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Referred to variously as technopanic, predator panic, cyberbullying panic, etc., a lot of fear and anxiety has developed around the intersection of youth and the Internet.

He defined juvenoia as "the exaggerated fear of the influence of social change [including the Internet] on youth." This week, the first of a two-part series on Dr. Finkelhor's talk: why the fear is unsupported by the evidence and (next week) why all the fear.

The bottom line is that the highest risk correlate for getting together with an adult offline, who was first met online, for the purposes of sexual activity, has nothing to do with going online.  The best predictor appears to be how the child acts offline; any child exhibiting psychosocial problems at home or in the classroom is a much better candidate for this kind of problem than someone who spends many hours on the Internet, but otherwise seems to be a happy well-adjusted child.  The old advice to “know your child” turns out to be true.

“We’ve added a critical new chapter to the story about music and education,” says Kraus. “Due to the overlap between neural circuits dedicated to speech and music, and the distributed network of cognitive, sensorimotor, and reward circuits engaged during music making, it would appear that music training is a particularly potent driver of experience-dependent plasticity in the brain that influences processing of sound related to academics.”

When you separate the different types of screen out, the effects start to vary.

"It doesn't say anything about what you're using that time for."

It’s like making children from around the world complete an obstacle course to fully participate in society but requiring the English-speaking participants to wear blindfolds

Unlike many other languages, English spelling was never reformed to eliminate the incongruities. In a sense, English speakers now talk in one language but write a different one

By contrast, languages such as Finnish and Korean have very regular spelling systems; rules govern the way words are written, with few exceptions. Finnish also has the added bonus of a nearly one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters, meaning fewer rules to learn. So after Finnish children learn their alphabet, learning to read is pretty straightforward—they can read well within three months of starting formal learning, Bell says. And it’s not just Finnish- and Korean-speaking children who are at a significant advantage: A 2003 study found that English-speaking children typically needed about three years to master the basics of reading and writing, whereas their counterparts in most European countries needed a year or less.