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Submission + - The 33rd First Annual Ig Nobel Prizes (improbable.com)

Submitted by Thorfinn.au
Thorfinn.au writes: CHEMISTRY and GEOLOGY PRIZE [POLAND, UK] — Jan Zalasiewicz, for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks.
LITERATURE PRIZE [FRANCE, UK, MALAYSIA, FINLAND] — Chris Moulin, Nicole Bell, Merita Turunen, Arina Baharin, and Akira O’Connor for studying the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times.
MECHANICAL ENGINEERING PRIZE [INDIA, CHINA, MALAYSIA, USA] — Te Faye Yap, Zhen Liu, Anoop Rajappan, Trevor Shimokusu, and Daniel Preston, for re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools.
PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE [SOUTH KOREA, USA] — Seung-min Park, for inventing the Stanford Toilet a computer vision system for defecation analysis et alia
COMMUNICATION PRIZE [ARGENTINA, SPAIN, COLOMBIA, CHILE, CHINA, USA] — María José Torres-Prioris, Diana López-Barroso, Estela Càmara, Sol Fittipaldi, Lucas Sedeño, Agustín Ibáñez, Marcelo Berthier, and Adolfo García, for studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backward.
MEDICINE PRIZE [USA, CANADA, MACEDONIA, IRAN, VIETNAM] — Christine Pham, Bobak Hedayati, Kiana Hashemi, Ella Csuka, Tiana Mamaghani, Margit Juhasz, Jamie Wikenheiser, and Natasha Mesinkovska, for using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person’s two nostrils.
NUTRITION PRIZE [JAPAN] — Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura, for experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food.
EDUCATION PRIZE [HONG KONG, CHINA, CANADA, UK, THE NETHERLANDS, IRELAND, USA, JAPAN] — Katy Tam, Cyanea Poon, Victoria Hui, Wijnand van Tilburg, Christy Wong, Vivian Kwong, Gigi Yuen, and Christian Chan, for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students.
PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE [USA] — Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz for experiments on a city street to see how many passersby stop to look upward when they see strangers looking upward
PHYSICS PRIZE [SPAIN, GALICIA, SWITZERLAND, FRANCE, UK] — Bieito Fernández Castro, Marian Peña, Enrique Nogueira, Miguel Gilcoto, Esperanza Broullón, Antonio Comesaña, Damien Bouffard, Alberto C. Naveira Garabato, and Beatriz Mouriño-Carballido, for measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies.
The Internet

Activists Use Wikipedia To Test Aussie Net Censors 330

Posted by samzenpus from the hole-in-the-net dept.
pnorth writes "Editors at Wikipedia have removed a link to a blacklisted web site that sat uncontested for over 24 hours in the main body of the Australian regulator's own Wikipedia entry. The link, which directs readers to a site containing graphic imagery of aborted foetuses, was inserted into ACMA's Wikipedia entry by a campaigner against Internet filtering to determine whether Australia's communications regulator had a double-standard when it came to censoring web content. The very same link motivated the regulator to serve Aussie broadband forum Whirlpool's hosting company with a 'link deletion notice' and the threat of an $11,000 fine. Last night, the link became the subject of 'warring' between several Wikipedia administrators in the lead up to its removal, with administrators saying they didn't want to be used to prove a point."
Censorship

Submission + - Attorney sues website over his online rating (nwsource.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is reporting that a local attorney is suing legal startup Avvo.com over a rating that was algorithmically assigned. The story touches over the controversy of computers grading humans. Such practices are not new: the New York Times earlier this year reported on Google using algorithms to determine applicant suitability. But what happens when you don't like the result? Can a computer program be considered defamatory?
Music

Why Music Really Is Getting Louder 388

Posted by Zonk from the what's-that-grandpa dept.
Teksty Piosenek writes "Artists and record bosses believe that the best album is the loudest one. Sound levels are being artificially enhanced so that the music punches through when it competes against background noise in pubs or cars. 'Geoff Emerick, engineer on the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album, said: "A lot of what is released today is basically a scrunched-up mess. Whole layers of sound are missing. It is because record companies don't trust the listener to decide themselves if they want to turn the volume up." Downloading has exacerbated the effect. Songs are compressed once again into digital files before being sold on iTunes and similar sites. The reduction in quality is so marked that EMI has introduced higher-quality digital tracks, albeit at a premium price, in response to consumer demand.'"

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