Penned some time around June 2021.....
The “Ig Nobel Prize”, as you all might be aware, is a “satiric prize”, awarded every year to the ten most absurd research papers written. Its name is a parody of the Nobel Prize, which it mockingly imitates. Also, “Ignoble”==> not noble.
You will be at
once horrified and bemused to know that a paper “Money and Transmission of
Bacteria” by Gedik et al 2013 had been awarded the Ig Nobel in 2019!! And just
within a year or so, the world was to be shattered by the dreaded scourge of
Covid-19 claiming millions of lives.
As Wisniewski et
al (2021) put it,… “The reaction to the study of Gedik et al. (2013) epitomizes
the attitudes of the bygone era (prior to the Covid-19 crisis). Their
insightful analysis examined bacterial survival on banknotes from different
countries. For their work, the authors received a satirical Ig Nobel Prize for
economics in 2019. One year later, the escalating death toll from coronavirus
caused a sea change in general attitudes towards this problem”.
---- Piotr
Wisniewski, Michal Polasik, Radoslaw Kotkowski, Andrea Moro (2021), “Switching
from Cash to Cashless Payments during the COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond”.
Quite a lot of
food for thought there, isn’t it?
Below, some
glimpses into the "Ig Noble" Ceremony.
