<i>BMJ</i>papers on ear growth and didgeridoo for sleep apnea win Ig Nobel awards
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Two papers published in The BMJ have won Ig Nobel awards, which are given for “research that first makes you laugh and then makes you think,” at the 27th annual ceremony on 14 September at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Ig Nobel peace prize was awarded to a Swiss, Canadian, and Dutch team at the University of Zurich for showing in a 2006 paper that playing the didgeridoo was a good treatment for sleep apnea and snoring.1 The Ig Nobel anatomy prize went to British GP James Heathcote, of Bromley, for research published in 1995 on how ears grow bigger with age.2 The event was produced by the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research and Harvard student organizations. Winners received a document signed by an actual Nobel laureate and a cash prize of a Zimbabwean 10 trillion dollar (£0; €0; $0) note. Didgeridoo playing for sleep apnea was discovered by Alex Suarez, a patient who couldn’t tolerate the usual treatment, a mask that produces continuous positive airway pressure. Playing the didgeridoo strengthened the muscles …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.111 | 0.062 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".