Honoring the Scholars Who Answer Questions Most People Don't Ask

Ever wonder why woodpeckers don't get headaches? Or why dry spaghetti often breaks into more than two pieces? Or whether a female mosquito would be more attracted to the smell of human feet or the odor of Limburger cheese?

Neither have I. But there are scientists who have asked and answered precisely these questions. And for their efforts, they were among 18 researchers who received Ig Nobel prizes in 10 categories last night at Sanders Theatre on the Harvard University campus.

The annual awards, first presented in 1991, spoof the Nobel prizes and honor scholarly research that "makes you laugh, then makes you think," said Ig Nobel founder Marc Abraham. This year's Igs were presented by five actual Nobel winners amid showers of paper airplanes tossed by the 1,200 audience members -- another Ig Nobel tradition.

A favorite: Princeton University psychologist Daniel M. Oppenheimer. He won the Ig Noble Prize in Literature for his article "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems With Using Long Words Needlessly," which appeared in the March issue of Applied Cognitive Psychology.

"It turns out that somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of people admit to replacing short words with longer words in their writing in an attempt to sound smarter," Oppenheimer said in an e-mail. "The problem is that this strategy backfires -- such writing is reliably judged to come from less intelligent authors.

"Back when I was a graduate student, I graded a lot of student papers, and I hated slogging through thesaurus-heavy writing. And yet, students kept turning it in. It made me curious as to whether my intuitions were typical. So I decided to test it."

As for the Ig Nobel, this laureate said he couldn't be prouder: "How often does one get a chance to receive a competitive international award for one's work?"

Stemming the Loss of Good Teachers

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Perhaps what we need is a No Teacher Left Behind program.

Certainly we should do something: Schoolteachers are less qualified today than they once were. And you can blame growing opportunities for women in other, higher-paying professions -- and stingy government officials -- for the teacher brain drain, says economist Marigee P. Bacolod of the University of California at Irvine.

Bacolod examined standardized-test scores, the selectivity of colleges that teachers attended and other measures of excellence. She found a dramatic drop in teacher quality since the 1950s, with the biggest decline occurring in the 1980s.

For example, she found that in 1970 about 30 percent of women in their twenties who scored in the top 20 percent on IQ and other tests became teachers, compared with only 8 or 9 percent of twentysomething women in the 1990s. That's key, because about 70 percent of teachers in kindergarten through 12th grade are women, a proportion that has not changed much in decades.

At the same time, the proportion of smart women who entered other professions soared as doors to other, higher-paying professions slowly swung open. One answer: Raise teacher salaries. Bacolod's findings indicate that that would significantly increase the percentage of smart women -- and men -- who become teachers.

Equal-Opportunity Affliction

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Men are as likely as women to be compulsive buyers, a condition that affects about one in 20 adults in the United States, according to Lorrin M. Koran, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University's medical school.

Koran and his colleagues surveyed 2,513 adults in 2004 and found that 6 percent of women and 5.5 percent of men exhibited symptoms of hard-core compulsive shopping: irresistible and often senseless impulses to buy that they felt largely powerless to resist.

"Compared with other respondents, compulsive buyers were younger, and a greater proportion reported incomes under $50,000 . . . and were more than four times less likely to pay off credit card balances in full," Koran and his colleagues reported in the latest American Journal of Psychiatry.

Richard Morin is a senior editor at the Pew Research Center. Versions of this column appear at washingtonpost.com andhttp://www.pewresearch.org.