IgNobles honor founder of dead people club (and other 10/2 results!

[papau]

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/10/03/ignobel.awards.reut/index.html

IgNobles honor founder of dead people club

WASHINGTON (Reuters) --An Indian who spent 18 years trying to prove he was alive, researchers who showed London taxi drivers have bigger-than-average brains and the inventor of Murphy's Law won this year's "IgNobel" prizes.The spoofs of the Nobel prizes were also awarded to researchers who found politicians to have simple personalities, a Japanese inventor who studied a statue that seems to be repulsive to birds and an economist who chronicles annoying behavior.

The IgNobels -- a play on the word ignoble -- are given annually by the science humor magazine "Annals of Improbable Research" and several groups at Harvard and Radcliffe universities to "honor achievements that cannot or should not be reproduced."<snip>

The engineering prize went to now-deceased Air Force Captain Edward Murphy, Air Force doctor John Paul Stapp, and George Nichols, who in 1949 came up with Murphy's Law -- "If anything can go wrong, it will."

The medicine prize went to a team at University College London for a study showing the brains of London taxi drivers are more highly developed than those of their fellow citizens.
Their report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in April 2000, showed that cabbies have an especially large hippocampus, associated with spatial memory. <snip>

A team at the University of Rome and Stanford University in California won the psychology prize for their report, published in the deadly serious science journal Nature in 1997, showing that voters judge politicians on two personality characteristics, as compared to five determinants of personality in most social interactions.

The chemistry prize went to Yukio Hirose of Kanazawa University in Japan for his study of a bronze statue that fails to attract pigeons.
John Trinkaus of the Zicklin School of Business in New York City was given the literature prize for more than 80 reports about oddities such as what percentage of automobile drivers fail to completely stop at one particular stop-sign <snip>

Copyright 2003 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

http://www.improb.com/ig/ig-pastwinners.html
The 2003 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
The 2003 Ig Nobel Prize winners were announced on Thursday evening, October 2, at the 13th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was telecast live on the Internet. (The winners will give free public talks on Saturday, October 4, at the Ig Informal Lectures, at MIT room 54-100.)

ENGINEERING
The late John Paul Stapp, the late Edward A. Murphy, Jr., and George Nichols, for jointly giving birth in 1949 to Murphy's Law, the basic engineering principle that "If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, someone will do it" (or, in other words: "If anything can go wrong, it will").
REFERENCE: "The Fastest Man on Earth," Nick T. Spark, Annals of Improbable Research, vol. 9, no. 5, Sept/Oct 2003.]
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: (1) Author Nick T. Spark , on behalf of John Paul Stapp's widow, Lilly. (2) Edward Murphy's Edward A. Murphy III, on behalf of his late father. (3) George Nichols, via audio tape.
PHYSICS
Jack Harvey, John Culvenor, Warren Payne, Steve Cowley, Michael Lawrance, David Stuart, and Robyn Williams of Australia, for their irresistible report "An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces."
http://www.culvenor.com/>
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: John Culvenor.
MEDICINE
Eleanor Maguire, David Gadian, Ingrid Johnsrude, Catriona Good, John Ashburner, Richard Frackowiak, and Christopher Frith of University College London, for presenting evidence that the brains of London taxi drivers are more highly developed than those of their fellow citizens.

WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Eleanor Maguire.
PSYCHOLOGY
Gian Vittorio Caprara and Claudio Barbaranelli of the University of Rome, and Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University, for their discerning report "Politicians' Uniquely Simple Personalities."

WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Philip Zimbardo.
CHEMISTRY
Yukio Hirose of Kanazawa University, for his chemical investigation of a bronze statue, in the city of Kanazawa, that fails to attract pigeons.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Yukio Hirose.
LITERATURE
John Trinkaus, of the Zicklin School of Business, New York City, for meticulously collecting data and publishing more than 80 detailed academic reports about specific annoyances and anomalies of daily life, such as: What percentage of young people wear baseball caps with the peak facing to the rear rather than to the front; What percentage of pedestrians wear sport shoes that are white rather than some other color; What percentage of swimmers swim laps in the shallow end of a pool rather than the deep end; What percentage of automobile drivers almost, but not completely, come to a stop at one particular stop-sign; What percentage of commuters carry attaché cases; What percentage of shoppers exceed the number of items permitted in a supermarket's express checkout lane; and What percentage of students dislike the taste of Brussels sprouts.
REFERENCE: 86 of Professor Trinkaus's publications are listed in "Trinkaus -- An Informal Look," Annals of Improbable Research, vol. 9, no. 3, May/Jun 2003.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: John Trinkaus.
ECONOMICS
Karl Schwärzler and the nation of Liechtenstein, for making it possible to rent the entire country for corporate conventions, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and other gatherings.
REFERENCE: <www.xnet.li> and <www.rentastate.com>
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Karl Schwärzler.
INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
Stefano Ghirlanda, Liselotte Jansson, and Magnus Enquist of Stockholm University, for their inevitable report "Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans."

WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: All three co-authors.
PEACE
Lal Bihari, of Uttar Pradesh, India, for a triple accomplishment: First, for leading an active life even though he has been declared legally dead; Second, for waging a lively posthumous campaign against bureaucratic inertia and greedy relatives; and Third, for creating the Association of Dead People.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Madhu Kapoor, on behalf of Lal Bihari.
BIOLOGY
C.W. Moeliker, of Natuurmuseum Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for documenting the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck.
http://www.nmr.nl/deins815.htm>>
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Kees Moeliker.
The 2002 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
(Click here to see video of the 2002 ceremony, and here to read details)
BIOLOGY
Norma E. Bubier, Charles G.M. Paxton, Phil Bowers, and D. Charles Deeming of the United Kingdom, for their report "Courtship Behaviour of Ostriches Towards Humans Under Farming Conditions in Britain."
PHYSICS
Arnd Leike of the University of Munich, for demonstrating that beer froth obeys the mathematical Law of Exponential Decay.
INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
Karl Kruszelnicki of The University of Sydney, for performing a comprehensive survey of human belly button lint -- who gets it, when, what color, and how much.
CHEMISTRY
Theodore Gray of Wolfram Research, in Champaign, Illinois, for gathering many elements of the periodic table, and assembling them into the form of a four-legged periodic table table.
MATHEMATICS
K.P. Sreekumar and the late G. Nirmalan of Kerala Agricultural University, India, for their analytical report "Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants."
LITERATURE
Vicki L. Silvers of the University of Nevada-Reno and David S. Kreiner of Central Missouri State University, for their colorful report "The Effects of Pre-Existing Inappropriate Highlighting on Reading Comprehension." < PUBLISHED IN: Reading Research and Instruction, vol. 36, no. 3, 1997, pp. 217-23.>
PEACE
Keita Sato, President of Takara Co., Dr. Matsumi Suzuki, President of Japan Acoustic Lab, and Dr. Norio Kogure, Executive Director, Kogure Veterinary Hospital, for promoting peace and harmony between the species by inventing Bow-Lingual, a computer-based automatic dog-to-human language translation device.
HYGIENE
Eduardo Segura, of Lavakan de Aste, in Tarragona, Spain, for inventing a washing machine for cats and dogs.
ECONOMICS
The executives, corporate directors, and auditors of Enron, Lernaut & Hauspie , Adelphia, Bank of Commerce and Credit International , Cendant, CMS Energy, Duke Energy, Dynegy, Gazprom , Global Crossing, HIH Insurance , Informix, Kmart, Maxwell Communications , McKessonHBOC, Merrill Lynch, Merck, Peregrine Systems, Qwest Communications, Reliant Resources, Rent-Way, Rite Aid, Sunbeam, Tyco, Waste Management, WorldCom, Xerox, and Arthur Andersen, for adapting the mathematical concept of imaginary numbers for use in the business world.
MEDICINE
Chris McManus of University College London, for his excruciatingly balanced report, "Scrotal Asymmetry in Man and in Ancient Sculpture."

The 2001 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

MEDICINE
Peter Barss of McGill University, for his impactful medical report "Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts."
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.
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."
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.
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.

The 2000 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

PSYCHOLOGY
David Dunning of Cornell University and Justin Kreuger of the University of Illinois, for their modest report, "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments."
LITERATURE
Jasmuheen (formerly known as Ellen Greve) of Australia, first lady of Breatharianism, for her book "Living on Light," which explains that although some people do eat food, they don't ever really need to.
BIOLOGY
Richard Wassersug of Dalhousie University, for his first-hand report, "On the Comparative Palatability of Some Dry-Season Tadpoles from Costa Rica."
PHYSICS
Andre Geim of the University of Nijmegen (the Netherlands) and Sir Michael Berry of Bristol University (UK), for using magnets to levitate a frog and a sumo wrestler.
CHEMISTRY
Donatella Marazziti, Alessandra Rossi, and Giovanni B. Cassano of the University of Pisa, and Hagop S. Akiskal of the University of California (San Diego), for their discovery that, biochemically, romantic love may be indistinguishable from having severe obsessive-compulsive disorder.
ECONOMICS
The Reverend Sun Myung Moon, for bringing efficiency and steady growth to the mass-marriage industry, with, according to his reports, a 36-couple wedding in 1960, a 430-couple wedding in 1968, an 1800-couple wedding in 1975, a 6000-couple wedding in 1982, a 30,000-couple wedding in 1992, a 360,000-couple wedding in 1995, and a 36,000,000-couple wedding in 1997.
MEDICINE
Willibrord Weijmar Schultz, Pek van Andel, and Eduard Mooyaart of Groningen, The Netherlands, and Ida Sabelis of Amsterdam, for their illuminating report, "Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Male and Female Genitals During Coitus and Female Sexual Arousal."
COMPUTER SCIENCE
Chris Niswander of Tucson, Arizona, for inventing PawSense, software that detects when a cat is walking across your computer keyboard.
PEACE
The British Royal Navy, for ordering its sailors to stop using live cannon shells, and to instead just shout "Bang!"
PUBLIC HEALTH
Jonathan Wyatt, Gordon McNaughton, and William Tullet of Glasgow, for their alarming report, "The Collapse of Toilets in Glasgow."

[displacedtexan]

1. have you read that 200o study which explains *?

"Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments."

i taught school for a zillion years, and this study explains every stupid thing my students used to do! it also explains why * can't comprehend that he's really not smart, which makes him dangerous.

[papau]

2. Journal ofPersonality andSocial Psychology is fun - and it does describe *

http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/psp7761121.html

Journal ofPersonality andSocial PsychologySelected Article
December 1999 Vol. 77, No. 6, 1121-1134

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments
Justin Kruger and David Dunning, Department of Psychology
Cornell University

Abstract
People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.


It is one of the essential features of such incompetence that the person so afflicted is incapable of knowing that he is incompetent. To have such knowledge would already be to remedy a good portion of the offense. ( Miller, 1993 , p. 4)
In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks and robbed them in broad daylight, with no visible attempt at disguise. He was arrested later that night, less than an hour after videotapes of him taken from surveillance cameras were broadcast on the 11 o'clock news. When police later showed him the surveillance tapes, Mr. Wheeler stared in incredulity. "But I wore the juice," he mumbled. Apparently, Mr. Wheeler was under the impression that rubbing one's face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to videotape cameras ( Fuocco, 1996 ).
We bring up the unfortunate affairs of Mr. Wheeler to make three points. The first two are noncontroversial. First, in many domains in life, success and satisfaction depend on knowledge, wisdom, or savvy in knowing which rules to follow and which strategies to pursue. This is true not only for committing crimes, but also for many tasks in the social and intellectual domains, such as promoting effective leadership, raising children, constructing a solid logical argument, or designing a rigorous psychological study. Second, people differ widely in the knowledge and strategies they apply in these domains ( Dunning, Meyerowitz, & Holzberg, 1989 ; Dunning, Perie, & Story, 1991 ; Story & Dunning, 1998 ), with varying levels of success. Some of the knowledge and theories that people apply to their actions are sound and meet with favorable results. Others, like the lemon juice hypothesis of McArthur Wheeler, are imperfect at best and wrong-headed, incompetent, or dysfunctional at worst.
Perhaps more controversial is the third point, the one that is the focus of this article. We argue that when people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the mistaken impression that they are doing just fine. As Miller (1993) perceptively observed in the quote that opens this article, and as Charles Darwin (1871) sagely noted over a century ago, "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" (p. 3).
In essence, we argue that the skills that engender competence in a particular domain are often the very same skills necessary to evaluate competence in that domain–one's own or anyone else's. Because of this, incompetent individuals lack what cognitive psychologists variously term metacognition ( Everson & Tobias, 1998 ), metamemory ( Klin, Guizman, & Levine, 1997 ), metacomprehension ( Maki, Jonas, & Kallod, 1994 ), or self-monitoring skills ( Chi, Glaser, & Rees, 1982 ). These terms refer to the ability to know how well one is performing, when one is likely to be accurate in judgment, and when one is likely to be in error. For example, consider the ability to write grammatical English. The skills that enable one to construct a grammatical sentence are the same skills necessary to recognize a grammatical sentence, and thus are the same skills necessary to determine if a grammatical mistake has been made. In short, the same knowledge that underlies the ability to produce correct judgment is also the knowledge that underlies the ability to recognize correct judgment. To lack the former is to be deficient in the latter.
Imperfect Self-Assessments
We focus on the metacognitive skills of the incompetent to explain, in part, the fact that people seem to be so imperfect in appraising themselves and their abilities. 1 Perhaps the best illustration of this tendency is the "above-average effect," or the tendency of the average person to believe he or she is above average, a result that defies the logic of descriptive statistics ( Alicke, 1985 ; Alicke, Klotz, Breitenbecher, Yurak, & Vredenburg, 1995 ; Brown & Gallagher, 1992 ; Cross, 1977 ; Dunning et al., 1989 ; Klar, Medding, & Sarel, 1996 ; Weinstein, 1980 ; Weinstein & Lachendro, 1982 ). For example, high school students tend to see themselves as having more ability in leadership, getting along with others, and written expression than their peers ( College Board, 1976—1977 ), business managers view themselves as more able than the typical manager ( Larwood & Whittaker, 1977 ), and football players see themselves as more savvy in "football sense" than their teammates ( Felson, 1981 ).
We believe focusing on the metacognitive deficits of the unskilled may help explain this overall tendency toward inflated self-appraisals. Because people usually choose what they think is the most reasonable and optimal option ( Metcalfe, 1998 ), the failure to recognize that one has performed poorly will instead leave one to assume that one has performed well. As a result, the incompetent will tend to grossly overestimate their skills and abilities.
Competence and Metacognitive Skills
Several lines of research are consistent with the notion that incompetent individuals lack the metacognitive skills necessary for accurate self- assessment. Work on the nature of expertise, for instance, has revealed that novices possess poorer metacognitive skills than do experts. In physics, novices are less accurate than experts in judging the difficulty of physics problems ( Chi et al., 1982 ). In chess, novices are less calibrated than experts about how many times they need to see a given chessboard position before they are able to reproduce it correctly ( Chi, 1978 ). In tennis, novices are less likely than experts to successfully gauge whether specific play attempts were successful ( McPherson & Thomas, 1989 ).
These findings suggest that unaccomplished individuals do not possess the degree of metacognitive skills necessary for accurate self-assessment that their more accomplished counterparts possess. However, none of this research has examined whether metacognitive deficiencies translate into inflated self-assessments or whether the relatively incompetent (novices) are systematically more miscalibrated about their ability than are the competent (experts).
If one skims through the psychological literature, one will find some evidence that the incompetent are less able than their more skilled peers to gauge their own level of competence. For example, Fagot and O'Brien (1994) found that socially incompetent boys were largely unaware of their lack of social graces (see Bem & Lord, 1979 , for a similar result involving college students). Mediocre students are less accurate than other students at evaluating their course performance ( Moreland, Miller, & Laucka, 1981 ). Unskilled readers are less able to assess their text comprehension than are more skilled readers ( Maki, Jonas, & Kallod, 1994 ). Students doing poorly on tests less accurately predict which questions they will get right than do students doing well ( Shaughnessy, 1979 ; Sinkavich, 1995 ). Drivers involved in accidents or flunking a driving exam predict their performance on a reaction test less accurately than do more accomplished and experienced drivers ( Kunkel, 1971 ). However, none of these studies has examined whether deficient metacognitive skills underlie these miscalibrations, nor have they tied these miscalibrations to the above-average effect.
Predictions
These shards of empirical evidence suggest that incompetent individuals have more difficulty recognizing their true level of ability than do more competent individuals and that a lack of metacognitive skills may underlie this deficiency. Thus, we made four specific predictions about the links between competence, metacognitive ability, and inflated self-assessment.
Prediction 1. Incompetent individuals, compared with their more competent peers, will dramatically overestimate their ability and performance relative to objective criteria.
Prediction 2. Incompetent individuals will suffer from deficient metacognitive skills, in that they will be less able than their more competent peers to recognize competence when they see it–be it their own or anyone else's.
Prediction 3. Incompetent individuals will be less able than their more competent peers to gain insight into their true level of performance by means of social comparison information. In particular, because of their difficulty recognizing competence in others, incompetent individuals will be unable to use information about the choices and performances of others to form more accurate impressions of their own ability.
Prediction 4. The incompetent can gain insight about their shortcomings, but this comes (paradoxically) by making them more competent, thus providing them the metacognitive skills necessary to be able to realize that they have performed poorly. <snip>

Concluding Remarks
In sum, we present this article as an exploration into why people tend to hold overly optimistic and miscalibrated views about themselves. We propose that those with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Although we feel we have done a competent job in making a strong case for this analysis, studying it empirically, and drawing out relevant implications, our thesis leaves us with one haunting worry that we cannot vanquish. That worry is that this article may contain faulty logic, methodological errors, or poor communication. Let us assure our readers that to the extent this article is imperfect, it is not a sin we have committed knowingly.