Category: Science

Gregg Easterbrook says yes, citing this new study.  Here is part of the abstract:

…we empirically investigate the hypothesis that early childhood television viewing serves as such a trigger [for autism].  Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey, we first establish that the amount of television a young child watches is positively related to the amount of precipitation in the child’s community.  This suggests that, if television is a trigger for autism, then autism should be more prevalent in communities that receive substantial precipitation.  We then look at county-level autism data for three states – California, Oregon, and Washington – characterized by high precipitation variability.  Employing a variety of tests, we show that in each of the three states (and across all three states when pooled) there is substantial evidence that county autism rates are indeed positively related to county-wide levels of precipitation.  In our final set of tests we use California and Pennsylvania data on children born between 1972 and 1989 to show, again consistent with the television as trigger hypothesis, that county autism rates are also positively related to the percentage of households that subscribe to cable television.  Our precipitation tests indicate that just under forty percent of autism diagnoses in the three states studied is the result of television watching due to precipitation, while our cable tests indicate that approximately seventeen percent of the growth in autism in California and Pennsylvania during the 1970s and 1980s is due to the growth of cable television.  These findings are consistent with early childhood television viewing being an important trigger for autism.

I am unconvinced.  Precipitation, in these states, is a coastal phenomenon and is proxying for heterogeneity in the gene pool.  Perhaps the coastal areas attract a more "autism-ready" group of individuals.  In fairness to the authors, they do try to control for income and education and population density and diagnosis capacity, among other variables.  Note two worrying features in the results: in California precipitation is not correlated with autism rates at all (there is a north vs. south split for rain, rather than the coast vs. inland), and precipitation is a better predictor of autism than cable viewing is directly. 

Here is the latest autism news on the genetic front.

Addendum: Steve Levitt is also skeptical.

The two main lessons, as I read this paper, are a) pain is less bad when the sufferer can see the endpoint, and b) pain is less bad when the sufferer feels in control to some measure.

The concluding discussion of "happiness economics" is on the mark:

…my personal reflections are only in partial agreement with the literature on well being (see also Levav 2002).  In terms of agreement with adaptation, I find myself to be relatively happy in day-to-day life – beyond the level predicted (by others as well as by myself) for someone with this type of injury.  Mostly, this relative happiness can be attributed to the human flexibility of finding activities and outlets that can be experienced and finding in these, fulfillment, interest, and satisfaction.  For example, I found a profession that provides me with a wide-ranging flexibility in my daily life, reducing the adverse effects of my limitations on my ability.  Being able to find happiness in new ways and to adjust one’s dreams and aspirations to a new direction is clearly an important human ability that muffles the hardship of wrong turns in life circumstances.  It is possible that individuals who are injured at later stages of their lives, when they are more set in terms of their goals, have a more difficult time adjusting to such life-changing events.

However, these reflections also point to substantial disagreements with the current literature on well-being.  For example, there is no way that I can convince myself that I am as happy as I would have been without the injury.  There is not a day in which I do not feel pain, or realize the disadvantages in my situation.  Despite this daily awareness, if I had participated in a study on well-being and had been asked to rate my daily happiness on a scale from 0 (not at all happy) to 100 (extremely happy), I would have probably provided a high number, probably as high as I would have given if I had not had this injury.  Yet, such high ratings of daily happiness would have been high only relative to the top of my privately defined scale, which has been adjusted downward to accommodate the new circumstances and possibilities (Grice 1975).  Thus, while it is possible to show that ratings of happiness are not influenced much based on large life events, it is not clear that this measure reflects similar affective states.

As a mental experiment, imagine yourself in the following situation.  How you would rate your overall life satisfaction a few years after you had sustained a serious injury.  How would your ratings reflect the impact of these new circumstances?  Now imagine that you had a choice to make whether you would want this injury.  Imagine further that you were asked how much you would have paid not to have this injury.  I propose that in such cases, the ratings of overall satisfaction would not be substantially influenced by the injury, while the choice and willingness to pay would be – and to a very large degree.  Thus, while I believe that there is some adaptation and adjustment to new life circumstances, I also believe that the extent to which such adjustments can be seen as reflecting true adaptation (such as in the physiological sense of adaptation to light for example) is overstated.  Happiness can be found in many places, and individuals cannot always predict their ability to do so.  Yet, this should not undermine our understanding of horrific life events, or reduce our effort to eliminate them.

Here are Dan’s papers, and here.  Here are Dan’s riddles.

Here is this year’s list.  Example:

Ornithology – Ivan R. Schwab, of the University of California, Davis, and the late Philip R.A. May of the University of California, Los Angeles, for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don’t get headaches.

The funny thing is that just about all of these, even the hiccups one, represent real research.  Seriously.  Here is further background.

Today’s headline reads:

Milky Way teeming with earth-like orbs.

They don’t have to visit, they can manipulate star patterns for an advertising campaign or a fundraiser.  Not to mention solar-powered self-replicating probes.  They don’t seem interested.

The obvious conclusion is that highly intelligent species do not last very long and are also not very common.  Here is my previous post on the Fermi Paradox.  Here is Geoffrey Miller on the Paradox.

Psychopaths cannot process clues of context very easily:

The key deficit in psychopaths, he [Newman] says, is an inability to process contextual cues, which makes them oblivious to the implications of their actions, both for themselves and for their potential victims…

Newman has published several studies showing this inability to consider peripheral information.  In 2004, Newman reported in the journal Neuropsychology one study in which subjects were presented with mislabeled images, such as a drawing of a pig with the word "dog" superimposed on it.  Newman’s researchers timed how long it took them to name what they saw.  They found that people in the control group — non-psychopaths — were confused by the mislabeled images, while the psychopaths answered swiftly and barely noticed the discrepancy.

"Although it is somewhat counterintuitive that superior selective attention be associated with psychopathology, it is consistent with the importance of incidental contextual and associative cues for regulating behavior," Newman wrote.

The main point of the article, with which I agree, is that we should feel sorry for psychopaths.  Here are Robert Hare’s results on psychopaths.  Here is a summary of some neurological evidence.

Addendum: Speaking of neurology, here is Will Wilkinson on whether neuroeconomics implies paternalism.

The utterly charming Seth Roberts, best-selling author and paragon of scientific  self-experimentation, visited GMU last week.

Seth told us how to be happy.  "See other people’s faces in the morning."  Faces on TV work as well as real faces.  Conversational distance is ideal.  In his view, seeing faces at night makes people unhappy.

The best way to sleep better is to stand all day.  Also you should stop eating breakfast.  Seth claims we are programmed to wake about three hours before our usual breakfast time.  (Oddly this started happening to me about two weeks before his visit.)

Most college professors have too few skills to be useful teachers and we should reward diverse kinds of achievement.  Given the importance of division of labor in modern economies, there should be many ways get an "A."  Students should receive more individualized attention.

Here is Alex’s earlier post on Seth, and here.  Here is Seth’s blog.

On the bottom of Seth’s home page is some fascinating Powerpoint on economics: "In the beginning, hobbies.  Diversify expertise: procrastination."

Here are three things statistics textbooks don’t tell you.

Seth is a true American original and his work deserves the attention of every thinking person.

HP has a new camera that can take off ten pounds.  As far as I can tell all it does is shrink the entire picture but the effect is still pretty impressive even though I prefer the less scrawny one.

Of course you can get the same effect in person using this method.

Hat tip to Boing Boing Blog.

Here is a nice flash animation explaining the meaning of the zeroth to tenth dimension.   

According to a recent paper in the American Journal of Epidemiology the rich are more efficient sleepers.  Not that they sleep fewer hours, in fact they sleep more than the poor, but their sleep latency, the time spent lying in bed trying to get to sleep is lower than for the poor.

Graphic from University of Chicago Magazine.

Me?  I have money but I sleep like a pauper.

Hat tip to Robin Hanson.

Women in almost every culture speak in deeper voices than Japanese women.  American women’s voices are lower than Japanese women’s, Swedish women’s are lower than American’s, and Dutch women’s are lower than Swedish women’s.  Vocal difference is one way of expressing social difference, so that in Dutch society, which doesn’t differentiate much between its image of the ideal male and the ideal female, there are few differences between male and female voice.  The Dutch also find medium and low pitch more attractive than high pitch.

That is from the new and interesting The Human Voice: How this Extraordinary Instrument Reveals Essential Clues About Who We Are, by Anne Karpf.  Here is an interesting dissertation abstract on voice pitch, some of which relates to economic ideas on signaling.

Anti-dork spin: Maybe guys likely to have autistic kids tend not to become dads as early as other guys.

That is from Slate.  Here is Steve Levitt on the same.  Here is The Washington Post and the effect appears very large indeed.

Addendum: Using bacteria to fight autism.  And here is a satirical (?) treatment of the causes of autism.