drone on
今年のイグノーベル賞の授賞式が２０日、ハーバード大学で開かれ、しゃべっている人を黙らせる装置「スピーチジャマー」を発明した産業技術総合研究所の栗原一貴研究員と科学技術振興機構の塚田浩二研究員の２人が「音響学賞」に選ばれました。
drone onは「低い単調な声でものうげに語る」という意味で、ミツバチの雄の羽音に由来する動詞です。最後あたりに出てくるersatzは「偽の、代用の」という意味でこの賞ではすっかりおなじみの単語ですね。
Shut up! Speech Jammer Among 2012 Ig Nobel Winners
For anyone who's ever been tired of listening to someone drone on and on and on, two Japanese researchers have the answer.
The SpeechJammer, a device that disrupts a person's speech by repeating his or her own voice at a delay of a few hundred milliseconds, was named Thursday as a 2012 winner of the Ig Nobel prize — an award sponsored by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine for weird and humorous scientific discoveries.
The echo effect of the device is just annoying enough to get someone to sputter and stop. Actually, the device created by Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada is meant to help public speakers by alerting them if they are speaking too quickly or have taken up more than their allotted time.
"This technology ... could also be useful to ensure speakers in a meeting take turns appropriately, when a particular participant continues to speak, depriving others of the opportunity to make their fair contribution," said Kurihara, of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan. Still, winning an Ig Nobel in acoustics for the device's other more dubious purpose is cool too.
"Winning an Ig Nobel has been my dream as a mad scientist," he said. As usual, the ersatz Nobels were handed out by real Nobel laureates, including 2007 economics winner Eric Maskin, who was also the prize in the "Win a Date with a Nobel Laureate" contest.
