Be careful with terms like "irresponsible parents" and "family planning". Some people plan to have kids close together in age.
For what it's worth, however, I have this to offer:
* My oldest son (age 5) can read at a second grade level and can do addition.
* My next son (age 4) can read at a first grade level and can also do addition.
* My next son (just turned 3) knows all of his shapes (including the difference between octagons and hexagons), recognize and count all numbers from 1-20, and knows all his letters and their sounds.
* My next son (almost 2) knows all his colors, can count to ten, sing his ABCs, and knows all his animal sounds.
* My last son (7 months old) just figured out sitting up unsupported, and can babble on his level.
Now keep in mind that my little guys also love Pixar movies, playing LEGO games on their Wii, dressing up as superheros, and hiking so they have managed to learn all these things while having a well-rounded and balanced childhood.
The reason these boys know as much as they do and are so well behaved is because my wife and I have taken the time to know their hearts and minds and have invested countless precious hours teaching and training them to be men.
So I want to make sure you understand that just because a family may have children close in age, it is no way has any bearing on their intelligence. My experience has shown me that the complete well-being of children directly correlates to the amount of time and love their parents invest in them, no matter how many siblings they have or far apart their ages may be.
Irresponsible parenting does not mean having many kids close in age. Irresponsible parenting simply means that you aren't willing to offer the time and love your kids need to thrive.
He's claiming that spacing is the dependent variable, not the independent variable.
Parents who are not considering these issues at all are arguably more likely to cluster towards shorter spacings, but shorter spacings alone do not provide enough information to classify the cause.
5 sons in a row? You should publish a book on how to father sons! That looks like a non-random result.
I agree with you in that the controlling factor is really just how much parental time is spent with the children. Closer spacing of children is likely to stretch parental time, but this is something a determined parent can easily overcome, even if just by being aware of it and correcting for it.
I would like to see a study which correlates future intelligence for things like time spent in childcare vs full time parenting. My personal belief is that a childcare effect would massively outweigh any child-spacing effect, particularly in boys, which in my experience seem to suffer from excessive childcare time under the age of 4 more than girls. I don't know if this is lack of male childcare workers or a biological difference in boys.
GNU gtypist. Got me from "hunt and peck" to touch typing with a decent wpm count within 2 weeks. Considering I used fewer than half of the tutorials, I think that's pretty awesome. It's an old GNU utility so it should be in any repos. Even had it on Cygwin.
That's exactly how I learned---I'd say it took me two weeks, to, to become comfortable with typing. I've been recommending learning to touch type that way for a few years now. Not a soul has taken me up on it yet.
I used some random type tutor software in high school (sometime in the mid-late 90s), though only spent enough time with it to learn the home keys. I would then look at the keyboard for the remainder of the keys. Initially that was probably no faster than my old hunt and peck method. I remember remarking at one stage that I was looking at the keyboard out of habit. Then one day I noticed that I was no longer looking at all. I'm sure it was a strange feeling at the time!
Goes to show you don't really need to learn the whole process with some type tutor software. Though in terms of efficiency you may want to be aware of what they suggest. For instance, I think I was hitting the Y key with my left hand rather than right hand at some stage, but long ago changed that.
When I forced myself to learn touch-typing with a qwerty keyboard i used gtypist. I found it to be sufficient for its purpose.
The only gripe i had with it was that it required typing two spaces after a period. I found this just plain weird, so I fixed it in the tutorial files.
I guess using a blank keyboard also helped quite a bit..
Sorry, hadn't seen your comment. Gtypist did a lot for my muscle memory, yet I barely scraped the surface. It's probably time I went through the remaining tutorials.
Unix is just a bunch of standards that a couple of OSes are implementing, including OS X, not something that adheres to any philosophy about how software should be distributed.
I'll gladly second Jon Skeet's 'C# in Depth'. The second edition is currently available through MEAP @ http://www.manning.com/skeet2/, with the print edition coming in September.
For what it's worth, however, I have this to offer:
* My oldest son (age 5) can read at a second grade level and can do addition.
* My next son (age 4) can read at a first grade level and can also do addition.
* My next son (just turned 3) knows all of his shapes (including the difference between octagons and hexagons), recognize and count all numbers from 1-20, and knows all his letters and their sounds.
* My next son (almost 2) knows all his colors, can count to ten, sing his ABCs, and knows all his animal sounds.
* My last son (7 months old) just figured out sitting up unsupported, and can babble on his level.
Now keep in mind that my little guys also love Pixar movies, playing LEGO games on their Wii, dressing up as superheros, and hiking so they have managed to learn all these things while having a well-rounded and balanced childhood.
The reason these boys know as much as they do and are so well behaved is because my wife and I have taken the time to know their hearts and minds and have invested countless precious hours teaching and training them to be men.
So I want to make sure you understand that just because a family may have children close in age, it is no way has any bearing on their intelligence. My experience has shown me that the complete well-being of children directly correlates to the amount of time and love their parents invest in them, no matter how many siblings they have or far apart their ages may be.
Irresponsible parenting does not mean having many kids close in age. Irresponsible parenting simply means that you aren't willing to offer the time and love your kids need to thrive.
(edit for formatting)