Boss revenge, auto-colonoscopy studies win Ig Nobels 2018 :: WRAL.com



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– Anyone who has ever been so furious with his boss that he wants revenge really needs to listen to Lindie Liang.

Liang and her colleagues found that abusing a virtual voodoo doll instead of your boss will make you feel better without being fired or thrown in jail, a study that earned them a Nobel Prize in 2018. Unlikely Search for comic but practical scientific discovery.

Among the winners, a Japanese doctor has come up with a revolutionary new method for colonoscopy. a professor of British archeology who understood that eating human flesh is not very nutritious; an Australian team has found that people who buy high tech products really can not be bothered by the instruction manual; and Spanish university researchers who measured the effects of shouting and insults while driving.

The awards at the 28th annual Harvard University ceremony were presented by real Nobel laureates. The event included a traditional air raid on paper and the premiere of "The Broken Heart Opera", with the help of cardiologists from Harvard Medical School.

The winners, who as usual traveled to Massachusetts at their expense, also received a cash prize of $ 10,000 trillion, a Zimbabwean dollar virtually worthless. Everyone had 60 seconds to deliver an acceptance speech before an 8 year old girl complained on stage: "Please, stop … I'm bored."

Liang, an assistant professor of business at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada, specializes in the study of workplace aggression.

"We wanted to understand why subordinates are fighting back when it's bad for them," she said. "We all know that shouting at our boss is bad for your career, so what is the function of retaliation, and why do people continue to do it?"

Obviously, Liang could not ask people to beat their bosses. Instead, they were shown a voodoo doll in line with the initials of their supervisor. They then had the opportunity to use pins, tweezers or pull on the virtual doll.

The essential: people felt better after abusing the doll or, as Liang said, "their perceptions of injustice are turned off."

Yet she does not approve of workplaces where voodoo dolls are found for people angry with their bosses. Just have more civilian workplaces to start, she suggests.

James Cole, professor of archeology at the British University of Brighton, earned his Nobel Ig for a study on cannibalism that revealed that eating human flesh is probably not the solution if you want a high calorie meal.

Cannibalism is quite common in the history of humanity, he said. But the accepted view is that humans have eaten other humans primarily for nutritional reasons. Cole found that the caloric value of humans is not so high compared to that of other animals that we know our ancestors hunted and eaten.

"We are not super nutritious," he said.

How did Cole determine the calorific value of a human? Do not worry. No man was injured in his study – he used a previously determined formula that bases the calorie count of body parts on weight and chemical composition.

Dr. Akira Horiuchi, pediatrician at Showa Inan General Hospital in Komagane, Japan, was rewarded for his autocoloscopy study during which he used a colonoscope designed for children and sitting in position elongate.

Horiuchi does not recommend that you give yourself a colonoscopy in the comfort of your own home. He said by e-mail that many people were afraid to do a colonoscopy and he just wanted to show how easy it could be.

"If people are watching a video of my colonoscopy, they think colonoscopy is simple and easy," he said.

People may laugh at the winners, but Horiuchi said that winning a Nobel Ig draws attention to studies such as his that might otherwise be ignored.

The incidence and death rate of colorectal cancer in Japan is increasing, he added. If his job makes someone more willing to undergo a colonoscopy, he reasons, perhaps it will save lives.

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