Gerard Henderson, Gans, Leigh, xkcd and lost in a monomaniac's urinal

(Above: I know I've borrowed this cartoon before, but it suddenly has a new relevance and poignancy).

Gerard Henderson twice in a day?

It takes guts, a cast iron stomach, and a brain carefully covered in aluminium foil. Perhaps also a plastic bag covering the extremities of the body. You can't be too careful, you never know what you might pick up.

For those who came in late to the story. In Gerard Henderson's Media Watch Dog issue no 28, 18th September 2009, reference was made to one Professor Gans - who in a research work had the indecency to suggest that the ABC newsroom skewed to the right in terms of its treatment of the coalition - and to another work by Gans involving urinals.

Note the actual wording:

Here’s hoping that Mr Holmes and his Media Watch team will publish much more of Joshua Gans’ ground-breaking research in future editions of the program. MWD is particularly impressed by his work on, er, male urinals. Gans’ paper “Urinal protocol vulnerability” attempts to answer one of the key questions of our time. Namely: “When a guy goes to the bathroom, which urinal does he pick?” Good question, don’t you think?

MWD is particularly impressed by the learned professor’s attempt to analyse and graph what he refers to as the “International Choice of Urinal Protocol”. This is how Joshua Gans sees it:

The protocol is vulnerable to producing inefficient results for some urinal counts. Some numbers of urinals encourage efficient packing, and others encourage sparse packing. If you graph the packing efficiency (f(n)/n), you get this:



As Jonathan Holmes would say: ”Knock me down with a feather!!!”

Gans' paper! This is how Joshua Gans sees it. Ding dong. It is of course how one of our favourite cartoonists, xkcd, sees it, and so can you, if you head off to his blag of the webcomic to read Urinal protocol vulnerability.

Knock me down with half a feather, since clearly Henderson is both a dickhead and a goose.

Now the civilized thing to do when you get something so comprehensively wrong is to admit that you're wrong and move along (yep, been there, done that).

Here's Henderson's actual offer, contained in his latest media watch newsletter, which can be found here:

As previously advised, I am willing to run an explanation in MWD as to how urinal analysis got on Professor Gans’ website. All I can say is that nothing goes on The Sydney Institute’s website without my approval as the Institute’s executive director.

The fact is that a paper titled “Optimal Number of Urinals” and signed by Joshua Gans is on Professor Gans’ website: www.economics.com.au. Moreover, Professor Gans consciously put a hyperlink on his website to the paper titled “Urinal protocol vulnerability” by xkcd. Professor Gans should have anticipated that someone would make fun of this - which is all I did in MWD.

That's right, po faced Pecksniffian sniffery, with a large digit firmly stuck up the bum. Nothing goes on the SI website without his approval. Perhaps that explains why it's as grey as a slate sky, and as dull as bat shit.

Which of course is also sleight of hand, since it has nothing to do with Henderson's attribution of xkcd to Gans.

Of course when you go to Gans' actual blog entry, you see that the paper wasn't signed by Gans, but rather was an entry by Gans with a link to xkcd, along with a little borrowed humor, and which if anything might be charged with sexism as he blames the gender of the dean of the time for the Commerce and Economics building having three times the number of stalls in women's toilets to the one on one ratio for men (you can read the actual entry under Optimal Number of Urinals).

Proving that not only is Henderson a humorless dickhead, he can't even get his corrections right. Because it's all done in jest. That's right, crediting someone else's work to the good professor as a way of slagging him off - actually pissing on him from a great height - is all fair meat in a dishonest day's work for an attack dog.

Gans' co-author, Professor Andrew Leigh, attempted to have a civilized discussion with Henderson, but made the mistake of suggesting an apology to Gans might be appropriate. You may as well request an apology from Uriah Heep as expect one from Henderson. (Oh wait even Heep could manage a mealy mouthed one if he thought her could turn it to his advantage).

Naturally Henderson calls it all part of the debate, and marvels at how sensitive academics are to criticism.

Perhaps Gans and Leigh have a more sympathetic understanding of authorship, since to send up Gans is one thing, but to credit him with authorship of a piece by xkcd is actually a charge of plagiarism. Well the next time I attribute some of Henderson's ultra tedious prose to Polonius, perhaps I'll also suggest Henderson likes to steal from other writers - as a sure fire way of demolishing his arguments.

The reality is you can't have a sensible rational discussion with a monomaniac with a bee in his bonnet, convinced that the media is full of lefties and that's likely the reason for the down fall of his demi-god John Howard.

There's more in the fuss and flurry of the exchange to do with Henderson's criticism of the statistical methodology involved - and in reading it all, I get the oblique sense that Henderson and mathematics and statistics have about the same connection as the Piltdown man does to Neanderthal man.

If you want Andrew Leigh's site, go here, and if you want Gerard Henderson's viewpoint, why not go outside in a full moon, and howl away.

Sad really, but it suggests what I've always suspected - mockery or simple abuse of Henderson is so much more sensible and satisfying.

(Below: but at least we get to publish another xkcd cartoon. More xkcd here and in so doing by providing this link, I am in in no way claiming credit, authorship, ownership or any other entitlements to the works of xkcd, including his ideas or his urinal analysis, so help me god. But I am standing by and have made myself available to be put in charge and fix everything, with a first priority the creation of a special gulag to house commentariat columnists. Pple, this is the way 4ward).