Interest In Penile Length Among Academics Growing

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Who said Finns don’t have a sense of humor? One of Finland’s very own has produced the second biggest joke of the year (the first obviously being our president and congress negotiating about how much more of our money to spend).

Somebody calling himself Tatu Westling, a doctoral student in economics from the University of Helsinki, has written “Male Organ and Economic Growth: Does Size Matter?“, a paper meant, in his own words, “to fill [a] scholarly gap with the male organ.”

Westling’s paper joins the comedy trend started by the Korean team of Choi, Kim, Jung, Yoon, Kim, & Kim— sounds more like a law firm than a collective of scientists—in their masterwork, “Second to fourth digit ratio: a predictor of adult penile length.”

This new work is only a discussion paper on the Helsinki department’s web site, so if it really was written in earnest, it is unlikely to be exposed to a more general audience. And it wasn’t—written in earnest, that is. It is almost certainly a prank by a punchy graduate student.1 There’s not a lot of sun and fun in Finland in the winter, and when you haven’t seen daylight in the last four weeks, strange things begin to seem hilarious. Penile Length and GDP

The best indication that this is a spoof comes from the opening sentences of the abstract:

This paper explores the link between economic development and penile length between 1960 and 1985. It estimates an augmented Solow model utilizing the Mankiw-Romer-Weil 121 country dataset. The size of male organ is found to have an inverse U-shaped relationship with the level of GDP in 1985.

An augmented Solow model, eh? Westling purports to show that “Economic growth between 1960 and 1985 is negatively associated with the size of male organ…With due reservations it is also found to be more important determinant of GDP growth than country’s political regime type.”

Put into plain English, this implies countries filled with men sporting flat underwear do better on the markets than do countries filled with men who have something to boast about. Translated yet again, and using the Choi, Kim, Jung, etc. paper as a baseline, it means Asians are besting Westerns, but only economically speaking.

Considering penile length and the economy, Westling says, “Injections of capital result in higher growth rates in developing countries and convergence should ensue.” This confirms the work of population biologists. As are his next words:

It is argued here that the average size — the erect length, to be precise — of male organ in population has a strong predictive power of economic development during the period. The exact causality can only be speculated at this point but the correlations are robust.

Somehow, Westling got his hands on the erect lengths—to be precise—of men of varying nationalities, from some mysterious database “augmented” by Mankiw. This database confirms “the ‘male organ hypothesis’ put forward here suggests that penises carry economic significance. Quite remarkably, the statistical endurance of the male organ is also found very formidable.”

You bet it is, baby! Just don’t get me started on statistical endurance.

Which sizes produces the heftiest bank balances? “GDP-maximizing length can be identified at around 13.5 centimetres [5.3 inches]. One striking result is the collapse in GDP after male organ exceeds the length of 16 centimetres [6.3 inches].”

But it is “also noteworthy that countries with below 12 centimetre [4.7 inches] male organs are generally less developed.” Poor things.

Westling concludes: “Taken at face value the findings suggest that the ‘male organ hypothesis’ put forward here is quite penetrating an argument. Yet for the best of author’s knowledge, male organ has not been touched in the growth literature before.” And for good reason: who wants to dirty their hands on this topic?

We could discuss the hard-core statistical results of the paper—such as the regression equation which includes both the term Organ and Organ-squared—but we would not learn much, except that, “If standard of living and penile length covary positively, the latter’s coefficient would be biased upwards.”

He also surmises “an evidently Freudian line of thought the notion of self-esteem might be at play” to explain why small size produces vigorous economic activity.

The tables, charts, models, and pictures Westling uses are all nonsense, of course, but they are sufficiently scientific looking to fool reporters. My guess is that he put this paper up for the benefit of his fellow students as a way to pass the time until the sun returns. He probably had no idea that it would be picked up so widely in the press (just one source, of many, here).

Westling will see who has a real sense of humor come Monday morning when all the regular dons return to work.

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1When a student, your own author used to try to slip fake papers into the bibliography authored by “Christ, J.H. (33)…” My advisor always caught them.

Thanks to readers Ray Futrell and Bob Ludwick for the head’s up on this story.

David Stove, PMS Admakers Apologize For PMS Apology Ad, San Franciscan Criminals, More

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David Stove

David Stove has a posthumous essay, put out in book form: What’s Wrong With Benevolence: Happiness, Private Property, and the Limits of Enlightenment. There is a review at American Conservative (via A&LD). Jim Franklin, Stove’s literary executor and professor of math, told me this is a new essay, never before appearing elsewhere.

I’ll be reviewing the book/essay in about two weeks.

PMS Ad Angers Women

While I was reviewing over-used statistics, I came across a website that suggested that some women tend to become moody while suffering from PMS. The site said imbibing milk could relieve PMS symptoms, but that if men could not get their hands on any, they should memorize some helpful apologies that would get them out of trouble. Example: “I’m sorry for listening to what you said and not what you meant.”

Well, there was a backlash. The Daily Mail reports that “The California Milk Processor’s Board decided on Thursday to alter its campaign, which portrayed men as the victims of temperamental women.”

Some women’s tempers flared after suggesting that they become temperamental, so they demanded the website be altered. Now when somebody surfs to EverythingIDoIWrong.org, they will be redirected to another site which “will encourage discussion of the issue.”

A glass of milk will now contain 100% of the recommended dose of irony.

Criminals To Become Protected Class In San Francisco

“No more discriminating against felons! Rapists are people too!” These, or similar, are the new slogans by the enlightened members of the San Francisco government, which is proposing a brand new law to “make ex-cons and felons a protected class, along with existing categories of residents like African-Americans, people with disabilities and pregnant women.”

The law would make it a crime to ask potential employees if they ever killed or maimed anybody, or if they committed any other felony. Landlords would also be barred from inquiring whether prospective tenants were sex fiends or bad check passers.

Lost on the government is the logical feedback loop created by this law. If a business asks, “Did you kill” and is caught doing so, they have committed a crime, which according to this law, cannot be held against them. We must consider the possibility that the enlightened city council is trying to psyche San Francisco residents out.

The story reports on one Monique Love, “who served time five years ago on a drug offense. Clean and sober now, she says boxes on application forms asking about criminal history unfairly discriminate against her.” She neglected to say how considering her previous criminal was “unfair.”

The report: “Commission Director Teresa Sparks calls it a public safety issue.” No, not in that way. She meant that if you don’t give criminals houses and jobs, they are likely to commit more crimes. Sparks said, “”All we’re saying is get a chance to know” the ex-cons before judging them.

But, of course, this is not “all” she is saying. She demands a law enforcing her benevolent advice.

The Singularity is Far

Boing Boing has an article by David Linden, a neuroscientist who argues that our knowledge of the biology of the brain is not increasing very fast. He doubts that we’ll soon be equipped with Kurzweilian nanobots which will cause us to be able to access our iPhones remotely, etc.

Yes, we have now sequenced quite a few human genomes and, yes, the speed and cost of doing so are improving exponentially. The human genome sequence—and those of the rat, mouse, fly, zebrafish and rhesus monkey—are an invaluable tool for biologists. That said, while the fundamental insights that have emerged to date from the human genome sequence have been important, they have been far from revelatory…

That’s all useful information, but it doesn’t represent a game-changing, exponential transformation in our understanding of genetics. When the human genome sequence was finished, no one was able to look at it and say, “A-ha, now I can understand what makes us uniquely human,” or “A-ha, now I see how a fertilized egg becomes a newborn during the course of gestation.”

There have been massive, exponential increases in data but “most of the other key conceptual breakthroughs in this field, have come slowly, the result of stubbornly linear small science, and not of the huge technology-driven data sets that Kurzweil describes.”

Read the entire article; well worth your time.

It’s made better by some intelligent commentary (as is often found here). One, by somebody calling himself Brainspore:

I’ve noticed that most futurists (and doomsday prophets) seem to favor timetables which place the amazing world-changing events within their own lifetimes, especially when the prophets in question seem obsessed with their own mortality. Anyone know if there is a name for this kind of predictive bias?

It’s called Wishcasting.

Does Exposure To American Flag Shift Support Toward Republicanism?

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It was just two red-white-and-blue weeks ago that we learned, via some Hahvard dons, that attending Fourth of July parades was likely to make one develop Republican sympathies. This finding was widely reported in the press, but it was clear that no reporters bothered reading past the abstract of the dons’ paper.

Because if they did, they would have discovered that the method the professors used to “prove” their contention was absurd. They did not measure actual parade attendance and actual voting behavior, they instead examined weather records and noted whether it rained on the Fourth when the interviewees were tykes, and then asked the interviewees how they felt about political parties as adults. The dons assumed that if it rained, parade attendance was unlikely and therefore one was likely to turn into a Democrat (sort of an anti-full moon effect).

It’s happening again. Just yesterday we began hearing of a new study, this one purporting to show that even a brief glance at Old Glory was enough to tug heart strings to the right, even nigh unto eight months after being exposed to the American tricolor.

That sound plausible to you? Me neither. But the peers of Psychological Science who reviewed the paper of Carter, Ferguson, and Hassin were evidently convinced.

Here is what reporters saw (from the abstract):

We report that a brief exposure to the American flag led to a shift toward Republican beliefs, attitudes, and voting behavior among both Republican and Democratic participants, despite their overwhelming belief that exposure to the flag would not influence their behavior. In Experiment 1, which was conducted online during the 2008 U.S. presidential election, a single exposure to an American flag resulted in a significant increase in participants’ Republican voting intentions, voting behavior, political beliefs, and implicit and explicit attitudes, with some effects lasting 8 months after the exposure to the prime. In Experiment 2, we replicated the findings more than a year into the current Democratic presidential term. These results constitute the first evidence that nonconscious priming effects from exposure to a national flag can bias the citizenry toward one political party and can have considerable durability.

Sounds persuasive enough. Not let’s see how it was done.

The trio asked 396 people to participate in Experiment 1, which was of four sessions, from before the election to eight months after. Only 197 made it through Session 2, but just 71 made it to the end—and 8 participants were excluded because, apparently, they fibbed their on-line survey answers (p. 2, bottom). That, dear readers, leaves just 63 out of the original 396 from which to draw conclusions.

Even stranger was that these 63 were pre-selected to have polarized views. The researchers only used those folks “who planned to vote in a state where polling indicated that a significant margin separated Obama and McCain.” Good grief! And this was thought kosher by the peer reviewers.

Vote Republican!But never mind. The trio asked folks a bunch of questions (such as the “Patriotism and Nationalism Scale”, etc.). They also asked for whom these folks would vote, how they felt about that, and so forth. Some of the 63 got a “small picture (72 × 45 pixels) of an American flag…in the top left corner of the survey” and some others did not. By Session 4, the folks were asked how President Obama did, etc.

It is at this point where decisions of a statistical sort have to be made. Do we look at the rate of those who voted for McCain or Obama and whether they saw the flag? Or perhaps we tally the responses of the questions by flag “exposure.” Seems simple enough, and it would tell us directly if we’re on to something.

But this is science, where nothing is easy! Instead of doing it the plain way, the researchers added a twist:

We created composite measures of voting intentions for both Sessions 1 and 2 by calculating the difference between intentions to vote for McCain and intentions to vote for Obama; higher numbers indicate a greater intention to vote for McCain than for Obama. We then regressed the centered Session 2 intentions on centered Session 1 intentions and used the residuals from this analysis as our main measure of voting intentions.

In other words, toss out the actual answers and replace them with residuals from some weird linear regression model. They go on to create many other “composite” measures, by adding the result from this question to the result from that one, and so on.

And, lo, they discovered that those of the 63—minus, I think, those who did not actually vote for either McCain or Obama, leaving how many we don’t know—who saw the flag tended to disapprove of Obama’s eight-month-old presidency.

They did another experiment of the same sort, just as odd and convoluted as the first, and, after much manipulation, came to the same conclusion as before. Which is that a brief, one time viewing of a 72 × 45 pixel picture of an American flag is apt to turn one into a raving Republican.

See the picture above. Boo!

The New Ballad of Chicken Little

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Once upon a day, so bright and fine
Walked Chicken B. Little. A scientist, mind!

“The sky is blue,” he said, “but I am not.”
“For I know much, quite quite a lot.”

His head was in the sky
So he did not espy
The sleeping fellow lying by
the soft grass near the pine.

Chicken Little tripped!
“I am vexed,” he said, “Truly hipped!”

“Who knew the woods would be so rich in people!
They stack up in a great ugly heap hill!”

So Chicken B. Little thought and he mused:
His brilliant mind was naught confused.

“What accounts for this human pollution?
I think I have the simple solution.”

He shouted and cried and then he out-louded,
“The natural world is way over crowded!”

He wrote his revelations down
And brought them straight in to town,
Right to Henny Penny, publisher of books,
Who said, “Ok, I will take a look see.”

“If what you say is true, the world is in for trouble.
And with global warming our trouble is really double!”

The pair rushed the warning words into print
Where they became an instant, chilling hit.

They were read by Cocky Locky, activist,
Who said, “We must tax, tax, tax, I insist!”

“Tax and regulation are the only true solutions
That can really rid us of these human pollutions.”

He said, “There is ample precedent
For us to warn the president!”

So the three ran off to arouse those far and near
And tell them that the end was almost here.

They soon met Turkey Lurkey, who was up for re-election.
He said, “My vote will be our ammunition
In the fight against those damned deniers;
Those oily fat-cats, rogues and liars!”

As they considered what to do,
Up walked Foxy Loxy, who ran an NGO.

“I can help you boys fund your cause
All you need do is sign this clause,
And promise fealty to that great -ism
Which the best of us call socialism.”

“What is this thing called socialism?” asked the troop.
“What does it mean? Can it help our group?”

“It is only for the brightest lights
For those who are sure they’re aways right.
It would put forever and ever in charge
Those whose minds are exceptionally large.”

Each of the four said, “That’s for me!”
Because to find some wiser cannot be.
How perfect, how wonderful and marvelously sublime
If the world were run on scientific lines!”

As they were cooing and comparing IQs,
The Fox said, “Come, all! Let’s join the queue!
We’ll finish the deal in my dark lair.
(It only looks dark; it is actually fare.)”

So down they all went, in one long line,
trusting themselves and thinking, “O, How fine!”

When the door finally closed and all the lines signed
The Fox ate them up: My, how he dined!

But he was not sated; he hungered still.
If only more bodies could add to his mill.

Where could he go to find the great minds
Who would fain rule over all of mankind?

It was then he remembered that great invention
The human-caused change of climate convention!

The End.

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A little doggerel never hurt anybody. Thus, I have no compunction dedicating this poem to Anne Ehrlich, who has taken up her father’s burden of telling the world that it is nearly finished.