Stand up for research

Statement

The latest proposal by the higher education funding councils is for 25% of the new Research Excellence Framework (REF) to be assessed according to 'economic and social impact'. As academics, researchers and higher education professionals we believe that it is counterproductive to make funding for the best research conditional on its perceived economic and social benefits.

The REF proposals are founded on a lack of understanding of how knowledge advances. It is often difficult to predict which research will create the greatest practical impact. History shows us that in many instances it is curiosity-driven research that has led to major scientific and cultural advances.

If implemented, these proposals risk undermining support for basic research across all disciplines and may well lead to an academic brain drain to countries such as the United States that continue to value fundamental research.

Universities must continue to be spaces in which the spirit of adventure thrives and where researchers enjoy academic freedom to push back the boundaries of knowledge in their disciplines.

We, therefore, call on the UK funding councils to withdraw the current REF proposals and to work with academics and researchers on creating a funding regime which supports and fosters basic research in our universities and colleges rather than discourages it.

Discoveries that would not survive the REF (.pdf) [213kb]

A testosterona reduz a generosidade

The Chronicle of Philanthropy
3 Dezembro

Hormone Inhibits Giving in Men, Study Finds

Scientists have found that giving to others triggers a warm glow, similar to the endorphin-induced highs that people have after sex, a good meal, or indulging in opiates. Now a new study finds another link between sex and charity — or, rather, the lack of charity.

The researchers, two California economists, studied the effects of the sex hormone testosterone on the generosity of male university students. Higher levels of testosterone, they found, made the students both more reluctant to give to others and more demanding that others give to them...

economics is a social science after all

The Financial Crisis: How Economists Went Astray

Two Nobel Laureates and over 2000 Signatories Uphold that Economists have Mistaken Mathematical Beauty for Economic Truth


On 2nd September 2009, Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times that in the run-up to the 2008 financial crash “the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.”

An online declaration in support of a fuller extract from Krugman’s article (see the text below) has received over 2000 signatures in little over a month. This is already higher than all earlier appeals for the reform of economics, since and including the June 2000 petition by students at the École Normale Supérieure (France's premier institution of higher learning) protesting against the excessive mathematical formalisation of their curriculum and its neglect of economic realities. This petition received 1545 signatures and prompted the French Minister of Education to set up formal enquiry.

Krugman joins a line of Nobel Laureates, including Ronald Coase, Wassily Leontief and Milton Friedman, who have argued that economists has become largely transformed into a branch of applied mathematics, with inadequate contact with the real world. On the online website, Krugman’s words are supported by Nobel Laureate Douglass North.

The narrow training of economists – which concentrates on mathematical techniques and the building of empirically uncontrolled formal models – has been a major reason for the failure of the economics profession to appreciate market vulnerability and warn of the serious risks in the financial system. In their pursuit of tractable models, economists have made over-simplified and misguided assumptions concerning of human agents, markets and other institutions, rather than engaging adequately with the complexities of the real world.

Mathematics is very important and useful, but it should be a servant to economics, and not its master. Real-world substance should prevail over mathematical technique. To help avoid further failings, governments in the USA, Europe and elsewhere should look into the state of economics and the way economics is taught.

Of the 2000-plus signatories of the current online appeal, 62% have PhDs, 20% are from the USA, and 10% from the UK.

As well as Nobel Laureate Douglass North, other prominent signatories include leading international academics and researchers such as Masahiko Aoki, Tony Aspromourgos, Michael Bernstein, Margaret Blair, Mark Blaug, Daniel Bromley, John Cantwell, Ha-Joon Chang, Victoria Chick, Keith Cowling, Kurt Dopfer, Gregory Dow, Ronald Dore, Giovani Dosi, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Peter Earl, Jan Fagerberg, Olivier Favereau, Duncan Foley, John Foster, Geoffrey Harcourt, Arnold Heertje, Joseph Henrich, Stuart Holland, Will Hutton, Peter Kellner, Arjo Klamer, Mark Lavoie, Richard Lipsey, Brian Loasby, Mark Lutz, Ronald Martin, William McKelvey, Deirdre McCloskey, Stanley Metcalfe, Julie Nelson, Richard Norgaard, Luigi Pasinetti, Peter Richerson, Erik Reinert, Barkley Rosser, Kurt Rothschild, Bridget Rosewell, Robert Rowthorn, Malcolm Rutherford, Paolo Saviotti, Malcolm Sawyer, Esther-Mirjam Sent, Mark Setterfield, Gerald Silverberg, Laurence Shute, Robert Skidelsky, Peter Skott, Ronald Stanfield, Arthur Stinchcombe, Thomas Weisskopf, Sidney Winter and Stefano Zamagni.

All 2000-plus signatories endorse the following words by Paul Krugman:

"Few economists saw our current crisis coming, but this predictive failure was the least of the field’s problems. More important was the profession’s blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy ... the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth ... economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations ... Unfortunately, this romanticized and sanitized vision of the economy led most economists to ignore all the things that can go wrong. They turned a blind eye to the limitations of human rationality that often lead to bubbles and busts; to the problems of institutions that run amok; to the imperfections of markets – especially financial markets – that can cause the economy’s operating system to undergo sudden, unpredictable crashes; and to the dangers created when regulators don’t believe in regulation. ... When it comes to the all-too-human problem of recessions and depressions, economists need to abandon the neat but wrong solution of assuming that everyone is rational and markets work perfectly." (New York Times, September 2nd, 2009.)

Additional supporters can sign the petition on
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/revitalizing_economics?e

(If you do not wish to make a contribution, then exist immediately when the web page changes.)

Militant Research

Militant research is a concept-tool that works on the premise that all interpretation of the world is linked to some kind of action. Related to practices of co-research and institutional analysis, militant research proposes that all new knowledge production affects and modifies the bodies and subjectivities of those who have participated. Rather than use research as a tool to categorise and separate knowledge from practice, militant research operates transversally, becoming part of the process that organises relationships between bodies, knowledge, social practices and fields of action.

Marta Malo de Molina:
Common notions, part 1: workers-inquiry, co-research, consciousness-raising
Common Notions, Part 2: Institutional Analysis, Participatory Action-Research, Militant Research

Kafka's good

Reading Kafka 'enhances cognitive mechanisms', claims study
Alison Flood
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 September 2009

Subjects who had just read Kafka's The Country Doctor were better at recognising patterns in grammar test, psychologists found

Forget Sudokus and crosswords: if you want to sharpen up your thinking, immerse yourself in Kafka's stories of the surreal.
Research from psychologists at the University of California in Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia claims to show that exposure to surrealism enhances the cognitive mechanisms which oversee implicit learning functions. The psychologists showed a group of subjects Kafka's story The Country Doctor, a disturbing and surreal tale in which a doctor travels by "unearthly horses" to an ill patient, only to climb into bed naked with him and then escape through the window "naked, exposed to the frost of this most unhappy of ages"...

A letter from a victim of jounal reviewers

Journal of Systems and Software, Volume 54, Issue 1, 30 September 2000, Page 1.

*Editor’s Note:* It seems appropriate, in this issue of JSS containing the findings of our annual Top Scholars/Institutions study, to pay tribute to the persistent authors who make a journal like this, and a study like that, possible. In their honor, we dedicate the following humorous, anonymously-authored, letter!

Dear Sir, Madame, or Other:

Enclosed is our latest version of Ms. #1996-02-22-RRRRR, that is the re-re-re-revised revision of our paper. Choke on it. We have again rewritten the entire manuscript from start to finish. We even changed the g-d-running head! Hopefully, we have suffered enough now to satisfy even you and the bloodthirsty reviewers.

I shall skip the usual point-by-point description of every single change we made in response to the critiques. After all, it is fairly clear that your anonymous reviewers are less interested in the details of scientific procedure than in working out their personality problems and sexual frustrations by seeking some kind of demented glee in the sadistic and arbitrary exercise of tyrannical power over hapless authors like ourselves who happen to fall into their clutches. We do understand that, in view of the misanthropic psychopaths you have on your editorial board, you need to keep sending them papers, for if they were not reviewing manuscripts they would probably be out mugging little old ladies or clubbing baby seals to death. Still, from this batch of reviewers, C was clearly the most hostile, and we request that you not ask him to review this revision. Indeed, we have mailed letter bombs to four or five people we suspected of being reviewer C, so if you send the manuscript back to them, the review process could be unduly delayed.

Some of the reviewers’ comments we could not do anything about. For example, if (as C suggested) several of my recent ancestors were indeed drawn from other species, it is too late to change that. Other suggestions were implemented, however, and the paper has been improved and benefited. Plus, you suggested that we shorten the manuscript by five pages, and we were able to accomplish this very effectively by altering the margins and printing the paper in a different font with a smaller typeface. We agree with you that the paper is much better this way.

One perplexing problem was dealing with suggestions 13–28 by reviewer B. As you may recall (that is, if you even bother reading the reviews before sending your decision letter), that reviewer listed 16 works that he/she felt we should cite in this paper. These were on a variety of different topics, none of which had any relevance to our work that we could see. Indeed, one was an essay on the Spanish–American war from a high school literary magazine. The only common thread was that all 16 were by the same author, presumably someone whom reviewer B greatly admires and feels should be more widely cited. To handle this, we have modified the Introduction and added, after the review of the relevant literature, a subsection entitled “Review of Irrelevant Literature” that discusses these articles and also duly addresses some of the more asinine suggestions from other reviewers.

We hope you will be pleased with this revision and will finally recognize how urgently deserving of publication this work is. If not, then you are an unscrupulous, depraved monster with no shred of human decency. You ought to be in a cage. May whatever heritage you come from be the butt of the next round of ethnic jokes. If you do accept it, however, we wish to thank you for your patience and wisdom throughout this process, and to express our appreciation for your scholarly insights. To repay you, we would be happy to review some manuscripts for you; please send us the next manuscript that any of these reviewers submits to this journal.

Assuming you accept this paper, we would also like to add a footnote acknowledging your help with this manuscript and to point out that we liked the paper much better the way we originally submitted it, but you held the editorial shotgun to our heads and forced us to chop, reshuffle, hedge, expand, shorten, and in general convert a meaty paper into stir-fried vegetables. We could not – or would not – have done it without your input.

Quantum walk

Quantum walks were first proposed by physicist Richard Feynman and are, in terms of probability, the opposite of a random walk. A random walk might be modeled by a person flipping a coin, and for each flip he steps left for heads and right for tails. In this case, his most probable location is the center, with the probability distribution tapering off in either direction. A quantum walk involves the use of internal states and superpositions, and results in the hypothetical person "exploring" every possible position simultaneously.

When a quantum walker flips a coin, it directs him to move one way, but he maintains an "internal state" that moves the other way, making him a superposition of both directions of movement. During a quantum walk, as the quantum object takes more steps, it becomes "delocalized" over all available positions, as if its presence is blurred.

A second feature of quantum walking is matter-wave interference, as when the person flips heads and next flips tails. The second step makes the new superposition overlap the old one, and the new superposition can either amplify the old position or remove it. After all this occurs and the desired number of steps have been taken, an attempted observation will collapse the superposition and "resolve" the object to a single position.

As previously mentioned, a random walk's probability distribution has a single peak tapering off in either direction. A quantum walk's probability distribution generally has two peaks placed evenly on either side of the starting position. However, this distribution can vary depending on the initial internal state of the particle doing the walking, which can cause the final position to strongly favor one side or the other.

in Ars Technica

Miseries of Scholars

Now because they are commonly subject to such hazards and inconveniences as dotage, madness, simplicity, &c. Jo. Voschius would have good scholars to be highly rewarded, and had in some extraordinary respect above other men, "to have greater [2000]privileges than the rest, that adventure themselves and abbreviate their lives for the public good." But our patrons of learning are so far nowadays from respecting the muses, and giving that honour to scholars, or reward which they deserve, and are allowed by those indulgent privileges of many noble princes, that after all their pains taken in the universities, cost and charge, expenses, irksome hours, laborious tasks, wearisome days, dangers, hazards, (barred interim from all pleasures which other men have, mewed up like hawks all their lives) if they chance to wade through them, they shall in the end be rejected, contemned, and which is their greatest misery, driven to their shifts, exposed to want, poverty, and beggary. Their familiar attendants are,

[2001]Pallentes morbi, luctus, curaeque laborque
Et metus, et malesuada fames, et turpis egestas,
Terribiles visu formae———

Grief, labour, care, pale sickness, miseries,
Fear, filthy poverty, hunger that cries,
Terrible monsters to be seen with eyes.

If there were nothing else to trouble them, the conceit of this alone were enough to make them all melancholy. Most other trades and professions, after some seven years' apprenticeship, are enabled by their craft to live of themselves. A merchant adventures his goods at sea, and though his hazard be great, yet if one ship return of four, he likely makes a saving voyage. An husbandman's gains are almost certain; quibus ipse Jupiter nocere non potest (whom Jove himself can't harm) ('tis [2002]Cato's hyperbole, a great husband himself); only scholars methinks are most uncertain, unrespected, subject to all casualties, and hazards. For first, not one of a many proves to be a scholar, all are not capable and docile, [2003]ex omniligno non fit Mercurius: we can make majors and officers every year, but not scholars: kings can invest knights and barons, as Sigismund the emperor confessed; universities can give degrees; and Tu quod es, e populo quilibet esse potest; but he nor they, nor all the world, can give learning, make philosophers, artists, orators, poets; we can soon say, as Seneca well notes, O virum bonum, o divitem, point at a rich man, a good, a happy man, a prosperous man, sumptuose vestitum, Calamistratum, bene olentem, magno temporis impendio constat haec laudatio, o virum literarum, but 'tis not so easily performed to find out a learned man. Learning is not so quickly got, though they may be willing to take pains, to that end sufficiently informed, and liberally maintained by their patrons and parents, yet few can compass it. Or if they be docile, yet all men's wills are not answerable to their wits, they can apprehend, but will not take pains; they are either seduced by bad companions, vel in puellam impingunt, vel in poculum (they fall in with women or wine) and so spend their time to their friends' grief and their own undoings. Or put case they be studious, industrious, of ripe wits, and perhaps good capacities, then how many diseases of body and mind must they encounter? No labour in the world like unto study. It may be, their temperature will not endure it, but striving to be excellent to know all, they lose health, wealth, wit, life and all.

excerpt from The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton, (first edition 1621).
full book in the Project Gutenberg Library

Scientists' sense of fun

o som da comida

Charles Spence, Oxford University, UK: Vencedor do IgNobel de 2008 de Nutrição, entrevistado pela BBC

When you play the sound of crisps when people bite into Pringles - if we change the sound as they eat, we can actually change how fresh, or how crisp, the Pringle tastes to people.

We've used [a bacon sizzling] sound to flip the flavour of bacon and egg ice cream. If we play that sound over the loudspeakers in the room, the ice cream will taste more 'bacony' than if you play the sound of, say, farmyard chickens.

Ouvir http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7650584.stm

on the future

At any moment we are free to act toward the future we desire.

in Heinz Von Foerster, 1971, "Perception of the Future and the Future of Perception", Twenty-fourth Annual Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, U.S.A.

on information and knowledge

The primordial and most proprietary processes in any man and, in fact, in any organism, namely “information and “knowledge,” are now persistently taken as commodities, that is as substance. Information is, of course, the process by which knowledge is acquired, and knowledge is the processes that integrate past and present experiences to form new activities, either as nervous activity internally perceived as thought and will, or externally perceivable as speech and movement (Maturana, 1970, 1971; Von Foerster, 1969,1971).
Neither of these processes can be “passed on” as we are told in phrases like “. . . Universities are depositories of Knowledge which is passed on from generation to generation,” etc., for your nervous activity is just your nervous activity and, alas, not mine.
No wonder that an educational system that confuses the process of creating new processes with the dispensing of goods called “knowledge” may cause some disappointment in the hypothetical receivers, for the goods are just not coming: there are no goods.
Historically, I believe, the confusion by which knowledge is taken as substance comes from a witty broadsheet printed in Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century. It shows a seated student with a hole on top of his head into which a funnel is inserted. Next to him stands the teacher who pours into this funnel a bucket full of “knowledge,” that is, letters of the alphabet, numbers and simple equations. It seems to me that what the wheel did for mankind, the Nuremberg Funnel did for education: we can now roll faster down the hill.
Is there a remedy? Of course, there is one! We only have to perceive lectures, books, slides and films, etc., not as information but as vehicles for potential information. Then we shall see that in giving lectures, writing books, showing slides and films, etc., we have not solved a problem, we just created one, namely, to find out in which context can these things be seen so that they create in their perceivers new insights, thoughts, and actions.

in Heinz Von Foerster, 1971, "Perception of the Future and the Future of Perception", Twenty-fourth Annual Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, U.S.A.

copos

“No Booze? You May Lose: Why Drinkers Earn More Money Than Nondrinkers” Bethany L. Peters and Edward Stringham, Journal of Labor Research, vol. 27, no. 3, Summer 2006, pp. 411–21

from Improbable Research

coerência

Um texto de um professor de física despedido por dar A+ a todos os estudantes.

Education for More Anarchy
by Denis G. Rancourt (Professor of Physics, University of Ottawa)

Education should not create experts. It should make experts irrelevant.

“[we call for] full education, all-round education, and complete education, so that no class may exist above [the masses of the people] superior by its knowledge, so that the aristocracy of the intellect may protect and direct them – that is, exploit them. We say that this so-called aristocracy of the intellect is the most hateful, scornful, insolent, and oppressive of all the aristocracies that have, each in its
turn and sometimes all at once, oppressed human society.”
- Bakunin, The Hypnotizers (~1870)

Call it “the knowledge economy” and believe that patents are something other than capital’s tax on the commons of creativity – that patents are something other than contracts for exploitation of the militarily-contained Third World, and of the First World citizenry (e.g., pharmaceuticals) and of everything. Or call it “economics” and believe that it is something other than a religion of wage slavery and capitalist
exploitation. Or call it modern medicine and believe that it has something to do with health rather than sustaining sickness and its profits.
And on
and on.

Institutionalized education brings us into The Lie, that we may serve the
master and not rebel. We are taught that the “power of ideas” must substitute revolutionary action, that mind-masturbation in elite circles will free humanity from injustice.

Bakunin sees the purpose of all-round education as making an individual who “grasps more fully the nature of his surroundings because he better understands those facts which are called the laws of nature and society and which interconnect natural and social events – that that person will feel freer in nature and society […]”
- Bakunin, All-Round Education (~1870)

By contrast, my learned colleagues expound that the masses of the people should “learn more science” but their clear intent is to make them more receptive to the authority of the expert scientists, who themselves are specialized into unquestioning servitude.

My colleagues confuse “freer in nature and society” with “more able to integrate the hierarchy of relative advantages.” They confuse freedom and servitude. They confuse independent thought and ass-licking (to use a biological term).

There are two kinds of “education”: all-round education that frees the human spirit and indoctrination. In our modern plutocracies, the latter is dispensed by the state, in the service of the capital masters and is achieved by the perfected devices of the grades carrot-and-stick (regurgitation on demand) and mindless specialization. In this scheme, “critical thinking” means seamless indoctrination, total assimilation of the master’s ideology.

All-round education cannot be achieved by a series of parallel classrooms in which academic subjects are disciplinally detached from each other and from student realities. However, such a scheme is by design perfect for disrupting natural thought and development patterns, disallowing discourse, and instilling Pavlovian responses to segmented technical abilities to serve capital.

All-round education requires freedom and makes more freedom. All-round education requires relevance and involvement, not forced abstraction and detachment, and creates more relevance and involvement.
Apathy and cynicism are the natural outcomes of state education, which produces infantile consumers, atomized automatons, and service intellectuals at the highest levels. Fortunately, the system is only near-perfect. Nature has a way of preserving itself.

Fight the system or be neutralized. Take back your life.

Existe uma petição para a sua reintegração, mas não será contraditória com o espírito do texto?!

Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity In Words of Four Letters or Less

[ 0 ]

So, have a seat. Put your feet up. This may take some time. Can I get you some tea? Earl Grey? You got it.

Okay. How do I want to do this? He did so much. It's hard to just dive in. You know? You pick a spot to go from, but soon you have to back up and and go over this or that item, and you get done with that only to see that you have to back up some more. So if you feel like I'm off to the side of the tale half the time, well, this is why. Just bear with me, and we'll get to the end in good time. Okay?

Okay. Let's see....

Obscurantismo na ciência

Obscurantism in science has often be come a goal in itself. But it is not enough to confuse the reader; one has to know what it is that one intends to confuse the reader about.

Alexander Kohn, um dos fundadores do Annals of Improbable Research e dos Ig Nobel Prizes

O Artigo completo deve ser lido aqui:
Alexander Kohn “Principles and Methods of Obscurantism,” CA Cancer J Clin, 1970;20;360-364.

muito interessante...

Free Software and Beyond
The World of Peer Production
4th Oekonux Conference
in cooperation with
P2P Foundation

March 27th-29th, 2009
University of Manchester
http://www.oekonux-conference.org/


Invitation

Project Oekonux researches the economical, political and social forms of Free Software and similar forms of production we collectively call peer production. In Project Oekonux, different people with different reasons and different approaches get together to build something new. A lot of participants want to know, whether and if so, how, the peer production can serve as a basis for a new society.

For the 4th Oekonux Conference Project Oekonux cooperates with the P2P Foundation. The Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives researches, documents and promotes P2P practices in every domain of social life. It's a global cyber-collective and aims to be a knowledge and internetworking platform for open/free, participatory, and commons-oriented initiatives on a global scale.

During the past decade the phenomenon of Free Software has become successful and well-known. It is still amazing how in the realm of software the creativity of so many volunteers leads to products which are useful for the whole mankind. Ten years after Project Oekonux was founded the world has changed. As expected by us the principles of the development of Free Software are spreading out to other fields. Wikipedia and Open Access are two of the most interesting examples among many. It is time to look at peer production from a broader perspective.

The 4th Oekonux conference "Free Software and Beyond. The World of Peer Production" takes up this development and widens the perspective from Free Software to other fields of peer production. Project Oekonux and P2P Foundation are proud to welcome nearly 30 invited contributors which will share their experience, studies and insights with us on the following topics

* Peer production beyond Free Software
+ Free Design of material goods for less industrialized countries
+ Open Source Car
+ Free Science with Open Access
+ Open Street Map project
+ Peer production in art
+ Free Farming
+ Free Knitting
* Aspects of Free Software
+ Free Software in Latin America
+ Innovation in Free Software
+ "Others" in the community
+ Communities and single developers
+ Women in Free Software
* Peer production and social movements
+ The Hipatia project
+ Social movements and peer production
+ Indigenous movements and cyberspace
* Theories on peer production
+ Patterns in peer production
+ Market and peer production based economies
+ Peer production and the concept of truth
+ Organization in peer production
* Future of peer production
+ Current limitations of peer production
+ Money and peer production
+ Ideas for expanding peer production
+ Political scenarios for expanding peer production

Please see the program page for detailed information and some more contributions.
Please register for free: http://www.oekonux-conference.org/registration.html


Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/

IgNóbeis 2007

Não, não tem a ver com o post anterior, se bem que merecesse ao Estado português um premio por estupidez.
E que os IgNóbeis de este ano já foram anunciados e a cerimônia efectuada. Eis a lista:

MEDICINE: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, USA, for their penetrating medical report "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects."
PHYSICS: L. Mahadevan of Harvard University, USA, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled.
BIOLOGY: Prof. Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night.
CHEMISTRY: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin -- vanilla fragrance and flavoring -- from cow dung.
LINGUISTICS: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.
LITERATURE: Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word "the" -- and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order.
PEACE: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon -- the so-called "gay bomb" -- that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.
NUTRITION: Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings, by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup.
ECONOMICS: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a device, in the year 2001, that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them.
AVIATION: Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek of Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.

Mais informação sobre as revistas onde os artigos podem ser encontrados e também sobre a cerimônia de entrega dos prêmios pode ser encontrada em:
http://improbable.com/ig/ig-pastwinners.html

another strange loop

“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”
Albert Einstein