3/4/2023 0 Comments Ig nobel speech timerAlessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy, took a fresh look at the Peter principle, which suggests that people working in hierarchical organisations get promoted repeatedly until they reach a post in which they are incompetent, where they remain indefinitely. Perhaps BP, sure to be interested, could also have benefited from the research that earned this year’s management prize. But not as surprised as the people who shared the chemistry prize with them: BP, which this spring validated those results over a far larger scale and longer time in the Gulf of Mexico. They were surprised to learn that ocean currents trapped mixtures of oil and bubbles in plumes about 300 metres above the seabed. They then “tried to monitor the heck out of it to see what happened”, Adams says. A decade ago, they collaborated with the US Minerals Management Service and 23 oil companies to study the effects of an oil spill in deep water, releasing 60 cubic metres of various blends of oil and natural gas at a depth of 800 metres in the sea off Norway. Oil spoilerĮric Adams of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Scott Socolofsky of Texas A&M University in College Station and Stephen Masutani of the University of Hawaii at Manoa didn’t have to wait quite so long for their moment of glory. Their bearded colleague capitulated, and shaved. Not content with that, they put a fake beard on a mannequin, sprayed it with pathogenic bacteria, and exposed it to hapless chickens and guinea pigs, some of which in due course got sick. So Barbeito and three volunteers grew their own beards for 73 days, then sprayed them with harmless bacteria and demonstrated that it was harder to wash the germs out of a beard than off clean skin. The scientist refused to shave, because there was no evidence that his facial fuzz posed a hazard. “A scientist who had never given us any problems grew a beard when he was working in containment lab,” Barbeito explains. Manuel Barbeito, Charles Matthews and Larry Taylor of the Industrial Health and Safety Office at Fort Detrick, Maryland, for instance, were honoured for a laboratory peril first recognised in 1967. Like the other Nobels – five recipients of which were on hand to present the awards – the Ig Nobels committee, convened as always by the Annals of Improbable Research, can take its time to make an award. And a high point of the show was a four-part operetta about tooth bacteria trying to go where no bacterium had gone before. (Last year’s economics prize went to the geniuses who rendered that note virtually worthless this year’s went to the bosses of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and Magnetar, for their bold work with new and innovative financial products.) The audience were still uproarious enough to have some of the proper Bostonians who built the Sanders Theater spinning in their graves. Because the cash prize, courtesy of a generous benefactor, was a 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollar note. And the first cash prizes in the awards’ 20-year history raised the ugly suspicion that the Ig Nobels will become yet another awards ceremony that’s all about money. The capacity audience was permitted to throw paper airplanes only during two designated intervals, rather than whenever the fancy took them. Are the Ig Nobels losing their edge? The venue for this year’s ceremony honouring science that “makes you laugh, then makes you think” was Harvard’s Sanders Theater – a splendidly sober Victorian building that’s housed many dignified graduations and historic lectures.
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