* Autism rates fluctuate by time and location (an important but poorly understood fact in and of itself), and it is no easy matter to pin down the exact rate of autism in the large and somewhat amorphous Silicon Valley. But a study by Baron-Cohen and his colleagues compared the “Silicon Valley of the Netherlands” (Eindhoven, where 30 percent of the jobs are in the IT sector) to two similarly sized Dutch cities (Utrecht and Haarlem). They found that autism rates were 23 per 1,000 people in Eindhoven, but only 6 per 1,000 in Utrecht and 8 per 1,000 in Haarlem.