Daisuke Inoue, inventor of karaoke, told his story (including what happened when he was awarded the 2004 Ig Nobel peace prize), in 2005, in an interview with Robert Scott Field for Topic Magazine. The Appendix has just reprinted that essay. It begins thus: Last year I received a fax from Harvard University. I don’t really speak English, […]
Category: Ig Nobel
News about the Ig Nobel Prizes — honoring achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK.
Breaking news: Ig Nobel Prize winner Gideon ($100,000,000,000,000 bill) Gono resigns
Reports from Zimbabwe say that Gideon Gono is leaving his position as governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank. Dr. Gono was awarded the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize for mathematics, for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers — from very small to very big — by having his bank print bank notes with […]
Ig Nobel day-after-Thanksgiving broadcast on Science Friday
Spread the word, please! Today, Friday, November 29, the Science Friday radio program will broadcast its specially edited recording of the 2013 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. It’s SciFri’s 22nd annual broadcast (SciFri began this day-after-Thanksgiving tradition in 1992, the Ig Nobel ceremony’s second year). Listen to it on an NPR station, if you’re near one, or […]
Measures must be taken, maybe. But what do they mean?
Hadas Shema muses on the importance, or lack of importance, of certain new measurements — measurements of the supposed “impact” of a published study. She writes, in Scientific American‘s Information Culture blog: When in trouble or in doubt, invent new words. We have bibliometrics and scientometrics from the Age of Print. Now they are joined […]