Accolades for Cool Australian Research

Research by University of Newcastle’s Professor Hugh Craig has been included in a Power of Humanities publication released by the Australian Academy of the Humanities (launched by none other than everyone’s favourite education minister, Christopher Pyne). The entry, entitled Enlisting Shakespeare to Help Fight Cancer, outlines how Professor Craig, along with Professor Pablo Moscato, attempted to identify whether a play had been written by Shakespeare or one of his contemporaries. With the help of a supercomputer, they found common words that each author used at different rates, and were thus able to determine which author should get the credit for the previously unattributed play. But why stop there? They then used this same technology to identify common biomarkers in cancer, allowing for specialised treatment with targeted drugs. You can read more about their research here.

Meanwhile, research conducted by Sydney University’s Nick Enfield (along with his colleagues Dr Mark Dingemanse and Dr Francisco Torreira from the Max Planck Institute for Pyscholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands) has earnt an Ig Nobel prize. They won the esteemed prize “for discovering that the word ‘huh?’ (or its equivalent) seems to exist in every human language — and for not being quite sure why”, according to the Ig Nobel website. Their research is outlined properly in the (free access!) paper Is “Huh?” a Universal Word? Conversational Infrastructure and the Convergent Evolution of Linguistic Items. While research like this may seem silly at first, the Ig Nobel Prizes honour “achievements that make people laugh, and then think”. The huh? paper has consequences for questions about language universals, innateness, and understandings of how speakers repair breakdown in conversation across different cultures.

Congratulations to all the researchers!