On the "Not so Noble"

 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.