Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 30

New, Added Acclaim for the Dunning-Kruger Effect

The University of Michigan proudly announces the good news about Ig Nobel Prize winners David Dunning [pictured here] and Justin Kruger:

Announcement of the New (2023) Prize

Dave Dunning Wins the Society of Experimental Social Psychology (SESP) Scientific Impact Award

Dr. David Dunning has won the Society of Experimental Social Psychology (SESP) Scientific Impact Award. According to the SESP, this award “honors the authors of articles or chapters that provide a theoretical, empirical, and/or methodological contribution that has proven highly influential over the last 25 years.” Dave Dunning along with his collaborator, Justin Kruger, were honored for their paper that gave rise to the concept of the Dunning-Kruger effect. More specifically, the citation for the paper is:

Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121–1134.

Not only has this paper been cited 9461 times, but it has also accomplished the rare feat of creating a concept that has been thoroughly adopted in the broader society.

An Earlier (2000) Prize

This week’s University of Michigan announcement modestly does not mention the much earlier prize that honored that research — and that rapidly brought the Dunning-Kruger Effect to much wider international attention.

The 2000 Ig Nobel Psychology Prize was awarded to David Dunning and Justin Kruger, for their modest report, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.”

An Opera Song (2017)

The 2017 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony included the premiere of a mini-opera about the Dunning-Kruger effect. Here is historic video of the rousing conclusion of that opera: the first public performance of “The Dunning  Kruger Song”:

Six foot plea / Gamers’ lives / Glaring proof / Baffling sci jargon

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:

Under footage — The green-and-white sign you see here is plastered on the floor of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts. It says: “MAINTAIN 6 FEET THANK YOU”.Upon inquiry, Feedback was told that no, the sign is not a plea to protect and defend our planet’s insects.Lives of the gamers — Here is good news for gamers, from Catarina Matias at LusÓfona University in Portugal and her colleagues. The team studied 235 Portuguese gamers, explaining (in the journal Computers in Human Behavior) that the bulk of them don’t conform to the unhappy stereotype of gamers having “mental disorders and an unhealthy lifestyle pattern“. Detractors say gamers are oddballs. But the study says that…Glaring proof — Research done at Texas Tech University prods a person to reflect on a fact: the software in our everyday life grows ever more complex by creating and tackling ever more complex problems, the solutions to which create still more complex problems. Hassan Wasswa and Abdul Serwadda conducted a study called “The proof is in the glare: On the privacy risk posed by eyeglasses in video calls“. They show (they say) that…O! E! What? — Non-scientists aren’t alone in their confusion at reading scientific papers. Scientists who glance at papers about specialities other than their own stumble on phrases that baffle them too. Anyone can feel ignorant and embarrassed. Do you know what “O horizon” means? Do you? If a stranger, in conversation, were to say “E horizon”, would you internally cower in confusion and shame? Would you? If you are a scientist who studies tundras, invasive earthworms or soil structure, perhaps you pepper and salt your everyday conversation with those two phrases. Otherwise, Feedback leaves you to your own devices (an internet search, a paper dictionary or a clever 10-year old) to discover what the phrases mean….

Pigeons’ toes and hairdressers

“Predicted probabilities of deformities occurrence in pigeons’ foot according to … the density of hairdressers (quadratic effect)” is one aspect of the study “Urban pigeons losing toes due to human activities“, which is featured in the column “Pigeons Research Review” in the special Gulls, Crows, Pigeons, Woodpeckers issue (volume 29, number 5) of the magazine Annals of Improbable Research.

Ig Nobel Show at Imperial College London

We invite you to join us at the Ig Nobel Show at Imperial College London, UK, on Saturday November 18, 2023.

This resumes the long series of annual events that was interrupted by the pandemic.  Marc Abrahams and several Ig Nobel Prize winners will talk about the prizes, and answer questions. Featuring:

2023 Literature Prize winner Akira O’Connor (the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times)2023 Physics Prize winners Bieito Fernández Castro, Marian Peña, Enrique Nogueira, Miguel Gilcoto, Esperanza Broullón, Antonio Comesaña, Damien Bouffard, Alberto C. Naveira Garabato, and Beatriz Mouriño-Carballido (measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies)2023 Education Prize winner Wijnand van Tilburg (methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students)2023 Chemistry & Geology Prize winner Jan Zalasiewicz (explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks)2014 Ig Nobel Psychology Prize winner Minna Lyons and colleague Gayle Brewer  (a newer study: Referee Height Influences Decision Making in British Football Leagues)

WHAT: Ig Nobel Show

WHERE: Imperial College London, UK, in the Great Hall, in the Sherfield building, Exhibition Road

WHEN: Saturday, November 18, 2023, 2 pm.

TICKETS: This is the first half of a special double-event day, together with BAHFest London. (The Ig Nobel event begins at 2:00 pm. BAHFest begins at 5:00 pm). TICKETS TICKETS TICKETS are on sale; there is the option to purchase tickets for both events, or for  just one.]

Beer foamaroma, Hierarchy of needs (dogs and dinos), Superpowerlessnesses

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:

A frothy matter — A report called “Beer foam is a carrier of aroma” may be the crushing blow beer foam aroma sceptics – if there are any – feared….Hierarchy of dog needs — … Maslow’s list of universal human needs motivated several generations of psychologists to write thousands of papers. And perhaps to take pride in using the non-vernacular phrase “self-actualization”…. Over decades, the list – and its usefulness to scholars – evolved. Now, in 2023, it has become superhuman. Karen Griffin, Saskia Arndt and Claudia Vinke at Utrecht University in the Netherlands wrote a study called “The adaptation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to the hierarchy of dogs’ needs using a consensus building approach“….Hierarchy of dino needs — Recently, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs also lent itself to the scholarly appraisal of two movies. Tidtaya Puteri Larasanty made it the heart of her 2023 dissertation at Diponegoro University, Indonesia. She called it “Hierarchy of needs of the main character in The Good Dinosaur (2015) movie“….Superpowerlessnesses— David Collins demonstrates a classic technique of scientific inquiry: look at the opposite of something that is already known. He studied Feedback’s collection of trivial superpowers and says: “I was becoming depressed at the astonishing range of superpowers claimed by New Scientist readers. So I offer my own contribution. I have no sense of direction….

Ig Nobel Face-to-Face Event at the MIT Museum

We invite you to join us at a new event — Ig Nobel Face-to-Face. This is a companion to the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony that happened in September. Most of the new Ig Nobel Prize winners will be there. They will ask each other questions about their work. And you will get a chance to talk with them.

This will happen at the new MIT Museum building. Its a sort of joyous reunion for us — the very first Ig Nobel Prize ceremony happened in the old MIT Museum building in 1991.

Featuring Marc Abrahams (founder of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony) and:

2023 Literature Prize winners Chris Moulin and Akira O’Connor (studying the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times)2023 Mechanical Engineering Prize winners Te Faye Yap, Zhen Liu, Anoop Rajappan, Trevor Shimokusu, and Daniel Preston (re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools)2023 Public Health Prize winner Seung-min Park (inventing the Stanford Toilet, a device that uses a variety of technologies — including a urinalysis dipstick test strip, a computer vision system for defecation analysis, an anal-print sensor paired with an identification camera, and a telecommunications link — to monitor and quickly analyze the substances that humans excrete)2023 Communication Prize winner Adolfo García (studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backward)2023 Medicine Prize winners Christine Pham and Natasha Mesinkovska (using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person’s two nostrils)2023 Nutrition Prize winner Homei Miyashita (experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food)2023 Education Prize winners Katy Tam and Christian Chan (methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students)2023 Physics Prize winners Bieito Fernández Castro and Miguel Gilcoto (measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies)Conversants Dany Adams, Melissa Franklin, Karen Hopkin, Eric Maskin, and maybe others

WHAT: Ig Nobel Face-to-Face

WHERE: The (new!) MIT Museum building, 314 Main Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (right next to the Kendall T station)

WHEN: Saturday, November 11, 2023, 7-9 pm.

TICKETS are now on sale at the MIT Museum web site. The space is intimate, the number of tickets is limited.

[NOTE: This event will not be livestreamed. It will be video-recorded for eventual broadcast.]

For Journalists: The following day, Sunday, November 12, there will be a leisurely afternoon social event for journalists and Ig Nobel Prize winners, organized in cooperation with the MIT Museum and the New England Science Writers (NESW). For details, please email marc atttttt improbable dottttttt com

“Russian Cyberfarm”

Russian Cyberfarm is part of a crop of newish scifi short films, with a pleasant nod to old documentaries and propaganda films:

Journal of Food Science editorial about the Ig Nobel Prizes

The Journal of Food Science has a nice essay today (October 16, 2023) about the Ig Nobel Prizes. We take the liberty of reproducing it here:

EDITORIAL

Ig Nobel awards

This month’s topic will be a little different, although I promise to bring the discussion back to peer review next month, as we look back on the Peer Review week, September 25–29 (which occurs too late for this editorial). Instead, I’ll take a lighter look at some unique research.

Most scientific researchers dream of being recognized for their work, especially ground-breaking work that is worthy of consideration for a Nobel Prize. It’s too bad that they don’t offer a prize in the category of food science. But there is another award perhaps better suited to the type of research sometimes published in JFS—the Ig Nobel awards. These are the awards that are given for work that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.”

Although there is no category for food science, if you look into the archives of the Ig Nobel awards (https://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of _Ig_Nobel_Prize_winners), there are numerous awards related to foods, either through the physics, chemistry, or nutrition category. A couple of my favorites include the study of the friction coeffi- cient (this was a tribology study) of a banana peel and a probabilistic study of whether a slice of buttered toast lands butter-side down more often. Then there are the two awards for studying the fluid mechanics of coffee sloshing in the cup of a person walking, one each for walking forward or backward. One of my favorites, because I fear I suffer from it, is the study that won an Ig Nobel award “for diagnosing a long-unrecognized medical condition: Misophonia, the distress at hearing other people make chewing sounds.”

In fact, there are multiple Ig Nobel award winners connected to JFS. Indeed, an article published in JFS was the basis of an Ig Nobel award for some Italian researchers. They studied the “Ultrasonic velocity in Cheddar cheese as affected by temperature” (Volume 64, No. 6, 1038– 1041, 2006). Although the title sounds weird if you look at it wrong, and that’s what won it the Ig Nobel, the study had an important underpinning, the use of ultrason- ics as a nondestructive method of characterizing quality attributes. In particular, the temperature effect allowed the researchers to characterize the change of state of the fat in the cheese. I suppose anyone outside of the food field would first laugh at the title but then make them think a little deeper.

There is another author connection with JFS, although the article was actually published in the Journal of Sen- sory Studies. An Ig Nobel award was given to M. Zampini and C. Spence for “demonstrating that food tastes bet- ter when it sounds more appealing.” In fact, this was a study correlating acoustic cues to perceived crispness and staleness of potato chips, a sensory topic we would all recognize as important to our field. The connection is through a coauthor of that paper, Dr. Charles Spence, who recently contributed an article to a special issue in JFS on Advances in sensory science: From perceptions to con- sumer acceptance (https://ift.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/ 17503841/2023/88/S1). His contribution to the special issue was on the importance of color to sensory perception of foods. Congratulations to Dr. Spence for winning an Ig Nobel award. He says he “has been looking to scoop up a second award, but alas, no luck so far.”

For many years now, I’ve been thinking that some of my own work might qualify for an Ig Nobel award. We study things in my lab that could be considered odd when looked at it in a certain way but actually have important conse- quences. I often joke that no one else cares about how ice cream melts more than we do, but apparently that’s not odd enough for an Ig Nobel.

If you are looking for a few chuckles, I recommend spending some time reading the list of Ig Nobel awards.

Sincerely,
Rich Hartel
Editor in Chief Journal of Food Science

Nature physics levity gravity

Nature Physics has a nice essay today about the Ig Nobel Prizes. We take the liberty of reproducing it here:

EditorialPublished: 11 October 2023Levity and gravity

Nature Physics, volume 19, page 1375 (2023)

The Ig Nobel Prize celebrates research that makes us first laugh and then think. We look at some of this year’s not so ignoble highlights.

The announcement of the Nobel Prizes in October is unquestionably one of the most anticipated fixtures of the scientific year. Although the stories of laureates finding out about the high honours bestowed upon them have their charm (Peter Higgs found out when someone told him on the street), the announcement itself is certainly not the most entertaining event. This honour goes to the Ig Nobel Prize, whose winners are announced during its award ceremony in case someone prefers to politely decline when getting the call from a place that is not Stockholm.

The official part of the ceremony where ten Ig Nobel Prizes in different categories are handed out by former Nobel Prize winners is — as described by Amanda Palmer — a “HILARIOUS and INCREDIBLY DORKY evening and ALWAYS awesome”. That’s nothing less than you would expect from an event that commences with a traditional Welcome, Welcome Speech, includes some paper airplane throwing, a mini opera, topics that certain people think about in so-called 24/7 lectures (not measured in hours per day as we shall explain below) and closes with a traditional Goodbye, Goodbye Speech.

During this year’s water-themed 33rd First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, each winner received their Ig Nobel Prize (a PDF document that can be printed out and assembled into a box) along with a supersize Zimbabwean ten trillion dollar bill — research funding issues are now water under the bridge.

Some of the prizes were awarded for research somewhat related to water. Geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, winner of the chemistry and geology prize “for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks”, explained that by wetting the surface of a rock, textures stand out more clearly than on a dry surface. Although there’s no need to do this on a rainy day, licking rocks — as Zalasiewicz demonstrated during the ceremony with a 400-million-year-old rock— is a common workaround.

Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura received the nutrition prize “for experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food”. Through electrical stimulation, humans can perceive information that they normally couldn’t with their tongue1.

Unsurprisingly, water was also the official beverage of the 2023 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and the overarching topic of the five lectures that delivered a complete technical description in 24 seconds, followed by a clear summary in 7 words. From Jasmine Nirody, we learned that “geckos’ bellies help them walk on water” and Andrea Sella explained how to make medium-density amorphous ice with a machine used to grind frozen salami.

The physics prize was awarded “for measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies”2. As the winners explained in their acceptance speech, oceanographers used to believe that fish are too small to mix the water layers in the ocean. But as it turns out, they should care about anchovies having sex in coastal regions.

Marc Abrahams, who founded the Ig Nobel Prize in 1991, wrote in The Guardian that3, “Observers may disagree as to which of these are good, which bad, which important, which trivial. Such distinctions are irrelevant to their winning a prize.” What it all comes down to is that the prize-winning science makes us laugh and then think. Admittedly, a certain sense of humour might be a prerequisite. The peace prize awarded in the founding year went to Edward Teller, “father of the hydrogen bomb and first champion of the Star Wars weapons system, for his lifelong efforts to change the meaning of peace as we know it.” Even if this happens not to be your sense of humour, it will at least make you think — and stick with you.

This fact is an important aspect of successful science communication. In 2022 for their 30-year-long effort in countering fake news with science, education and humour, the team behind the Ig Nobel Prize received the Heinz Oberhummer award for science communication endowed with €20,000 and — as the award’s eponym was fond of alpacas — a jar of alpaca droppings. Abrahams promised that, “Alpaca droppings will then multiply the greatness [of the ceremony] by some nicely irrational number.”

This promise is a highly entertaining thought and indeed, science communication should engage the respective audience. As this year’s communication prize “for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students” showed, the mere anticipation of boredom makes it more likely to occur4 — at least in lectures. By all means, the Ig Nobel Prize and its celebration of quirky yet impactful science is not even remotely dull as dishwater.

References

Nakamura, H. & Miyashita, H. In Proceedings of the 2nd Augmented Human International Conference article no. 34 (Association for Computing Machinery, 2011).

Fernández Castro, B. et al. Nat. Geosci. 15, 287–292 (2022).

Fast Sloth, Spammed History, God and AI, Ambiguity Weary

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them:

Too fast, too furious — The Fast & Furious action movies now have a companion in the world of animal study. A team of biologists videoed a furious and fast – well, relatively fast – incident, which they describe in a paper called “Sloths strike back: Predation attempt by an ocelot (Leopardus pardalis) on a Linnaeus’s two-toed sloth (Choloepus didactylus) at a mineral lick in Western Amazonia, Ecuador“. The video, they explain, “shows the sloth trying to escape at a considerably high speed (for a sloth)…Spam-filtered lives — An advisory memo for lawyers has made Feedback muse on an unanswerable question: how much have spam filters altered the course(s) of history?How many meetings didn’t happen because email spam filters swallowed the invitations? How many agreements went unconsummated? How many other kinds of consummation were banjaxed into spam-filtered-interruptus? The legal advisory, by attorney Barron Henley, explains that “A high percentage of malpractice practice claims and practice management problems are caused by communication breakdowns.” …In God (and AI) we trust — “Thinking about God increases acceptance of artificial intelligence in decision-making.” That is the title of a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. By Mustafa Karataş at Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan, and Keisha Cutright at Duke University, North Carolina, it reads like a thrill ride, with surprises around every corner. The study was a series of experiments…Weary of ambiguity — Are you Weary of research-titles-that-are-ambiguous fame? If you are Daniel Weary, co-author of the study “Exploring the effect of pain on response to reward loss in calves“, the answer is yes. If you are not Weary, or anyway not that Weary, Feedback poses you this riddle: is Weary’s calves study about the muscular back part of the lower leg or is it about young cows? Feedback urges you to read the study and decide for yourself, but here is a not very helpful hint….