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

"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.

More like this

Most of us could easily distinguish between spoken English and French. But could you tell the difference between an English and a French speaker just by looking at the movements of their lips? It seems like a difficult task. But surprising new evidence suggest that babies can meet this challenge…
You may have noticed that I've been laying off the antivaccination movement recently. Indeed, it's been over two weeks since I last mentioned the topic, and then I only did so by briefly citing a post by Steve Novella. For this blog, aside from vacations, that has to be a record. Truth be told,…
Oh, no, here we go again. In fact, before I get started, I feel obligated to show this clip, saying, just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in again: Yes, I know I've used this clip on multiple occasions before over years. However, sometimes it's just so completely appropriate to how I…
Because there are some conversations you have to have with your kids even if you wish you didn't have to have them: Dr. Free-Ride: I wanted to talk to you about a situation that has come up for a friend of mine and is a little worrisome. So, you know I went down to UCLA the other week, right?…