Laugh now. Think later.
Dear students,
We are all no doubt recovering from our tryptophan-laced meal. I hope your travels back to Austin are safe. Over Thanksgiving, I caught up on a little reading with John Perry's book The Art of Procrastination, which I've been carrying in my book bag for a few months, but just never got around to reading it (?!). It's based on a free article in the Chronicle of Higher Education which I recommend — in it he suggests that all of us procrastinators are actually very productive because we secretly use completing moderately important tasks as a means of postponing the really important tasks on our to-do lists. Hopefully you can identify some important birthday thank you notes to put off in order to better tackle your coursework for the next couple of weeks.
John Perry's book was recognized with an Ig Nobel Prize which celebrate the year's most improbable research. Since I'd told you about the Nobel Prizes I also meant to let you know about this year's Ig Nobel winners. Unfortunately I just kept putting it off. Some highlights include:
- This year's Ig Nobel in Psychology went to Anita Eerland, Rolf Zwaan, and Tulio Guadalupe for their study "Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller: Posture-Modulated Estimation," which documents that our estimation of size is affected by our posture. So apparently if I write exam averages on the board with a slight tilt to the right everyone will be more satisfied?
- This year's Ig Nobel in Neuroscience went to Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford, for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can interpret "meaningful" brain activity anywhere — even in a dead salmon. They showed that some of the tools of neuroscience, when interpreted without care, find patterns where inappropriate — such as attributing brain activity in dead fish. Once again they've proved the old adage that correlation is not the same as causation. Their paper ("Neural Correlates of Interspecies Perspective Taking in the Post-Mortem Atlantic Salmon: An Argument For Multiple Comparisons Correction") was published in the Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results.
- This year's Ig Nobel in Literature went to the US Government General Accountability Office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports. ("Actions Needed to Evaluate the Impact of Efforts to Estimate Costs of Reports and Studies"). 'Nuff said.
- This year's Ig Nobel in Fluid Dynamics went to Rouslan Krechetnikov and Hans Mayer for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee. I wish I'd read their article ("Walking With Coffee: Why Does It Spill?") before I'd ruined so many shirts on my way over to Welch Hall to teach this year.
- This year's Ig Nobel in Medicine went to Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel Antonietti for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimize the chance that their patients will explode ("Colonic Gas Explosion During Therapeutic Colonoscopy with Electrocautery"). Those of you taking classes with pre-meds will never look at them the same way again.
- This years Ig Nobel in Acoustics wen to Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada for creating the SpeechJammer — a machine that disrupts a person's speech, by making them hear their own spoken words at a very slight delay ("SpeechJammer: A System Utilizing Artificial Speech Disturbance with Delayed Auditory Feedback") If you see your professor walk in to class with a suspicious small black box, now you'll know.
For previous year's Ig-Nobel prizes, see their web site.
Keep smiling in the coming week,
Sacha Kopp
Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education,
College of Natural Sciences
PS: When Christmas break happens, this is the time to actually start thinking about your summer. My first summer in college I spent making pizzas back in my home town. I hope you'll do a little better, and actually build some experience useful to you. Two programs are worth mentioning:
- The National Science Foundation runs a program called the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) across all disciplines. Universities and labs act as host sites for students all across the county to apply. All areas of science are represented. Applications will probably open soon, but you don't want to wait til the new semester to start thinking about this.
- The US Department of Energy has the "DOE Scholars' program" which is accepting applications now through Jan 4. Again, internships for summer are available in all areas of science at the DOE's national laboratory facilities. Here the thing to keep in mind is that there will be a diverse set of internships at each lab — such as chemistry and biology internships at a particle accelerator lab. You have to look at the mission of each lab and read about all the areas you might participate. In addition to the link above, those with questions are invited to contact Barbara Dunkin at DOE via email or phone at 865-574-6440.
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