News & Views item - October 2006

 

 

CSIRO's Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes Win 2006 Mathematics Ig Nobel Prize. (October 7, 2006)

    Postdoctoral fellow Piers Barnes at CSIRO's Division of Industrial Physics when approached by photographer Nic Svenson whinging about the difficulty she had taking group photographs in which none of the individuals was caught with eyes shut produced the following argument and equation:

The probability of one person spoiling a photo by blinking equals their expected number of blinks (x), multiplied by the time during which the photo could be spoilt (t) - if the expected time between blinks is longer than the time in which a photo can be spoilt.
 

This makes the probability of one person not blinking 1 - xt. For two people it's
(1 - xt).(1 - xt) and for a group of people it's (1 - xt)n, n being the number of people.
This means (1 - xt)n is also the probability of a good photo. Therefore, the number of photos should be 1/(1 - xt)n.

 

Where the average number of blinks made by someone getting their photo taken is ten per minute and the average blink lasts about 250 milliseconds and, in good indoor light, a camera shutter stays open for about eight milliseconds.

 

As a rule of thumb Barnes advises, "For groups of less than 20: divide the number of people by three if there's good light and two if the light's bad."

Both  Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes attended the October 5 prize giving ceremony.

 

Together with Terry Tao's winning a Fields Medal, its been a bumper year.
 

See "Blink-Free Photos, Guaranteed," Velocity, June 2006.
 

Winners of the 2006 Ig® Nobel Prize

The winners have all done things that first make people LAUGH, then make them THINK.

"The Ig Nobel awards are arguably the highlight of the scientific calendar." --Nature

The 2006 Ig Nobel Prize winners were awarded on Thursday night, October 5, at the 16th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre.

 

ORNITHOLOGY: Ivan R. Schwab, of the University of California Davis, and the late Philip R.A. May of the University of California Los Angeles, for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don't get headaches.

 NUTRITION: Wasmia Al-Houty of Kuwait University and Faten Al-Mussalam of the Kuwait Environment Public Authority, for showing that dung beetles are finicky eaters.

 PEACE: Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, for inventing an electromechanical teenager repellant -- a device that makes annoying noise designed to be audible to teenagers but not to adults; and for later using that same technology to make telephone ringtones that are audible to teenagers but not to their teachers.

 ACOUSTICS: D. Lynn Halpern (of Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, and Brandeis University,


MATHEMATICS: Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Rsearch Organization, for calculating the number of photographs you must take to (almost) ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed.


LITERATURE: Daniel Oppenheimer of Princeton University for his report "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly."

 MEDICINE: Francis M. Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, for his medical case report "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage"; and Majed Odeh, Harry Bassan, and Arie Oliven of Bnai Zion Medical Center, Haifa, Israel, for their subsequent medical case report also titled "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage."

 PHYSICS: Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris, for their insights into why, when you bend dry spaghetti, it often breaks into more than two pieces.

 CHEMISTRY: Antonio Mulet, José Javier Benedito and José Bon of the University of Valencia, Spain, and Carmen Rosselló of the University of Illes Balears, in Palma de Mallorca, Spain,  for their study "Ultrasonic Velocity in Cheddar Cheese as Affected by Temperature."

 BIOLOGY: Bart Knols (of Wageningen Agricultural University, in Wageningen, the Netherlands; and of the National Institute for Medical Research, in Ifakara Centre, Tanzania, and of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna Austria) and Ruurd de Jong (of Wageningen Agricultural University and of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Italy) for showing that the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet.