A year of astonishing research and gripping sport
Others may be winding down but I have been toiling over the entries for the 2004 Barely Managing Awards. Hardly a country, research institute or executive suite has escaped my gaze. There were a few hard calls and, inevitably, some will be disappointed. To the winners: congratulations. To the losers: there is always 2005.
Enough with the pleasantries. The winners are: Best Piece of Research Proving the Bleeding Obvious. Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College for a study showing that people who receive threatening e-mails suffer greater distress than those who receive non-threatening e-mails.
The college's researchers told a British Psychological Society conference that they showed 48 students threatening and neutral e-mails. The researchers monitored the students' blood pressure while they read them. Astonishingly, the hostile e-mails resulted in higher blood pressure than the neutral ones.
If that was not enough, the researchers found that people were more upset when they got threatening e-mails from their superiors than when they received rude e-mails from colleagues of equal status. Well done.
Most Heroic Extrapolation of a Research Result. The runaway winner was an effort by the UK's Medical Research Council and London's Traumatic Stress Clinic which got student volunteers to watch a film featuring traffic accident victims. Some of the students were asked to type a complex five-key sequence on a keypad while they watched the film. The research found that students who tapped on the keypad were less upset by the film than those who did not.
So, keeping your hands busy while something ghastly is happening reduces post-traumatic stress. And it was just a small hop from there to concluding that Madame Defarge
and the women who knitted while they watched people being guillotined during the French revolution
“were probably not troubled by flashbacks of the event afterwards”. Superb.
The Diversity Award goes to Jens Orback, whose appointment as Sweden's equality minister provoked outrage from feminists who said he did not take women's rights seriously and from gay activists who accused him of being a “family fundamentalist, colonialist and neo-conservative”. The former television presenter denied that he was intolerant of alternative lifestyles, pointing out that he had a “wonderful aunt” in Canada who “lived with a horse”.
Most Heart-Warming Resistance to the Rebranding Consultants. In the age of Accenture, Braxton (formerly Deloitte Consulting) and Altria (as we now have to call Philip Morris), this award celebrates organisations that resolutely refuse to change their names. There was some lobbying by admirers of Ar?elik, the Turkish manufacturer, but these awards will not descend to that level of puerility, and, in any event, it is pronounced “Ar-che-lick”.
Instead, this year's winner is the South African Paralympic squad. The athletes sent a message home from the Athens games apologising to anyone who had been offended by their choice of name. But the South African rugby team, the Springboks, were also known by the African name Amabokoboko, and the Paralympians were jolly well going to carry on calling themselves Amakrokokroko.
Most Entertaining Response to a Team Crisis. As 2004 was an Olympic year, we make no apology for continuing in a sporting vein. This award goes to all those involved in the “lay-down Sally” affair. If you are not Australian, you may be unfamiliar with this episode, but Down Under they have been convulsed by it.
What happened was this: halfway through the women's eights rowing final in Athens, Sally Robbins, one of the Australian team, decided she could take no more and flopped backwards in the boat, trailing her oar. The Australians came last. This bore some resemblance to the Paula Radcliffe affair, except that the British runner gave up in two events: the marathon and the 10,000m. There were scattered attempts afterwards to mount an anti-Radcliffe campaign but they fizzled out because most Brits know they could not run 26 yards without collapsing, let alone 26 miles. Second, they like Paula and, third, they know there is more to life than winning, as British teams have proved repeatedly over the years.
In Australia, by contrast, Ms Robbins' collapse “polarised the country” (Sydney Daily Telegraph), was “one of the most heartbreaking and inexplicable scenes ever seen in Australian sport” (also the Sydney Daily Telegraph) and provoked a controversy “bigger than the sinking of the Titanic” (Melbourne Herald Sun).
The way to have dealt with the affair would have been for Ms Robbins to have apologised for letting her team down, for the other seven to have vowed to win gold in Beijing in 2008 and for everyone else to have gone back to the beach.
Instead, one of her team mates threatened to throw her into the water, “lay-down Sally” did not seem wholly contrite and their coach disappeared, failing to explain why he had selected Ms Robbins when she had collapsed in races before. Then, during a welcome-home dinner in Sydney for Australia's Olympians, Catriona Oliver, one of the other rowers, slapped Ms Robbins, for which she received a two-year ban, suspended on condition that she does not slap anyone else.
Lest they come across as a little childish, the seven non-collapsers called for an independent investigation into the affair. Actually, they did not call for it: their parents did.
Meanwhile, Ms Robbins said she hoped to be in the team in Beijing. Noel Donaldson, Rowing Australia's “high performance director”, did not rule it out. “The door's not closed to anybody,” he said. Neither is this award, and I am sure there will be many competitive entries over the next three years. But anyone hoping to beat Australian rowing to the prize in 2008 had better start training now.
This column will return on January 5.
给2004年怪事颁奖
岁末将至，别人可能正松弛下来，但我却一直在为2004年“勉强维持奖”的评选埋头苦干。几乎没有哪一个国家、研究机构或酒店高级套房能逃过我的眼睛。有些结果不太容易定夺，而且不可避免地将会令有些人感到失望。对于获胜者：我要道声祝贺；对于落选者：请加把劲，来年还有机会。
开场白过后言归正传，今年的赢家是：“能证明显而易见结果的最佳研究奖项”――白金汉郡奇尔特恩斯大学学院（Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College）。该学院的一项研究显示，收到威胁性电子邮件的人要比收到不具威胁性电子邮件的人受到更高的心理压力。
研究人员在英国心理学协会（British Psychological Society）的会议上称，他们让48名学生读到威胁性和中性的电子邮件，并在学生阅读时监测其血压。结果真令人惊奇：恶意电子邮件比中性电子邮件导致更高的血压！
得出这个结论似乎还不够，研究人员还发现：阅读来自上司的威胁性电子邮件时，要比阅读来自同等地位的同事发出的无礼邮件感到更大的不安。做得太棒了！
“对研究结果做出最大胆推断奖”――遥遥领先的赢家当属英国医学研究委员会（Medical Research Council）和伦敦创伤压力诊所（Traumatic Stress Clinic），它们让学生志愿者观看一部涉及交通事故受难者的影片。一些学生被要求一边看电影，一边在键盘上输入复杂的5个按键字符。这项研究发现，那些在打键盘的学生比起那些不打键盘的学生感到更低程度的不安。
所以说，当一件可怕的事情发生时，让你的手忙个不停就会减少创伤后心理压力。这样一来，由此也可以很容易推断出，《双城记》中的德法奇夫人（Madame Defarge）以及那些在法国大革命期间一边织毛衣一边目睹砍头的妇女们，“很可能不会受到事后回想这些事件时的困扰”。真是太妙了！
“多样性大奖”――瑞典平等事务部长延斯?奥尔巴克（Jens Orback）当之无愧。他的任命激起了女权主义者和同性恋活跃人士的激烈反对，前者认为他不把女性的权利当回事，而后者则指责他是一个“家庭原教旨主义者、殖民主义者和新保守主义者”。这位前电视节目主持人否认自己不容忍另类的生活方式，并指出他在加拿大有一个“极好的阿姨”曾和“一匹马一起生活”。
“最让人感动的抵制品牌重建顾问奖”――在埃森哲（Accenture）、博敦（Braxton）（原德勤咨询，Deloitte Consulting）和Altria（现在我们不得不称其为菲利普莫利斯，Philip Morris）等品牌时代，这一奖项旨在为那些坚决拒绝更名的机构叫好。土耳其制造商Ar?elik公司的崇拜者曾极力推举此公司，但这个奖项不会沦落到如此幼稚的程度，不管怎么说，这公司的名字应读作“Ar-che-lick”，不要跟“Arse Lick”（意为舔屁股）的声音混淆。
事实上，今年的获奖者是南非的残疾人奥林匹克运动队（残奥队）。 这些运动员从雅典运动会上向家乡发回消息，称他们为自己的命名向所有可能受影响的人道歉。无独有偶，名为“跳羚”（Springboks）的南非英式橄榄球队也有一个非洲名称：Amabokoboko，而这些残奥队员很喜欢自己的名字：Amakrokokroko。
“最搞笑的团队危机反应奖”――由于2004年是奥运年，我们无需为大谈体育而抱歉。这一奖项要授予所有卷入“摆平萨莉”（lay-down Sally）事件的人。如果你不是澳大利亚人，你可能对这个小插曲还不熟悉，但是澳洲人都为这件事而忍俊不禁。
事情是这样的：在雅典奥运会上，当女子8人划艇决赛已经赛到一半时，澳大利亚队中的萨莉?罗宾斯（Sally Robbins）觉得自己再也受不住了，于是在船上往后扑通一倒，拖住了自己的船桨，结果澳大利亚队最后抵达终点。这让人联想到葆拉?拉德克利夫（Paula Radcliffe）事件，唯一不同的是，这位英国长跑运动员放弃了两件赛事：马拉松和1万米赛跑。事后尽管曾有一些零星的反对拉德克利夫的尝试，但最终都也是不了了之，因为大多数英国人都明白，他们跑不了26码就会倒下，更不用说跑26英里了。其次，他们喜欢葆拉。再者，他们懂得生活中有比赢得比赛更重要的东西，正如这些年来英国队运动员屡次证明的那样。
但在澳大利亚就截然不同了，罗宾斯女士的倒下使“该国分成截然不同两派”（载自《悉尼每日电讯报》，Sydney Daily Telegraph），这“是澳大利亚体坛迄今所见最令人伤心、最难以解释的一幕”（同样载自《悉尼每日电讯报》），而且该事件所引起的争议“超过了泰坦尼克号的沉没”（载自《墨尔本先锋太阳报》，Melbourne Herald Sun）。
解决这起事件的方法可以是让罗宾斯女士为自己拖累了团队而道歉，也可以让其余7名队员发誓要在2008年上北京夺回金牌，或者是让所有其他人返回海滩玩儿去。
然而事实却是，她的一名队友威胁要把她扔进水里，看来“摆平萨莉”事件似乎并非只涉及懊悔的感受，就连她们的教练也不知去向，因而无从解释为什么他会挑选罗宾斯女士，她以前也曾在比赛中倒下过。后来在一次悉尼举行的、为澳大利亚奥林匹克运动员接风的宴会上，另一名划艇队员卡特里安娜?奥利弗（Catriona Oliver）打了罗宾斯女士一记耳光，并为此受到2年禁赛的惩罚，不过这项惩罚暂缓执行，条件是她不再打其他人的耳光。
这7位没有倒下的运动员要求对该事件进行独立调查，以免使自己显得有些孩子气。但准确地说，她们并没有作出此要求；这是她们的父母要求的。
另一方面，罗宾斯女士表示，她希望能与划艇队一道参加北京的比赛。而澳洲划艇队“表现出色的主管”诺埃尔?多纳尔森（Noel Donaldson）并不排除这种可能性。他说，“这个大门对任何人都没有关闭。”在此我要加上一句：这个奖项也是如此，而且我确信，在未来3年里会有很多竞争者会为此奖项争得难解难分。不过，如果想在2008年击败澳大利亚划船队而赢得此殊荣，最好现在就开始训练。
本专栏将于2005年1月5日继续与读者见面。
