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Normally, issues of child development fall outside of the purview of this Internets WebLog (unless we're talking about the latest supermarket checkout line cry for help issued by Britney Spears' pre-literate children), but today's LAT story about a University of Washington study investigating the effectiveness of popular infant-education videos in actually producing baby geniuses caught our eye, mainly because of the radical alternate course of study proposed by the professor at the end of the article:

For every hour a day that babies 8 to 16 months old were shown such popular series as "Brainy Baby" or "Baby Einstein," they knew six to eight fewer words than other children, the study found. [...]

Christakis and his colleagues surveyed 1,000 parents in Washington and Minnesota and determined their babies' vocabularies using a set of 90 common baby words, including mommy, nose and choo-choo. [...]

Christakis said children whose parents read to them or told them stories had larger vocabularies.

"I would rather babies watch 'American Idol' than these videos," Christakis said, explaining that there is at least a chance their parents would watch with them — which does have developmental benefits.

We suspect that Christakis has never actually watched an episode of American Idol; if he had, he'd probably realize that an impressionable infant's vocabulary may be increased by watching the show with its parents, but the gains would likely be limited to creatively constructed expletives like "pitchy motherfucker," hardly the advanced lexicon one wants available to their youngster as they head off to a competitive preschool environment.