Was the Ig Nobel prize a big surprise?
Yes, a big surprise. Before I received the award, one of my students in Montreal told me that I was on the website of the Annals of Improbable Research, which I had never heard of. Did you know that you had been nominated, or did you just receive notification that the prize was yours? The organiser at Harvard, Marc Abrahams, is an editor of Annals of Improbable Research. He contacted me to confirm that it was indeed my work, told me they wanted to give me the Ig Nobel in medicine for that year, and offered me the chance to accept or decline. Some very serious professors don’t like it—I thought it was great. The Ig Nobel brought me amazing publicity and now if you type in my name, there are about 30 000 hits in Yahoo and 18 000 in Google. What did you get from the organisers? Any gifts, a statue, money? The prize was a strange looking, useless plaque with some fake mobile phones attached to it. The best prize has been the incredible publicity for my work in injury prevention, which for
