Slate published a short piece on a recent academic paper that suggested several possible correlations between the increase of autism and television watching.
I just glossed the article and thought seems far-fetched to me and moved on. Over at the Freakonomics blog, Steven D. Levitt did what he does so well: Examine the data and explore how it might yield false positives. I don't always agree with Levitt and Dubner's conclusions, but I love the way they approach data—they suspect it of trying to trick them, which John Atkinson assures me, is the only way to approach testing.
Read Levitt's thoughts for yourself—I love the theory he throws out in the next-to-last paragraph.
