Following the recent announcement of Nobel Prize winners, its mocking counterpart the Ig Nobel Prize has announced its winners.
A recent article in the Financial Times supports the validity of the Ig Nobel Prize, and the benefit of many of its discoveries. For example, the Dunning-Kruger effect is now a widely cited psychological phenomenon, first discovered by David Dunning and Justin Kruger for which they received an Ig Nobel Prize. The effect states that incompetent people rarely realise that they are incompetent.
One of the most interesting discoveries, particularly for Materials Science and Chemistry applicants, is Andre Geim’s Ig Nobel for Physics, where he levitated a live frog and was shortly given a real Nobel Prize for the discovery of graphene.
The winner of the Biology prize, Thomas Thwaits, lived life as a goat, but the Financial Times argues that he would be better placed for the Economics prize. Thwaits tried to make a cheap Argos toaster by smelting iron in a microwave, producing plastic with food waste, and generally avoiding external labour or intensive machination – the result was a £1,187.54 toaster, which gives us brilliant insight into the global means of production and economy that allows a toaster to be produced for £3.99.
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