Improbable Awards

The Ig Nobel awards are now in their 34th year and here at Optimize we look forward to this whacky awards ceremony every year.? The awards are the result of the science humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research which each year presents alternative awards along the lines of the rather more formal Nobel prizes.

The categories match those of the more illustrious Nobel cousin but the awards are designed to “first make you laugh and then make you think”. The awards are handed out by real Nobel Laureates and the mission is to "celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative and spur people's interest in science, medicine and technology".

For us, the highlights this year include the award to B.F. Skinner, for experiments to see the feasibility of housing live pigeons inside missiles to guide the flight paths of the missiles.? We were also happy to see the Botany prize given to Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita, for finding evidence that some real plants imitate the shapes of neighboring artificial plastic plants.

Then there is the Physics prize awarded to James C. Liao, for demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout.? Perhaps our favourite this year though was the Demography prize?awarded to Saul Justin Newman, for detective work to discover that many of the people famous for having the longest lives lived in places that had lousy birth-and-death recordkeeping.

Some of our favourites from the past include the winner from 2006 awarded to Welshman Howard Stapleton who created a device that ‘repelled teenagers’ – a device that emitted a high pitch sound inaudible to adults but annoying to teenagers (we can imagine a number of our readers with teenagers now looking for Google to see where they can get one….), last year’s Literature prize awarded to Eric Martínez, Francis Mollica, and Edward Gibson, for analyzing what makes legal documents unnecessarily difficult to understand, and in 2008 of course was the research proving that fleas on dogs jump higher than fleas on cats.

One previous award from 2010 still remains our firm favourite and that was the Management Prize awarded to Alessandro Pluchino (Italy) and colleagues for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.?

This might be a mathematical demonstration and we can certainly attest to certain companies talent management programs being fairly random or at least not based on much science.? However, our experience suggests that random promotions are rarely successful for the individual or the organization, but conversely well-structured talent management programs and effective succession planning deliver real returns.?