Please Stop, I’m Bored.

Please stop, I’m bored! Please stop, I’m bored! (Animated GIF from io9.com)

The 23rd First Annual Ig Nobel Awards Ceremony was held September 12 at Harvard. The event is sponsored by Improbable Research (Link), an organization that looks at ridiculous research studies. (A quick read via an abbreviated version at www.io9.com is available here.) Some of the “winners” research is amazingly… stupid.

Example:

First Place, The Probability Prize:

Awarded to: Bert Tolkamp and colleagues, for making two related discoveries: First, that the longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely that cow will soon stand up; and Second, that once a cow stands up, you cannot easily predict how soon that cow will lie down again.

Reference: “Are Cows More Likely to Lie Down the Longer They Stand?” Bert J. Tolkamp, Marie J. Haskell, Fritha M. Langford, David J. Roberts, Colin A. Morgan, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, vol. 124, nos. 1-2, 2010, pp. 1–10.

(sigh)

Seriously, you can’t make this up. I’m sure much of the “research” is paid for with tax dollars as well.

But on a positive note, the way they keep the acceptance speeches short is nothing but brilliant.

The organizers of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony solved an ancient problem: How to keep speeches from droning on and on… The solution, called “Miss Sweetie Poo”, is an 8-year-old girl who tells long-winded speakers to “Please stop. I’m bored. Please stop. I’m bored…”

This got me to thinking… How could we incorporate a cute, little 8-year old girl into a design presentation?