Canadians and the IG Nobel prize

Canada has a history of winning important international prizes and the IG Nobel prize

1996 SAFETY ENGINEERING


Troy Hurtubise, of North Bay, Ontario, for developing, and personally testing a suit of armor that is impervious to grizzly bears. [REFERENCE: "Project Grizzly", produced by the "National Film Board of Canada.]

1997 STATISTICS

Jerald Bain of Mt. Sinai Hospital in Toronto and Kerry Siminoski of the University of Alberta for their carefully measured report, "The Relationship Among Height, Penile Length, and Foot Size."

[REFERENCE: "Annals of Sex Research," vol. 6, no. 3, 1993, pp. 231-5.

The 1999 Ig Nobel Prize Winner SOCIOLOGY

Steve Penfold, of York University in Toronto, for doing his PhD thesis on the sociology of Canadian donut shops.
REFERENCE: "The social life of donuts: Commodity and community in postwar Canada," Steven Penfold, York University Ph.D. thesis, 2002.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2010

Did anyone realize that a student at the University of Ottawa won an Ig Noble in 2004 for PHYSICS?

Ramesh Balasubramaniam of the University of Ottawa, and Michael Turvey of the University of Connecticut and Haskins Laboratory, for exploring and explaining the dynamics of hula-hooping.

REFERENCE: "Coordination Modes in the Multisegmental Dynamics of Hula Hooping," Ramesh Balasubramaniam and Michael T. Turvey, Biological Cybernetics, vol. 90, no. 3, March 2004, pp. 176-90.