MetaFilter posts tagged with nobelprize

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2009

jfricke — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 05:13:26 -0800

Surprise, surprise. It's a girl - for the first time. Elinor Ostrom ("for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons") and Oliver E. Williamson ("for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm") have won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2009.

Obama wins Nobel Prize Peace 2009

NekulturnY — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 02:11:30 -0800

Barack Obama wins Nobel Prize for Peace 2009. Isn't this kind of... soon?

Herta Müller is the 2009 Nobel Laureate in Literature

Kattullus — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:10:13 -0800

This year's Nobel Laureate in Literature is Romanian born author Herta Müller, who writes in German, as predicted yesterday by M. A. Orthofer of The Complete Review and Literary Saloon. Here's an interview with Herta Müller and a short bio.

Never look a gift park in the mouth.

mudpuppie — Mon, 18 May 2009 14:51:54 -0800

A 28-acre plot of unspoiled Sierra foothill forest is bequeathed to the Auburn (CA) Recreation District. The bequeath came with one condition: That the park be named "Nobel Laureate William B. Shockley And His Wife Emmy L. Shockley Memorial Park." You may remember Nobel winner Shockley as the co-founder of the transistor. Or you may remember his as the so-called Father of Silicon Valley. He also made a splash as one of the only admitted donors to the mythical Nobel sperm bank (real name: Repository for Germinal Choice). Or perhaps you remember that he once advocated offering "financial rewards for the 'genetically disadvantaged' [primarily blacks] if they volunteered for sterilization." The Auburn Recreation District was unaware of Shockley's other infamies, and is unsure now about how to proceed with the donated land.

Star Stories and the Nobel Prize

ozomatli — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 08:27:27 -0800

Star Stories explains the life and death of stars using a multimedia approach that incorporates images, animation, video and text. From the official website of the Nobel Foundation. Don't miss out on the other cool games . One of the games has been posted before, but Star Stories is hot off of the presses.

Reading Anna Karenina in Africa

jokeefe — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 13:50:57 -0800

Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech. "The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed."

Nobel Prize in literature 2007

Termite — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 07:20:26 -0800

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2007 is awarded to ... ...the English writer Doris Lessing, “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”. Doris Lessing has been discussed earlier on Metafilter, see for instance here and here.

Fritz Haber

Plutor — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 05:07:15 -0800

Fritz Haber's story is the story of the double edged sword of science. He won the Nobel prize in 1918 for his groundbreaking work in breaking the nitrogen cycle for Germany's WWI efforts, but it's been estimated that two out of every five people now living would not have been born if it weren't for artificial fertilizers created using his process. He also spent much of the war developing poison gases; first chlorine (after watching its first use, Haber's wife committed suicide) and later Zyklon B (the cyanide insecticide later used against his fellow Jews in concentration camps). He died alone and in poverty in Switzerland. But the lessons of his life haven't quite been forgotten.

"For their efforts to create economic and social development from below"

matthewr — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 03:55:34 -0800

In 1976, a young Bangladeshi economics professor named Muhammad Yunus founded Grameen Bank to implement microcredit — lending small sums to the very poorest members of society. Today, he and his bank share the Nobel Peace prize. Grameen, a profit-making company with social objectives, has lent $5.3bn to 6.4m people. 97% of borrowers are women, as Yunus believes [video] "men will do whatever they could to enjoy for themselves personally [but] women looked at it for the children, for the family and for the future."

Orhan Pamuk receives the Nobel Prize

Kattullus — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 06:18:08 -0800

Orhan Pamuk has been awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel website has a short audio interview with Orhan Pamuk in English. Here is the AFP article which has a good rundown of his career. And finally, here's an essay he wrote this summer called Who do you write for?

RNA Interference. 10 Kilodalton Penalty. First Down.

scblackman — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 04:16:05 -0800

[MediFilter] The 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to the discoverers of RNA interference (RNAi) [Note: Links to original 1998 Nature paper .pdf]. The finding that cells have an intricate mechanism for blocking viral RNA replication quickly spawned a new technology for investigating the role of different genes by allowing scientists to quickly, (relatively) cheaply and easily "knock down" their expression and measure the effects. When Kerry Mullis won in 1993 for the discovery of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), there was talk of whether or not the prize had gone to a technical advance and not a fundamental discovery. It will be interesting to see, in this case, which receives more focus: the discovery of a new technology or of a new cellular mechanism.

Co-winner of the Nobel prize in economics

Adamchik — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 10:13:32 -0800

Co-winner of the Nobel prize in economics Robert Aumann of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem gave a very interesting interview about how he became interested in economics, math, and the "topology of bagels." How he applied logic from the Talmud to bankruptcy and other economic events was described nicely at Slate here.

The 2005 Nobel Prize for Economics

daksya — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 07:53:18 -0800

The 2005 Nobel Prize for economics goes to Robert J. Aumann and Thomas C. Schelling. Marginal Revolution has a wonderful set of posts that link to various related resources, like a summary of Aumann's work or Schelling's views on global warming.

Putting your stomach where your mouth is

DirtyCreature — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 18:05:43 -0800

A young, average intern looking for a research project and an older, oft-ridiculed pathologist from an Australian hospital were scoffed at for a decade for daring to challenge the conventional wisdom that stomach ulcers were caused by stress and diet. It took the intern's self-promotion skills, and a extraordinarily bold move of ingesting a large quantity of the Helicobacter bacteria they believed were the dominant cause of ulcers, giving himself severe gastritis and subsequently curing it with only fairly standard antibiotics, before the medical world started taking notice. Despite the ongoing resistance of an 8 billion dollar industry in over the counter heartburn medication, the two have been finally rewarded with a Nobel Prize for uncovering the easily diagnosed bacterial cause and fairly simple cure of over 90% of peptic ulcers.

Nobel Prize Market

MzB — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 15:37:26 -0800

Nobel Prize Market - trading is now over; at least we can see if the economics market outperforms the others.

Congratulations to Austria

mr.marx — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 04:10:57 -0800

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2004: Elfriede Jelinek, probably best known for the story behind Michael Haneke's La Pianiste.

Pontius Pilate contracted his brows, and his hand rose to his forehead...

matteo — Thu, 24 Jun 2004 11:26:17 -0800

"Jesus?" he murmured, "Jesus -- of Nazareth?..." Pontius Pilate, prefect of Judea, is the only historical figure named in the Nicene Creed -- Coptic saint or eternally damned, his role in the greatest story ever told has been debated by many of history's greatest minds: St Augustine, Dante Alighieri, Tintoretto, John Ruskin, Mikhail Bulgakov, Monty Python. Unfortunately, there is very little historical evidence about him. His role in the death of a certain charismatic Galilean healer and apocalyptic preacher is still being debated today by theologians and historians alike. He is also, of course, the main character of The Procurator of Judea, the classic short story (complete text in main link) by Anatole France. (France's magnificent story has lately been tragically neglected by publishers, even if the author was one of his era's most acclaimed writers in the world -- he won the Nobel Prize in 1921 over Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, and Proust, and when he died in 1924, hundreds of thousands of people followed his funeral procession through Paris). These last 2,000 years of fascination with Pilatus can be explained, some argue... (more inside, for those unwilling to wash their hands of this post)

limitedpie — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 06:29:10 -0800

Nobel Prize Winners Hate School. Not that it takes a genius to figure out that 'school is a lot like prison but worse' (George Bernard Shaw) or that it "smothers every truly scientific impulse" (Einstein)....

He and His Man

_sirmissalot_ — Tue, 09 Dec 2003 12:39:09 -0800

J.M. Coetzee's Nobel Speech. It seemed to him, coming from his island, where until Friday arrived he lived a silent life, that there was too much speech in the world. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, delivers his lecture from the perspective of Robinson Crusoe.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Daze — Tue, 30 Sep 2003 23:14:25 -0800

The Nobel Prize for Literature will be announced on Thursday. Two candidates with buzz this year are Syrian poet Ali Ahmad Said, better known as Adonis, and New Zealand novelist-memoirist Janet Frame. Other candidates frequently mentioned include JM Coetzee, Philip Roth, Inger Christensen, Tomas Transtroemer, Margaret Atwood and Carlos Fuentes.

In 1956, Dr. Werner Forssman was awarded The Nobel Prize

hob — Thu, 07 Aug 2003 15:44:33 -0800

Human cardiac catheterization was introduced by Werner Forssman in 1929. Ignoring his department chief, and tying his assistant to an operating table to prevent her interference, he placed a ureteral catheter into a vein in his arm, advanced it to the right atrium [of his heart], and walked upstairs to the x-ray department where he took the confirmatory x-ray film. In 1956, Dr. Forssman was awarded The Nobel Prize. [via the "fortune" command]

Globalization

SandeepKrishnamurthy — Tue, 17 Dec 2002 08:53:04 -0800

Nobel Laureate says it is right to rebel against globalization. "The protests against globalisation are often ungainly, ill-tempered, simplistic, frenzied and frantic, even highly disruptive. And yet, they also serve the function of questioning and disputing the unexamined contentment about the world in which we live." [Exact quote- British spelling]

Nobel Price for Literature

semmi — Tue, 10 Dec 2002 21:21:52 -0800

The acceptance speech of Nobel Price winner for literature Imre Kertesz

Dreama — Fri, 11 Oct 2002 02:55:23 -0800

As war looms, a Peace Prize is awarded. But not to Hamid Karzai, valiantly attempting to rebuild Afghanistan, or 154 other candidates, (a list which will be largely secret until 2052) individuals and groups which are working worldwide. Instead, the Nobel Institute has chosen former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. The award is not just for his (largely unheralded) work in the last year, but for his "decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development." Deserved? More so than others? Care to second guess the Norwegians on this one?

ushuaia — Thu, 10 Oct 2002 04:01:56 -0800

Nobel Prize for Literature. We've got a winner. Imre Kertesz from Hungary. Ever heard of him?