Are You Off To Meet A Tall Dark Stranger?


The second thing you notice about a stranger when you meet them is their height. I hardly need mention that the first thing is their gender. Gender and height has a weak connection in humans in that men are reportedly ~8% taller than women, but is this important?

This weighty question has received detailed scrutiny by Stulp et al in the Journal of Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology (1). They start off with the observation from online dating sites that women prefer taller men. Height appears to be an indicator of greater strength, but physical dominance is not the be all and end all. It is apparently correlated with social status in terms of income and education. This was from studies that I’d missed, so I had better amend my reading habits.

The males of most species have a great interest, and therefore make an investment, in reproductive success. Social status is critical in group-living species if the females are going to come your way. But people are a little different. In terms of social status, we have a dichotomy. More offspring (meaning greater reproductive success) increases with increasing income, while more offspring goes with decreasing educational attainment.

Stulp and his coworkers jumped off from this point and immersed themselves in the metadata accumulated in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. They found that 3,578 of the men in that study had their height recorded as well as the number of their offspring.

The computers were buzzing for a while until they settled on some correlations. Both years in education and income increased with increasing height, but not so with reproductive success. We need to note here that reproductive success is taken as number of children surviving to be able to spread their genes around.

The peak height for reproductive success turned out to be 5’ 10” to 5’ 11”. So we average guys score again, or do we? Maybe it’s just that there are more of us to choose from so more of us get started earlier. Or possibly, just possibly, height and number of kids are not causally connected even though the can be correlated.


  1. http://www.springerlink.com/content/k45351223q403p42/fulltext.pdf

Our Ladybirds


The Symbol Of The Dutch Foundation Against Senseless Violence            photo credit: Ziko


Ladybirds, or ladybugs, are a regular sign of summer and have long provided entertainment in counting the spots on their wing cases. They are bright and colorful and are popular as logos. Perhaps the most interesting is the picture of a ladybird used as symbol by the Dutch Foundation For Senseless Violence where it is on a tile embedded in the sidewalk where a particularly nasty and senseless crime has taken place.

The term “lady” comes from the religious connotation and in the Netherlands the name refers to “The Lord’s” animal, so we see it as a rather benign creature. Even in the nursery rhyme where we urge it to “fly away home” to take care of its children, we are looking on it as benevolent fellow creature.

But let’s look at its children. A different picture emerges.  The rose lovers amongst us are already aware that the larvae munch their way through lots of aphids every day. They have voracious appetites and the aphids have to breed like crazy to keep up.

Of course, it isn’t just our roses that have aphids. For some strange reason, the world seems to becoming more and more addicted to soya beans and that’s fine with the aphids who see acre after acre of grazing stretch out before them. It is also easy pickings for the ladybird larvae.

The fields in Québec are the focus of Gagnon et al who decided to look at the darker side of ladybird larval lifestyle (1). They identified four species of ladybirds were using the fields as cafeterias for their kids. However, the ladybird kids weren’t very well brought up. They did eat what was in front of them, as good kids should, but if that happened to be a different strain of lady bird, too bad, it went the way of the aphids.

This has the fancy name in intraguild predation (IGP) and simply means dog-eat-dog when the predators are hungry. Gagon et al analyzed the DNA from the stomachs of a large group of each species of larvae and showed that they were very catholic (with a small “c”) in their eating habits. There was a year-to-year difference and this was put down to the aphid supply chain, but it was recognized that IGP provided a better nutrition source. Ladybird eggs were also a delicacy.

So ladybirds have a dark side. Maybe it’s wise not to look too deeply into a lady’s past.


  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0028061

A Break For The Crowd


The use of crowd intelligence seems to be continuing to grow. Perhaps decision democratization or committee consensus would be better descriptions, but neither has quite the cache of “intelligence”. Even if our crowds are not expert, (and they are supposed to be cast wider than just experts,) we should hope that they are wise.

The latest piece of crowd intelligence to catch my eye is Bernstein et al’s study in medical diagnosis (1). The diagnostic problem was the assessment of hip fractures. That is the problem of a break at the neck of the femur when, if there is displacement of the ball from the socket, the surgical solution is a hip replacement. If it is not displaced, pinning is the treatment. Diagnosis is done from X-ray pictures; nobody waits until they get to the table to decide.

The baseline for correct diagnosis was 69% for the twelve orthopedic surgeons chosen for the test. Note: no unlucky old folks were affected by these diagnoses. Next, small committees were formed of various sizes and the diagnosis was decided by majority vote.

Committees did better with 3-member committees hitting 77% and 5-member committees getting to 80% correct.

The big experiment was done next with a 40-member internet-based group. The critical issue here is response time. The input from a group of nine was taken as a sufficient “crowd” to get things right and this could be done in about an hour, with the longest time in a ten-case study being less than two and a half hours.

The authors conclude that their “wise crowd” should have people with diverse opinions and, of course, the democracy of the internet means that no one dominates the committee. So this may be a low-cost error-reduction procedure, which sounds good.

However, the “crowd” is still a crowd of “experts,” in other word, a “wise crowd” and this takes us away from the real idea of crowd intelligence where the non-expert is included thus enabling an unexpected solution to emerge.

Personally, this leaves me in a bit of a dilemma. The wise crowd decision over a broken leg seems to work OK, but it seemed to be a failure in Congress where six “wise experts” couldn’t achieve a consensus. The latter is clearly a case where true crowd intelligence is required.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0027620

The Art Of Mating


Geoffrey Miller took up one of Darwin’s thoughts about evolution, that is the one about sexual selection working with natural selection. Not that this is meant to imply anything un-natural about choosing a mate, but we humans go about it differently from many other species. For example, male Bower Birds set up a very elaborate decorative display to catch the eye of a passing female.

Most of us guys, when in our prime anyway, don’t have very elaborately decorated bowers at our disposal. Our bed, computer, TV for football, and a fridge for our beer cover most of the essentials. All that fancying up the place and moving furniture around comes later under strict design guidance.

Now that doesn’t seem to cut it with Clegg, Nettle and Miell who have their new analysis published in The Frontiers in Personality Science and Individual Differences (1). They focused their attention on a group of 236 visual artists. The base concept is that creative behaviors don’t fit neatly into the survival mechanism as a useful adaption and therefore it must have something to do with sex.

Their chosen artists were then grilled as to their art, views and successes. Now relaxed and chatty, they were grilled about their mating habits with details like the number of “one night stands" to the number of longer term relationships. The age demographic was suitably large at 18 to 78 years old. 151 of the artists were women and 85 were men. Everyone was heterosexual and 91% were of western-white ethnicity.

The estimation of artistic success was necessarily complex as those selected ranged from hobbyists to established professionals. Their mating success was easier to measure, with the number of partners fitting onto a log scale covering 1 to 250. Note though that it was heavily skewed with a mean around 11 over the last 5 years.

The conclusions? Well, the more successful the guys were at art, the more successful they were with their mating. This didn’t work for the women artists who were looking for longer relationships. Now the strange observation: the successful male artists also were seeking long term mates, but seemed to want to try more out before settling.

The good news for us run of the mill guys is that they found that women preferred creative guys, even if poor, over richer non-creative ones, but there is a rider – for short term mates only.

Note to self: replace old tubes of water colors ASAP.

  1. http://www.frontiersin.org/personality_science_and_individual_differences/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00310/full

Just How Mobile Is Your iPhone?


Day after day, smartphones sit in your pockets, bags, or holsters until required to perform for a few minutes before being re-consigned to darkness and oblivion, That is until their owners get bored and demand playtime. Absolute dependability is demanded, and year-by-year the performance bar is raised. The threat of being cast aside for a new love is constant.

A new day is dawning, for iPhones, that is, and maybe, just maybe, for the rest of us owners. Thanks to Romotive, your iPhone can become truly mobile. An independent life is just over the horizon for them and is no longer just a fantasy (1).

Romotive have designed a wheelchair for your iPhone (1, 2). The phones headphone jack supplies the communication link and your phone can drive itself about the place, scare your cat, bark at your dog or otherwise take its place in the good life. This is as it should be in these days of cell phone based democracy.

Now, the guys at Romotive, having set their iPhones free, haven’t got much further than persuading them to act as go-betweens in office romances by delivering flowers to pretty coworkers, but guys will be guys, I guess.

The promise, of course, is that App Developers will jump in with all sorts of applications so that your old iPhone 4, and the 4s when the 5 reaches your hot sweaty hands, will be liberated into retirement and allowed to run free around your accommodations making themselves useful in a myriad of ways.

Imagine, with a mechanical arm, they could lift themselves out of their chairs and place themselves on charging mats, and then be off again in an hour to play each other at some multiplayer game or, if wanting some personal time, go off into the corner and tweet wisecracks on your Twitter account. Maybe even trundle into your bedroom for a candid photo of you snoring to post on your Facebook wall.

  1. http://romotive.com/
  2. http://news.discovery.com/tech/the-robot-with-a-smart-phone-brain-111118.html