Nobel Prizes

[Provost Harrison]

EDIT: misread, I thought they were given the award for work into discovering apoptosis which was done years ago. Damn things.

Yes, well it is important to figure out why cells divide into the patterns they do and how the develop into a fully functional organism with distinct compartmentalisation of tissue of distinct histology. Basically, their work was another step on the way to figuring out how a cell and it's genome divide into the very distinct patterns they do to become an adult human, almost without fail...

[Provost Harrison]

I would like to see something more comprehensive about the awards, that medicine link in the first post is a bit too fluffy for my tastes...

[Urban Ranger]

Nothing on the Nobel site itself?

[CyberGnu]

Hey, PH, how is the research going? Are you graduating soon?

[CyberGnu]

http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/2002/press.html

does this help?

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
Detection of neutrinos? How long has that been? 30 years?

Not detection of neutrinos. Groundwork required to use neutrinos in antronomy/astrophysics. Detection of neutrinos was awarded nobel prize quite a while ago, IIRC.

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Buck Birdseed
So, as usual, does any people who actually do stuff know what the **** these are about?

The physics prize is interesting, given that neutrino astronomy still isn't very well established. They're giving the prize to people who laid foundations of a discipline which we're not even sure is useful yet.

[Buck Birdseed]

Good lord, I've never heard of Kertész Imre and I'm half-hungarian.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Frogger


The physics prize is interesting, given that neutrino astronomy still isn't very well established. They're giving the prize to people who laid foundations of a discipline which we're not even sure is useful yet.

Multiply that by 100 and you have the media.

[Rogan Josh]

Originally posted by Frogger
The physics prize is interesting, given that neutrino astronomy still isn't very well established. They're giving the prize to people who laid foundations of a discipline which we're not even sure is useful yet.

Well, I think the interesting thing is more that it looks like a political decision. If you had told me that Davis and Koshiba woud get the Prize with a third person, I wouldn't have been surprised but I would have assumed it was for neutrino oscillations and would have wrongly guessed the third guy (there is another japanese guy who would have got it for oscillations).

However, the abstract doesn't mention oscillations at all, and the second half is obviously not connected to oscillations.

It almost looks like the committee wanted to award Davis and Koshiba for their work without admitting that neutrinos oscillate -- just in case there turns out to be some other explanation. It seems a bit weird....

[Eli]

Originally posted by Buck Birdseed
Good lord, I've never heard of Kertész Imre and I'm half-hungarian.

Another Jew joins the nobel list.

[Adam Smith]

Nobel Prize in Economics

Kahneman's work involves trying to integrate psychology and economics. It might help explain how expectations are formed, and in turn explain supposedly irrational behavior, such as investment bubbles. Matthew Rabin (UCal Berkeley) won last year's John Bates Clark Award (best American economist under 40) for similar work.

Vernon Smith's award is well deserved and long overdue. Economists constantly complain that they have to develop theories without being able to do experiments on the economy. Vernon Smith was the first guy to do experiments, usually with respect to individual agents or markets (microeconomics). Some of his earliest work was intended to probe the underlying assumptions of microeconomic theory. In two famous early experiments he found that agents we might expect to be "irrational", namely pigeons and drunks, behave "rationally" by demanding less of something when the price goes up.

His later work involved simulation of market mechanisms. This is particularly useful in deciding whether and how to deregulate industries, since you don't have any data on how the industry will act after the fact. In essence, he would give a bunch of grad students a list of the proposed regulations, tell them they get say one percent of any supposed profits they generate, and then play out a simulation game. Would they collude or not? Would the collusion fall apart or not? Could the regulations be redesigned to prevent problems? Vernon Smith's experiments were used as the basis for auctioning off the spectrum in the US, and could well have been applied to California electricity deregulation if the State Legislature had bothered.

[Urban Ranger]

Pigeons?

[DanS]

"Vernon Smith's experiments were used as the basis for auctioning off the spectrum in the US"

This process was fascinating--an adult's intellectual playground.

I heard that Malone drove up the prices on the spectrum, never with the intention of actually buying the licenses. What a bastard!

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Rogan Josh


Well, I think the interesting thing is more that it looks like a political decision. If you had told me that Davis and Koshiba woud get the Prize with a third person, I wouldn't have been surprised but I would have assumed it was for neutrino oscillations and would have wrongly guessed the third guy (there is another japanese guy who would have got it for oscillations).

However, the abstract doesn't mention oscillations at all, and the second half is obviously not connected to oscillations.

It almost looks like the committee wanted to award Davis and Koshiba for their work without admitting that neutrinos oscillate -- just in case there turns out to be some other explanation. It seems a bit weird....

I had predicted neutrino oscillations on the first page of this thread, actually.