The Ignobel Prizes:Both humorous and educational
One of my Google news feeds is HowStuffWorks. Today I saw a post I never expected to see. HowStuffWorks set out to explain the Ignobel prizes!
The Ignobel prizes are the humorous counterpart to the Nobel prizes. The prizes are awarded for real world accomplishments in health, politics, economics, technlogy, and science. It is real research and real accomplishments. The criteria for nomination is that it has to be research that "first make people laugh, and then make them think."
I learned about these awards years ago and have enjoyed reading over the accomplishments of the annual winners. I have also bought and enjoyed the books compiling the achievements of winners in years past. One of my (many) personal favorites was a computer program for determining whether a cat was walking across the keyboard (and turning off the input if that was the case).
I actually use the Ignobel summaries of the research and in some cases, the actual articles, in my research methods class. Because they are funny, the students don't mind reading them or analyzing them. I think the humor also makes the articles more memorable and (hopefully) making the points they were used to illustrate more memorable as well.
For example, one article that was awarded the Ignobel prize proposes that being in love physiologically resembles suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). The researchers tested the blood of normal individuals, those diagnosed as suffering from OCD, and couples who had just fallen in love. They then retested the couples' blood a year later, after the first blush of the romance had faded somewhat. They confirmed their hypothesis. The blood of couples newly in love had equivalent levels of serotonin as obsessive compulsives. At their retest a year later, those same couples had blood that now more closely resembled the normal, non-OCD, not madly in love controls.
I use this article because it has a wonderful operational definition of being "in love" which I read to the students when we discuss operational definitions and what qualities those definitions should have.
I like teaching because science is COOL.
The Ignobel prizes are the humorous counterpart to the Nobel prizes. The prizes are awarded for real world accomplishments in health, politics, economics, technlogy, and science. It is real research and real accomplishments. The criteria for nomination is that it has to be research that "first make people laugh, and then make them think."
I learned about these awards years ago and have enjoyed reading over the accomplishments of the annual winners. I have also bought and enjoyed the books compiling the achievements of winners in years past. One of my (many) personal favorites was a computer program for determining whether a cat was walking across the keyboard (and turning off the input if that was the case).
I actually use the Ignobel summaries of the research and in some cases, the actual articles, in my research methods class. Because they are funny, the students don't mind reading them or analyzing them. I think the humor also makes the articles more memorable and (hopefully) making the points they were used to illustrate more memorable as well.
For example, one article that was awarded the Ignobel prize proposes that being in love physiologically resembles suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). The researchers tested the blood of normal individuals, those diagnosed as suffering from OCD, and couples who had just fallen in love. They then retested the couples' blood a year later, after the first blush of the romance had faded somewhat. They confirmed their hypothesis. The blood of couples newly in love had equivalent levels of serotonin as obsessive compulsives. At their retest a year later, those same couples had blood that now more closely resembled the normal, non-OCD, not madly in love controls.
I use this article because it has a wonderful operational definition of being "in love" which I read to the students when we discuss operational definitions and what qualities those definitions should have.
I like teaching because science is COOL.