Archives
Electronic Highways
The Nobel Prize: Some dynamite online sites
This past Monday, the Nobel committees announced the recipient of the prize in physiology or medicine, followed by physics on Tuesday and chemistry yesterday. Tomorrow, the Nobel Peace Prize winner will be announced in Oslo, and on Monday the winner of the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, founder of the prizes, will be named. Later this fall, the Swedish Academy confers the Nobel Prize in Literature. The official ceremony honoring all prizewinners will take place on Dec. 10, the 109th anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death.
If you're curious about this tradition, a good starting point would be to visit the official Web site of the prizes at http://nobelprize.org/. You can familiarize yourself with Alfred Nobel's life, and most importantly, his last will and testament, which furnished the endowment to honor the world's achievements in science, literature and humanitarianism. An excerpt from the will is on the site, along with a 17-minute slide presentation. Other features of this site include biographies, interviews, text excerpts, presentation speeches and photos of all 763 winners.
Moreover, there are games and simulations illustrating many of the recipients' ideas or creations. For example, you can play the Lord of the Flies Game, or Conductive Valley ("Shape and furnish your future house with conductive polymers!") Finally, you can take a virtual tour of the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, which this year offers an exhibit on Albert Einstein (1921, physics).
An unofficial, yet quite informative and entertaining site is the Nobel Prize Internet Archive (http://www.almaz.com/nobel/). This is more interactive than the aforementioned site; visitors can submit Web sites on the various Nobel recipients to be added as links, or they can contribute to various discussion topics in the Nobel Gossip Bulletin Board—the most stimulating being the "who will/should win?" category. You also can view a list of institutions that claim Nobel laureates as faculty, researchers or students—as of this writing, Cambridge University edges out the University of Chicago for the top spot, 80-78—discover which recipients share your birthday, and test your Nobel trivia I.Q.
Unlike the other Nobel prizes, which are judged and presented in Stockholm, the Nobel Peace Prize is administered by the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo, and thus has its own official Web site (http://www.nobel.no/). The site includes information on the history and mission of the committee, a list of award recipients, the texts of presentation and acceptance speeches of the past seven years, and a searchable catalog of the Norwegian Nobel Institute's library. The affiliated Nobel Peace Center (http://www.nobelpeacecenter.org/), which was opened to the public last year, hosts the live broadcast of the annual ceremony and also sponsors lectures, films and exhibits throughout the year. The current exhibit is on Bertha von Suttner, the first female Nobel laureate, who received her prize in 1905.
If you are of the opinion (and you are not alone) that the Nobel prizes themselves are taken a bit too seriously, you can look no further than Harvard University, where the annual Ig Nobel Prize (http://www.improbable.com/ig/) ceremony will be held today. Under the auspices of the Annals of Improbable Research, the prize honors achievements that, according to the conferrers, "first make people LAUGH, then make them THINK."
You can watch video of previous ceremonies, the proceedings of which range from mock-solemnity to near-chaos. All winners since 1991 are listed, most with links to their research, primarily in the fields of biology, chemistry, economics, engineering, literature, medicine, peace, public health and psychology. For a satirical antidote to the Nobel prizes, this site is highly recommended.
Finally, you may wish to keep abreast of world reaction to the awards by connecting to some of UB's current events-related online resources, particularly Lexis/Nexis Academic (http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/lexisnexis.html). In addition to accessing full-text news about the Nobel prizes, you can read related stories, such as the dubious scheme for genetic perpetuation of genius (type in the terms "nobel prize sperm bank"), of which the less said in this column, the better.
—Rick McRae, University Libraries