Sunday, October 08, 2006

ignobel?

who decides whether a piece of research qualifies as being ignobel or not ..

makes you ponder --> most research is never seen by the world do all those nameless works of research count as better research than the ignobel research?

also it appears that the committee for deciding ignobel awards tries to trivialize the nature of the research and makes it sound more funny than it actually may be ..

almost always the nature of ignobel research is decided based on the question that the research seeks to answer, under the presumption of course that the question is so esoteric to have no real impact .. this raises two questions
1. what about research that is ignobel because it suffers from methodological pathologies ..
2. a lot of pure-science/pure-math can arguably be quite easily categorized into the class of ideas that can have no tangible impact -- would these guys venture to classify that research as being ignobel?

as a last note .. the ignobel awards have a strong bias towards experimental/measurement studies -- dont see why this should be so!

p.s. the woodpecker research in this years ignobel sounds very legit to me .. this post sponsored (mentally not financially!) in part by that

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