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Fresh from a country with two official languages: a new Canadian study suggests that being bilingual will, on average, postpone the onset of dementia by 4.1 years. Even after adjusting for schooling and immigration status, the results were unequivocal: being a polyglot (or at least a biglot) fights brain rot. What's not clear is why. Researchers speculate the ability to operate in two languages could - like exercise or stimulating leisure and social activity - help the brain continue normal functions even as it decays physically. Just don't expect great things from your French refresher course. The study, appearing...
...required to report data on kids who receive special-education services, but autism wasn't added as a category until the 1991-92 school year. No wonder the numbers exploded--from 22,445 receiving services for autism in 1995 to 140,254 in 2004. Grinker points out that "traumatic brain injury" also became one of the 13 reportable categories in 1992, and it had a similar spike...
Computers are certainly doing some of the work. Companies like eBay, GM and Motorola have all used software from Massachusetts firm Idiom Technologies to help power their efforts in localization, as language targeting is sometimes called. Still, it often takes a real brain to differentiate terms in context: the word trunk can refer to a suitcase, a car hatch or an elephant's snout, for example...
...case: Ashley, now 9, is a severely brain-damaged girl whose parents feared that as she got bigger, it would be much harder to care for her the way they wanted to. So they set out to keep her small. Through high-dose estrogen treatment over the past two years, her growth plates were closed and her prospective height reduced about 13 in., to 4 ft. 5 in. "Ashley's smaller and lighter size," her parents write on the blog defending their decision, "makes it more possible to include her in the typical family life and activities that provide...
...Ashley may be an extreme case; but she is a terrifying precedent. Critics note that for brain-damaged children, development can come very, very slowly - so deciding when she's only six to change a child's body irreversibly can amount to a medical form of identity theft. Frequent touch is indeed important; but is it really so much harder to hug someone who is 5'6," or bring her to the table at dinnertime? Turning people into permanent children denies them whatever subtle therapeutic benefit comes from being seen as adults. "I know they love their daughter," says Julia...