Improbable Research

The 1993 Ig Nobel Prize in literature was awarded to Eric Topol, R. Califf, F. Van de Werf, P. W. Armstrong, and their 972 co-authors, for publishing a medical research paper which has one hundred times as many authors as pages. That study was in The New England Journal of Medicine,]

Now, seventeen years later, the journal Nature has published a study that has approximately 57,000 co-authors. That study is:”Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer online game,” Seth Cooper, Firas Khatib, Adrien Treuille, Janos Barbero, Jeehyung Lee, Michael Beenen, Andrew Leaver-Fay, David Baker, Zoran Popović & et al., Nature, vol. 466, August 5, 2010, pp. 756-60.

Do your own calculations about interesting author/page ratios.

BONUS: Here are links to lots of reports (some of which put the co-author count at about 75,000) about the report.

Tickets for the Twentieth 1st Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony went on pre-sale today, from the Harvard Box Office online (and later this week, they will also be available at the ticket office at Holyoke Center in Harvard Square).

NOTE: There was some sort of glitch in the box office online computer today (Sunday). The problem has apparently been fixed. Sorry about the initial difficulty — and if you’re one of the people who had an adventure with it, thanks for your patience!

Lavakan de Aste, the Spanish company that invented a washing machine for cats and dogs, has a promotional video. They also have a promotional brochure. They also have an Ig Nobel Prize, awarded to them in 2002 for inventing this machine.

Tickets for the Twentieth 1st Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony will go on pre-sale SUNDAY, AUGUST 1, 2010, at NOON, from the Harvard Box Office online (and later that week, from the ticket office at Holyoke Center in Harvard Square).

We expect that this year’s tickets will get snapped up very quickly (for reasons that will become evident a bit later in August, when we announce more info about who will be part of this year’s ceremony).

The ceremony will happen at the usual place, Sanders Theatre, Harvard University, on THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 7:30 pm.
This year’s theme is BACTERIA.

The organizers of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony solved an ancient problem: How to keep speeches from droning on and on… The solution, called “Miss Sweetie Poo”, is an 8-year-old girl who tells long-winded speakers to “Please stop. I’m bored. Please stop. I’m bored…” Here are Miss Sweetie Poo highlights from several Ig ceremonies.

Tocky, pictured here [click on the image to see Tocky in action], is the new advanced-engineering sibling of Clocky, the alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people DO get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday. Clocky moved on wheels. Tocky is wheel-less, being itself quasi-spherical.

Gauri Nanda, inventor, Clocky’s (and now Tocky’s) inventor, was awarded the 2005 Ig Nobel Prize in economics.