled by empathy, since it requires an understanding of the emotional state of another individual to “catch” a yawn.
“With tortoises we’ve found evidence of social learning, fantastic spatial cognition and brilliant visual perception, so we wanted to know what else can they do,” said Wilkinson. “I thought it would be really interesting to test one of these high-level hypotheses with a species which, it is very clear, do not possess empathy.”
Her tortoises, however, showed no evidence of contagious yawning. The result lends weight to the idea that the behaviour is indeed controlled by higher-level cognitive mechanisms.
Other winners included a team of French and Dutch researchers who were given the physics Ig Nobel for studying why discus throwers become dizzy whereas hammer throwers do not. The world’s doomsayers – including Harold Camping – who have predicted the end of the world on various dates were collectively awarded the mathematics Ig Nobel “for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations”.
Almost all the winners turned up to collect their awards and make 60-second speeches at the ceremony in Boston. They were handed their trophies by real-life Nobel laureates including Prof Roy Glauber (physics, 2005), Prof Dudley Herschbach (chemistry, 1986) and Prof Louis Ignarro (physiology or medicine, 1998).
Ignarro was himself given away in a competition to win a date with a Nobel laureate.
Marc Abrahams, the editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, a regular Guardian writer and the founder of the prizes, ended the ceremony with his customary congratulations: “If you didn’t win an Ig Nobel prize tonight – and especially if you did – better luck next year.”
2011 Ig Nobel prizewinners
Physiology
Anna Wilkinson, Natalie Sebanz, Isabella Mandl and Ludwig Huber for their study ““No evidence of contagious yawning in the red-footed tortoise Geochelone carbonaria“.
Chemistry
Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami for determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi (pungent horseradish) to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency, and for applying this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm.
Medicine
Mirjam Tuk, Debra Trampe and Luk Warlop, and jointly to Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder, Robert Feldman, Robert Pietrzak, David Darby and Paul Maruff for demonstrating that people make better decisions about some kinds of things – but worse decisions about other kinds of things – when they have a strong urge to urinate.
Psychology
Karl Halvor Teigen of the University of Oslo, Norway, for trying to understand why, in everyday life, people sigh.
Literature
John Perry of Stanford University for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which states: “To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that’s even more important.”
Biology
Daryll Gwynne and David Rentz for discovering that certain kinds of beetle mate with certain kinds of Australian beer bottle.
Physics
Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, Dominique Deviterne, Bruno Ragaru and Herman Kingma for trying to determine why discus throwers become dizzy, and why hammer throwers don’t, in their paper “Dizziness in discus throwers is related to motion sickness generated while spinning”.
Mathematics
Dorothy Martin of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1954), Pat Robertson of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1982), Elizabeth Clare Prophet of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1990), Lee Jang Rim of Korea (who predicted the world would end in 1992), Shoko Asahara of Japan (who predicted the world would end in 1997), Credonia Mwerinde of Uganda (who predicted the world would end in 1999), and Harold Camping of the USA (who predicted the world would end on 6 September 1994 and later predicted that the world will end on 21 October 2011), for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.
Peace
Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania, for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running over them with a tank.
Public safety
John Senders of the University of Toronto, Canada, for conducting a series of safety experiments in which a person drives an automobile on a major highway while a visor repeatedly flaps down over his face, blinding him.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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Autism: how computers can help
A lot of the articles on autism is pretty much on the disadvantages and problems faced by those who are diagnosed with it. But there is some good news for those who have mild autism, especially individuals with skills that fall into the IT industry. New research suggests that the traits of autism can be found more frequently in people involved with computers. So I am left comtemplating whether or not I possess the traits of autism myself?
http://www.yepod.com/?p=35881
That’s my comment…pass it on,
Dr Anthony
Yepod.com
In 2001, the technology magazine Wired coined the phrase “geek syndrome” to describe the threefold increase in autism diagnoses in California’s Silicon Valley over the space of a decade.
The rumour that Bill Gates himself, founder of Microsoft and figurehead of the world IT industry, displays the traits of Asperger’s syndrome, the high-functioning form of autism, spread like wildfire, across – appropriately – the internet.
More than a decade later Cambridge University’s Autism Research Centre is now running a study investigating the previously established link between parents working in hi-tech, scientific and mathematical industries and an increased incidence of children on the autism spectrum. The National Autistic Society reports in its latest member’s magazine that the number of software packages and apps designed specifically for people with autism is rocketing. IT companies in the UK and beyond are actively recruiting an autistic workforce for its highly technical and concentration skills.
The relationship between computers and autism is undisputed – and double-edged. Many autism experts agree with Temple Grandin, an author and professor at Colorado State University, herself autistic, who believes that without “the gifts of autism” there would probably be no Nasa or IT industry. Yet the high-profile cases of Gary McKinnon and Ryan Cleary, both of whom have Asperger’s syndrome, are just two examples of how that relationship can go wrong.
Last November a conference organised by Research Autism considered this apparent contradiction, asking are computers a blessing or a curse for people with autism? Richard Mills, director of research at the charity and chair of the conference, believes the answer is complicated: “The computer age totally changes the world of autism. Things are instant, and they are unregulated. We see tremendous advantages to this if it is properly managed – and huge pitfalls if it isn’t.”
The risks are not just for the small proportion who hit the headlines though. “We have so many parents concerned about their children’s computer use, and about the explosion of packages designed to help people with autism to communicate, which have not been properly evaluated. We must proceed with rather more caution and try to think through problems before they actually happen.”
The potential of computers to help a group that struggles to communicate and form relationships in real life is obvious. Professor Simon Baron Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre believes they outweigh the possible risks: “We can use computers to teach emotion recognition and to simplify communication by stripping out facial and vocal emotional expressions and slowing it down using email instead of face-to-face real-time modes.”
Research at Nottingham University and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh has found that people with autism value the increased control over their interactions that is afforded by the filter of a computer screen. They can observe interactions, choose when to be sociable and make contact with other people who have autism.
Presenting information visually in the precise and predictable computer format suits the autistic mind, says Baron Cohen, and can provide “a tool or platform for developing further skills”.
He also identifies the role of computers in making geeks fashionable: “The new technology is chic, so people who are talented at using technology acquire a certain kudos, thereby further reducing any stigma that is often associated with disability.”
One risk though is that the computer can itself become an obsession which, in extreme cases, leads the user into serious problems. The reports of Essex teenager Ryan Cleary, charged with a cyber-attack on the Serious Organised Crime Agency, leaving his computer only to use the bathroom, may be extreme but they are far from unique, says Mills: “We do need to think about the tendency in autism to become fixated on narrow activities. They may have the skills to use computers but not to know when to stop.”
In March it will be 10 years since Gary McKinnon’s arrest for allegedly hacking into a number of US military computers. High court judges last month set a July deadline for the home secretary to decide whether McKinnon will be extradited to face trial and a possible 60-year sentence. His mother, Janis Sharpe, is well aware of the dichotomy of computer use and autism. “When Gary was nine, we bought a primitive Atari,” she says. “He would beg me not to send him out to play so he could use it. We wanted him to mix more but we didn’t want to deny him the information, pleasure and security computers gave him. They were an outlet for him to be himself, and that boosted his self-esteem.”
She recalls accompanying her by-then-adult son to a Christmas party at the family home of a girlfriend. “Gary got his computer out. I told him he couldn’t use it at a party but he couldn’t understand.”
The relationship foundered, and McKinnon retreated further into his virtual world. “People with autism need space, and computers can offer that,” says Sharpe. “But we have to make sure they don’t take over and make other relationships, already difficult for people with autism, even harder.”
She advises parents to keep computers in communal spaces, limit their use and to help children learn to question what they read, guidelines which Mills supports. “This virtual world has to help people access the real world, not isolate them further. They must control it, not be controlled by it,” he says. “We have to reinforce the positives.”
For further information see researchautism.net and autism.org.uk
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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