In Blink Of An Eye, Aussies Win Open And Shutter Case
The Sunday Age
Sunday October 8, 2006
AUSTRALIAN scientists, take a bow. In 2001, we won the technology prize for patenting the wheel. In 2003, we won the physics prize for a study entitled An analysis of the forces required to drag sheep over various surfaces. And this year we won the mathematics prize - for figuring how many group photos need to be taken to be confident there's at least one where no one is blinking.
These prizes are the quirky alter ego of the Nobel Prize, the Ig Nobels, which celebrate and recognise bizarre and funny scientific research. Chosen by the American journal Annals of Improbable Research, the winners of 10 categories were duly recognised at a ceremony at Harvard University this week, including our home-grown experts on blinking analysis, Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes, of the CSIRO. "My colleague, Nic Svenson, who is a science writer, was getting fed-up with too many of her group shots - which she needed to take for some of her articles - being spoilt by people blinking," said Dr Barnes, who works at CSIRO Industrial Physics in Sydney."She figured there must be somebody in our organisation who could figure out the problem, so she found me and I thought that it sounded like an interesting problem."Dr Barnes said many factors altered the rate of blinking - from a person's nervous disposition to the state of light in a room - so he approached the problem from a minimalist angle. "What we did was condense it all down to single parameters, such as the time that a blink actually lasts and the expected duration between blinks - the blink rate, if you like. Just using those two things, we came up with out formula."It was not hard work. "It was a couple of lunchtimes and a bit of thinking about it in the evening," he said. How many photos do you need to take to be confident no one in your group shot is blinking? For groups of fewer than 20, divide the number of people by three if there is good light or a decent flash, and divide by two if the light is bad. So how did Boston's Annals of Improbable Research get wind of it? Ms Svenson did a piece on the formula on the ABC's Science Show, which apparently has overseas fans - including one connected with the journal. "He and the prize committee obviously thought that it was sufficiently amusing, and met the criteria," he said. "It made people laugh and think about some aspect of science. To our amazement, we were selected for the award."Dr Barnes said the formula had been only a theory to that point. When he found out they had been selected for an Ig Nobel, the pair thought they had better verify it experimentally. "We got a whole lot of our colleagues together in the canteen during a coffee break and took a whole lot of photos," he said. "To our surprise, the number of blinks in the photos seemed to be more or less following the pattern that we predicted. We were quite pleased and relieved after that." Dr Barnes described the prize as "no cash but much cachet".
© 2006 The Sunday Age
Share This