Morning Dip: Facebook (not) friends, paid learning, lip-reading babies, more on EHRs : Neuron Culture

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I write articles on science, medicine, nature, culture and other matters for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, National Geographic, Scientific American Mind, and other publications, and am working on my fourth book, The Orchid and the Dandelion, which expands on my recent December 2009 Atlantic article. In August 2010, I'll be moving to London for a year to work on the book. I'll also serve as a senior fellow at City University London's MA science journalism program.

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Morning Dip: Facebook (not) friends, paid learning, lip-reading babies, more on EHRs

Posted on: March 9, 2009 9:47 AM, by David Dobbs

"Primates on Facebook" -- "Even online, the neocortex is the limit" to how many people we can really have as friends.

People who use more textual shortcuts (lk whn they txt in skl) when texting have higher reading skills. The coverage seems to assume this is causal, but it's almost surely just an association -- people with good reading skills more quickly come up with or absorb textual shortcuts.

Does "pay for performance" work in learning? For a bit, then not. "A number of the kids who received tokens didn't even return to reading at all," Dr. Marinak said. From the Times.

Babies can distinguish French from English -- just from lip-reading. Ed Yong does that thing he does.

The downside of electronic medical records, from Time.