Links for 2012-02-17 [del.icio.us]

• Study: Autistic brains show changes months before symptoms – USATODAY.com
  Twenty-eight children went on to develop autism. When researchers looked at their scans, they saw key differences in the way that these pathways developed, Piven says. At age 6 months, these pathways were more developed than those of typically developing children. By the time children were 2, the autistic kids’ brain development had fallen behind.
• Wired 9.12: The Geek Syndrome
  Asperger’s syndrome is one of the disorders on the autistic spectrum – a milder form of the condition that afflicted Raymond Babbitt, the character played by Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. In the taxonomy of autism, those with Asperger’s syndrome have average – or even very high – IQs, while 70 percent of those with other autistic disorders suffer from mild to severe mental retardation. One of the estimated 450,000 people in the US living with autism, Nick is more fortunate than most. He can read, write, and speak. He’ll be able to live and work on his own. Once he gets out of junior high hell, it’s not hard to imagine Nick creating a niche for himself in all his exuberant strangeness. At the less fortunate end of the spectrum are what diagnosticians call “profoundly affected” children. If not forcibly engaged, these children spend their waking hours in trancelike states, staring at lights, rocking, making high-pitched squeaks, and flapping their hands, repetitively stimulating (“stimming
• Crime and the Social Crisis – NYTimes.com
  A synthesis.
• Whence comes this sudden wave of economic determinism?
  More plausibly it is the rise in female income (among other factors, including the rise of birth control, read more here) which is behind the decline in marriage, but that doesn’t fit with traditional mood affiliation, which finds the rise in female income to be good (which it is), and the decline in marriage to be — neither good nor bad per se but not exactly worth celebrating. If you can blame capitalism and wage stagnation for the decline of the family among lower earners, so much the better for ideology but as a sociological proposition that is a very weak hypothesis (do you see convincing links to real sociological evidence, showing this to be the dominant factor? No) and as Caplan shows it doesn’t fit with the economics either.

  Remind me again, how is wage stagnation supposed to explain the pronounced decline in religiosity, among lower earners, as shown by Murray? It’s well-known that a secular outlook is a normal good, and that on average poorer countries are more religious

• The American Conservative » The Bell Curve’s Toll
• Coming Apart: The Review – The Daily Beast
• Charles Murray on the new upper class « Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
  st, Murray tones down the Snidely Whiplash rhetoric and describes upper-class liberals as people who are living admirable lives but who are giving irresponsible advice because of their deluded social theories. His recommendation is, “When it comes to marriage and the work ethic, the new upper class must start preaching what it practices.”

Read more at Hispanic Pundit