Apart from being incredibly fashionable, wearing socks over shoes to prevent blowing out on the icier parts of Dunedin terrain had been thought to be a practice with little justification. That was until a three-person team of researchers from the University embarked on a scientific endeavour to prove that it was also very practical.
Researchers Dr. Lianne Parkin, Dr. Patricia Priest, and Associate Prof Sheila Williams conducted the shoes-over-socks research last year by getting study participants to gather on a winter morning. Half of them put socks over their shoes and walked down Dunedin's Queen Street, and the other half were left to walk down in their regular footwear
As you may have guessed, those who had the socks over their shoes had less trouble traversing the traction-less pavement. The study’s findings were published in the New Zealand Medical Journal last year.
Dr. Parkin told the Otago Daily Times the "light-hearted" research was carried out independently by the group, who got the idea over morning tea. The research has attracted international attention, and the group has now been honoured with a coveted Ig Nobel.
The Ig Nobel awards, handed out by the Annals of Improbable Research in a ceremony at Harvard University, are a 20-year-old tradition awarding scientific achievements that “first make people laugh, then make them think.” The group won the prize in the Physics category.
Past winners have been toasted for research which demonstrated that toast would more often fall on the buttered side, the discovery of a link between over-exposure to country music and suicide, and publication of proof that trained pigeons can discriminate between the paintings of Picasso and the works of Monet.
But the awards are not entirely devoid of scientific merit or effort. The winners of the 2000 Award for Physics, who won for using magnets to levitate a frog, went on to win a real Nobel Prize in Physics this year for their work with Graphene.
This year was the 20th anniversary of the Awards, which are handed out by real Nobel Prize laureates.
Otago Scientists Honoured for Sock Research
