Les anti Nobel 2016 sont arrivés

Vous l'avez sans doute lu ailleurs car désormais les grands médias en sont friands. À tout hasard, pour ceux qui marchent en regardant l'asphalte et ne s'informent qu'en lisant les manchettes du JdeQ... Les Ig Nobel 2016 ont été décernés hier.

Le prix le plus adapté aux domaines de recherche du centre ETE est celui... d'économie. Yep!

Economics Prize - Mark Avis and colleagues, for assessing the perceived personalities of rocks, from a sales and marketing perspective.

L'article d'origine: The brand personality of rocks: A critical evaluation of a brand personality scale. Marketing Theory DOI: 10.1177/1470593113512323
Vous pourrez d'ailleurs faire une application concrète de leur théorie en allant visiter la magnifique exposition de minéraux qui est dans le hall du 490 jusqu'en novembre. Rien ne se perd...

Il y a bien sûr quelques perles plus savoureuses que les autres :

Reproduction Prize - The late Ahmed Shafik, for testing the effects of wearing polyester, cotton, or wool trousers on the sex life of rats.

Chemistry Prize - Volkswagen, for solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electromechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested.

Biology Prize - Awarded jointly to: Charles Foster, for living in the wild as, at different times, a badger, an otter, a deer, a fox, and a bird; and to Thomas Thwaites, for creating prosthetic extensions of his limbs that allowed him to move in the manner of, and spend time roaming hills in the company of, goats.

Pour le gars des chèvres, il y a même un vidéo. On a mal au dos juste à le regarder... : http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37443204

et les autres également hilarants mais désormais, on est tellement blasé, n'est-ce pas?...

Medicine Prize - Christoph Helmchen and colleagues, for discovering that if you have an itch on the left side of your body, you can relieve it by looking into a mirror and scratching the right side of your body (and vice versa).

Psychology Prize - Evelyne Debey and colleagues, for asking a thousand liars how often they lie, and for deciding whether to believe those answers.

Peace Prize - Gordon Pennycook and colleagues, for their scholarly study called "On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit".

Physics Prize - Gabor Horvath and colleagues, for discovering why white-haired horses are the most horsefly-proof horses, and for discovering why dragonflies are fatally attracted to black tombstones.

Literature Prize - Fredrik Sjoberg, for his three-volume autobiographical work about the pleasures of collecting flies that are dead, and flies that are not yet dead.

Perception Prize - Atsuki Higashiyama and Kohei Adachi, for investigating whether things look different when you bend over and view them between your legs.

Pour en savoir (à peine un peu) plus : http://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/insolite/201609/22/01-5023423--anti-nobel-des-rats-en-pantalon-un-homme-chevre-dans-la-cuvee-2016.php

Photo : "Herd of goats", domaine public, via Wikimedia commons