Another reason to not let your toddler watch TV?

Economics professors at Cornell and Indiana U. have found a possible correlation between watching TV before the age of three and autism. The evidence looks even more circumstantial than the study linking early TV viewing to ADHD, but still interesting: really what they’ve found is a correlation between diagnosis of autism and the number of rainy days in a particular county for a given period, which is known to correlate with hours kids spend watching TV. I wonder if they also looked at birth month and whether that has an effect — if it did that might imply a critical period of only a few months. (Thanks to Andrea for the link.)

Update 3:30pm: Here’s the actual study. Plus, Steven Levitt offers some skepticism at the Freakonomics blog. (Thanks to Judith for the links.)

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Reuters opens Second Life bureau

A few days ago Reuters opened a bureau in Second Life, the online virtual world that’s more second home than game to some 400,000 (presumably part-time) residents. Adam Pasick is bureau chief and sole reporter, and is dedicated fulltime to Second Life. As science fiction writer Charlie Strauss put it a month ago, “Truth stranger than fiction? Must write faster, the clowns are gaining …” (Via NPR’s Marketplace.)

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Why don’t we only search terrorists?

Bruce Schneier answers the question “why do we bother making people with security clearances go through airport security?” with the obvious answer “how would an airport screener know if you have a security clearance?”

Heck, as long as we’re living in fantasy land, why don’t they let non-terrorists bypass security and just focus on The Terrorists? After all, it must not be too hard to tell who’s a Terrorist and who isn’t, since we’re already single them out for torture, rendition to Syria and indefinite detention without review. What’s forcing them to spend extra time in line at the airport compared to that?

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