The Ig Nobel Prize Winners, 2001

The 2001 Ig Nobel Prize Winners were honored in a gala ceremony at
Harvard on October 4. Seven of the ten attended the ceremony, and two
others sent taped acceptance speeches. The prizes were physically
handed to the winners by four Nobel Laureates.

Here is a list of the winners.

MEDICINE
Peter Barss of McGill University, for his impactful medical report
"Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts."
PUBLISHED IN: The Journal of Trauma, vol. 21, no. 11, 1984, pp. 990-1.

PHYSICS
David Schmidt of the University of Massachusetts for his partial
solution to the question of why shower curtains billow inwards.

BIOLOGY
Buck Weimer of Pueblo, Colorado for inventing Under-Ease, airtight
underwear with a replaceable charcoal filter that removes bad-smelling
gases before they escape.

ECONOMICS
Joel Slemrod, of the University of Michigan Business School, and
Wojciech Kopczuk, of University of British Columbia, for their
conclusion that people find a way to postpone their deaths if that
that would qualify them for a lower rate on the inheritance tax.
REFERENCE:"Dying to Save Taxes: Evidence from Estate Tax Returns on
the Death Elasticity," Wojciech Kopczuk and Joel Slemrod, National
Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. W8158, March 2001.

LITERATURE
John Richards of Boston, England, founder of The Apostrophe Protection
Society, for his efforts to protect, promote, and defend the
differences between plural and possessive.

PSYCHOLOGY
Lawrence W. Sherman of Miami University, Ohio, for his influential
research report "An Ecological Study of Glee in Small Groups of
Preschool Children."
PUBLISHED IN: Child Development, vol. 46, no. 1, March 1975,
pp. 53-61.

ASTROPHYSICS
Dr. Jack and Rexella Van Impe of Jack Van Impe Ministries, Rochester
Hills, Michigan, for their discovery that black holes fulfill all the
technical requirements to be the location of Hell.
REFERENCE: The March 31, 2001 television and Internet broadcast of the
"Jack Van Impe Presents" program. (at about the 12 minute mark).

PEACE
Viliumas Malinauskus of Grutas, Lithuania, for creating the amusement
park known as "Stalin World."

TECHNOLOGY
Awarded jointly to John Keogh of Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia, for
patenting the wheel in the year 2001, and to the Australian Patent
Office for granting him Innovation Patent #2001100012.

PUBLIC HEALTH
Chittaranjan Andrade and B.S. Srihari of the National Institute of
Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, India, for their probing
medical discovery that nose picking is a common activity among
adolescents.
REFERENCE: "A Preliminary Survey of Rhinotillexomania in an Adolescent
Sample," Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, vol. 62, no. 6, June 2001,
pp. 426-31.