Copying, then generalizing according to the kid's own logic, then learning where the generalizations don't work. Actually, that's pretty much how most of us learn most everything:)
Introduction to Reading: immediately, if not sooner. My mom read to me from the time I could sit up, usually every day, tho there was NO formal teaching involved -- just read to me, let me see the book, run a finger along the words as she read. Yet somewhere along the line I absorbed it, just from following along visually as she read: by the time I was 5 years old, I could read at about a 4th grade level, AND I had a good functional grasp of phonics (without any formal teaching), sufficient that I could work out unfamiliar words as I encountered them in print.
However, the cases mentioned are themselves skewed to the point that I don't think they can be taken as any reliable indicator. An abused kid is likely to have defense mechanisms, and a deaf person likely to already be habituated to coping skills, that in themselves probably restrict how well they can learn spoken language (and probably other skills as well). So the only valid conclusion there is that people raised in stressed or abnormal environments don't learn as well in later life. (D'oh!!)
And kids teach themselves many skills by experimentation, with no instruction whatever. Back to the above, I think it boils down to that restricting a kid's experimentation generally retards their ability to learn stuff.
I remember experimenting with "getting sounds right" when I was a kid -- nonsense sounds, not language at all, just noises. And we've all seen kids make up nonsense songs of meaningless syllables, even after they're old enough to have speech -- likely they're doing the same thing.
Not real surprising. I have a dyslexic friend who has trouble reading text, but has no trouble with math. And there are people who have trouble with language but are good in music (another form of math, so to speak).
Computer language might be considered a glorified form of algebra, IOW math. It's probably using a different part of the brain entirely from written and spoken language.
I think it's simpler than that, since it only affects irregular verbs. Most verbs form the past tense simply by adding -ed. Walk, walked; talk, talked, etc. So in a kid's mind, the logical progression (already established by the majority of the verbs they hear) is run, runned; drink, drinked, etc. To little kids, "ran" and "drank" probably sound like bad grammar!
I took Latin in the 11th grade (we learned to speak it, not just read/write it) and Spanish in the 12th grade, and somewhere along the line I also became fluent in NewSpeak. I didn't translate as I went, I just spoke whichever. A side effect was that I'd sometimes use them all together in the same sentence, to the mystification of my English-only family.
At the time I also taught my dog commands in English, Spanish, and hand signals, and could mix them together any which way, but it never confused her.
"You are Apple Dos. Simple and primitive with a good understanding of the common man. You're still a work in progress, but a good start."
[eyeing heap of machines that run M$DOS, DRDOS, and/or random species of Win32, and one Mandrake box] I'm not sure, but I think I've just been insulted!!
As the image slowly loads over my sick dialup, the first thing I see is what LOOKS like pumpkin goo and seeds being blown out of the stem on top... and I'm thinkin', "Man, that pumpkin musta drank some hot shit..."... and when it finished loading, we can see the hangover:)
"The issues are Googles lack of QA and security testing.."
I think that's a good point. Yeah, "thousands of eyes" were looking at GMail, but how many were doing it AS dedicated beta testers, with a *mission* to find and report flaws? Damn few, I'd bet.
The music is from the original "Mission: Impossible" TV show (in fact, it sounds like an analog recording using TV and mic, the way we used to do it in the olden days) and if you remember the series, one of its regular schticks was that at the end, when there was no escape, the MI team would in some highly ironic way inform the target that he'd been pwn3d.
Which makes this just bloody perfect, music and all!
Yeah, never mind the fines.. think of the bandwidth bill!!
Actually, when I looked at the forums subpage, it informed me that "1 guest" (evidently myself) was the only person there. Come on, slashdotters, you can do better than that!
At first I didn't know what to think, but my high school's Latin teacher was good and enjoyed her subject (and was utterly fluent in both written and spoken Latin... she was an English teacher the rest of the time)... and I wound up loving the class. Plus frankly it was pretty easy -- it's a very logical, efficient language.
And we sure are stupid when we're young, eh?:)
Which probably applies to gov'ts and corporations too, now that I think about it. (Ha, and we thought we were off topic.:)
I took Latin in high school, then Spanish the next year. This made Spanish unreasonably easy, as for practical purposes it's just degenerate Latin.
(I'd have taken a 2nd year of Latin if I could have, but they'd temporarily suspended those courses. Latin was reinstated the year after I graduated, due to -- no shit -- popular demand!!)
Interesting to hear from someone with experience on both sides of the issue. Now, I'm curious -- is there anyone who has lived in a state that requires people to carry their papers, who is actually in favour of such a scheme??
Yep -- DNA would be a lot more interesting than mere remains, and one helluva lot more definitive!
Tho as someone further down the chain said, at first go-round this sounds a lot like someone trying to one-up an anthropological colleague, and angling for some grant money... and not too much like real research.
But there are isolated pockets of other "we thought those died out *eons* ago" species still extant, so it's perfectly possible they were the last gasp of a remnant species.
Dogs are an extreme example, yeah -- the species has the largest range of "normal" phenotypes, and probably the most flexible gene pool, of any creature alive today.** But let's narrow it down, to say, the variation within a single breed (a much more homogenous gene pool). Even then, variations can be so extreme that the average person cannot readily tell two dogs are of the same breed, and such variations will breed true within a given bloodline. (Frex, compare Maxx's Surprise http://www.totalretriever.com/00nfc.htm and Dickendall Arnold http://www.dickendall.com/arnold.html. About all they have in common is being black, floppy-eared, and short-coated; neither more than superficially resembles a typical field or show Labrador of even as little as 30 years ago.##)
** I have my own theory about this: one theory of evolution is that occasionally, a species' gene pool mutates wildly and "shatters" into many new species, most of which are nonviable and soon die out. I think domestication hit dogs at a "shatter point", and because dogs no longer had to fend for themselves, many genes were preserved that would have disappeared in the wild -- thus the modern dog's incredibly varied gene pool. (I have a further suspicion that coyotes are a =descendant= of the earliest domesticated dogs, rather than being originally a wild species or an ancestor of modern dogs. Coyotes' behaviour is much more dog-like than wolf-like.)
It doesn't take much to get different limb lengths and proportions to breed true, even to the point of looking "wrong" to someone from another tribe (thus from another gene pool). There are plenty of examples among modern ordinary humans, even without delving into genetic anomalies like dwarfism.## Some races are long-bodied and short-limbed, others are long-limbed and short-bodied; some have large round skulls, others have small narrow skulls; etc, etc. If you put extreme (yet still normal-range) examples side by side, they'll barely LOOK like the same genus, let alone the same species.
Point being, you can't judge by appearance at that level. Now, if they had DNA evidence to back up their speculation about these people being a different species... that would mean something.
## Selection for proportions can be done in just a couple generations in dogs**. Humans aren't that much more complex, and human mating behaviour tends toward selecting the familiar (ie. someone who looks at least sortof like your own tribe). Types do develop and breed true in humans, if sufficiently isolated by geography and/or tribal behaviour. -- I've heard how some Orientals can peg another Oriental by physical type right down to their native village and even family, because the local types are so consistent. [I can do the same with some bloodlines in dogs.]
(**Something I'm intimately aware of, as a professional dog breeder/trainer with 11 generations of my own bloodline, and 35 years experience.)
I was recently reading about African Pygmies, and how Pygmy tribes interact with other tribes -- these naturally pint-sized people (which despite their small stature are still ordinary Homo sapiens, genetically) live in the deep forest, maintain a very primitive lifestyle by choice, and only come to town to trade (or sometimes to beg or work). Some "town tribes" regard them more or less as "forest elves". Their numbers, never great, have declined radically in some areas, and doubtless some Pygmy tribes now exist only as mouldering or even fossilized bones.
These newly-discovered "hobbitt-sized people" may well be no more than a sort of local pygmy tribe, now extinct.
OTOH, it's perfectly possible that remnants of genetic side-branches of Homo Whatever persisted into historical times, if sufficiently isolated and protected by their local environment.
Size is no indication of being a different species; hell, look at dogs, which even among wild species range from 25 to 100 lbs. A closed environment can select for even larger extremes; also, note the radically different brain size among different breeds of domestic dogs, even tho they are all the same species.
Sounds like maybe one of the first 92xx series? Most of what I had were 89xx (ISA) and 94xx (VLB), IIRC. The latter were still over $100 in 1994... amazing what we considered "cheap" back then. I remember being delerious with joy to find memory at $40 a meg!
Never had a Genoa card, myself. I did have one off-brand very early VGA card that had the most wonderful colour, deep and rich like nothing else I'd seen at the time -- but its memory chips got so hot that it would only work for a little while at a time before the smoke started escaping. So much for the bleeding edge in the early days!
Say what? I've run WordPerfect 5.1 on a number of XT-class machines (so have numerous friends and clients) -- and it works just fine on every one I've encountered. No idea what you're talking about re "requires the 286 instruction set"; first time I've ever heard anything like that!
I don't recall when WP4.x came out (I've got 4.1 and 4.2 here tho -- I collect WP versions when I can pick 'em up cheap) tho without going to look, I believe it was in 1987. WP5.0 for the PC was released in 1988, and WP5.1 a few months later. The first commonly-seen version of WP5.1 for DOS is dated 1989.
WP ports to other OSs didn't bear much relationship to the PC version; frex, I've got WP4.2 for Xenix that IIRC is dated 1988, so it was at least a year behind the PC version, and it wouldn't surprise me if the NeXT port ran a version behind. The Mac version ran several years behind, too (WPMac 3.5 is essentially WPDOS 5.1).
As of WP5.1+ (the final 5.1 version, released in 1994), the installer still had a floppy-only option. AND.. it still runs perfectly on an XT, as I can attest from firsthand experience.
I've heard about issues with the old Trident cards, but I've never seen it, and I had a shitload of 'em back in the Olden Days. I never had a bit of trouble with the ISA and VLB models. But they went completely to hell as of the PCI era (damned slowest things I've ever seen), and Trident-based AGP cards are no better.
I wonder if the "VGA snow" was an interaction with a particular motherboard chipset??
[I now use Matrox video cards, and they're rock-stable, if not geared toward gamers.]
Ah, machine code, that would be before my time. But I'm reminded of tales told by a programmer fellow I know who flew in Navy spyplanes in the 1960s. The onboard computer had this array of plugs that you moved around to program it, and a bunch of blinkenlights one had to interpret results from.
We still live with its legacy to this day -- in every SF film that depicts a computer!!
Slashdot Mirror
Copying, then generalizing according to the kid's own logic, then learning where the generalizations don't work. Actually, that's pretty much how most of us learn most everything :)
Introduction to Reading: immediately, if not sooner. My mom read to me from the time I could sit up, usually every day, tho there was NO formal teaching involved -- just read to me, let me see the book, run a finger along the words as she read. Yet somewhere along the line I absorbed it, just from following along visually as she read: by the time I was 5 years old, I could read at about a 4th grade level, AND I had a good functional grasp of phonics (without any formal teaching), sufficient that I could work out unfamiliar words as I encountered them in print.
However, the cases mentioned are themselves skewed to the point that I don't think they can be taken as any reliable indicator. An abused kid is likely to have defense mechanisms, and a deaf person likely to already be habituated to coping skills, that in themselves probably restrict how well they can learn spoken language (and probably other skills as well). So the only valid conclusion there is that people raised in stressed or abnormal environments don't learn as well in later life. (D'oh!!)
And kids teach themselves many skills by experimentation, with no instruction whatever. Back to the above, I think it boils down to that restricting a kid's experimentation generally retards their ability to learn stuff.
I remember experimenting with "getting sounds right" when I was a kid -- nonsense sounds, not language at all, just noises. And we've all seen kids make up nonsense songs of meaningless syllables, even after they're old enough to have speech -- likely they're doing the same thing.
Not real surprising. I have a dyslexic friend who has trouble reading text, but has no trouble with math. And there are people who have trouble with language but are good in music (another form of math, so to speak).
Computer language might be considered a glorified form of algebra, IOW math. It's probably using a different part of the brain entirely from written and spoken language.
I think it's simpler than that, since it only affects irregular verbs. Most verbs form the past tense simply by adding -ed. Walk, walked; talk, talked, etc. So in a kid's mind, the logical progression (already established by the majority of the verbs they hear) is run, runned; drink, drinked, etc. To little kids, "ran" and "drank" probably sound like bad grammar!
Very interesting about the kids!
I took Latin in the 11th grade (we learned to speak it, not just read/write it) and Spanish in the 12th grade, and somewhere along the line I also became fluent in NewSpeak. I didn't translate as I went, I just spoke whichever. A side effect was that I'd sometimes use them all together in the same sentence, to the mystification of my English-only family.
At the time I also taught my dog commands in English, Spanish, and hand signals, and could mix them together any which way, but it never confused her.
Strange you should mention that... look what I found while researching another response:
e rnetOnlineSp01.htm
http://internet.ggu.edu/law_library/Greenberg/Int
You have no honour -- you just made me spit gak all over my monitor. For that, you will die!!
[eyeing heap of machines that run M$DOS, DRDOS, and/or random species of Win32, and one Mandrake box]
I'm not sure, but I think I've just been insulted!!
[finds their other quiz Which File Extension are You?, tries that instead]
"You are .html -- You are versatile and improving, but you do have your limits. When you work with amateurs it can get quite ugly."
[Goes back, inserts HTML tags in post]
That's more like it!
As the image slowly loads over my sick dialup, the first thing I see is what LOOKS like pumpkin goo and seeds being blown out of the stem on top... and I'm thinkin', "Man, that pumpkin musta drank some hot shit..." ... and when it finished loading, we can see the hangover :)
"The issues are Googles lack of QA and security testing.."
I think that's a good point. Yeah, "thousands of eyes" were looking at GMail, but how many were doing it AS dedicated beta testers, with a *mission* to find and report flaws? Damn few, I'd bet.
The music is from the original "Mission: Impossible" TV show (in fact, it sounds like an analog recording using TV and mic, the way we used to do it in the olden days) and if you remember the series, one of its regular schticks was that at the end, when there was no escape, the MI team would in some highly ironic way inform the target that he'd been pwn3d.
Which makes this just bloody perfect, music and all!
Yeah, never mind the fines.. think of the bandwidth bill!!
Actually, when I looked at the forums subpage, it informed me that "1 guest" (evidently myself) was the only person there. Come on, slashdotters, you can do better than that!
At first I didn't know what to think, but my high school's Latin teacher was good and enjoyed her subject (and was utterly fluent in both written and spoken Latin ... she was an English teacher the rest of the time) ... and I wound up loving the class. Plus frankly it was pretty easy -- it's a very logical, efficient language.
:)
:)
And we sure are stupid when we're young, eh?
Which probably applies to gov'ts and corporations too, now that I think about it. (Ha, and we thought we were off topic.
I took Latin in high school, then Spanish the next year. This made Spanish unreasonably easy, as for practical purposes it's just degenerate Latin.
(I'd have taken a 2nd year of Latin if I could have, but they'd temporarily suspended those courses. Latin was reinstated the year after I graduated, due to -- no shit -- popular demand!!)
Interesting to hear from someone with experience on both sides of the issue. Now, I'm curious -- is there anyone who has lived in a state that requires people to carry their papers, who is actually in favour of such a scheme??
Yep -- DNA would be a lot more interesting than mere remains, and one helluva lot more definitive!
Tho as someone further down the chain said, at first go-round this sounds a lot like someone trying to one-up an anthropological colleague, and angling for some grant money... and not too much like real research.
But there are isolated pockets of other "we thought those died out *eons* ago" species still extant, so it's perfectly possible they were the last gasp of a remnant species.
Dogs are an extreme example, yeah -- the species has the largest range of "normal" phenotypes, and probably the most flexible gene pool, of any creature alive today.** But let's narrow it down, to say, the variation within a single breed (a much more homogenous gene pool). Even then, variations can be so extreme that the average person cannot readily tell two dogs are of the same breed, and such variations will breed true within a given bloodline. (Frex, compare Maxx's Surprise http://www.totalretriever.com/00nfc.htm and Dickendall Arnold http://www.dickendall.com/arnold.html. About all they have in common is being black, floppy-eared, and short-coated; neither more than superficially resembles a typical field or show Labrador of even as little as 30 years ago.##)
;) http://www.longplain.com/
:)
** I have my own theory about this: one theory of evolution is that occasionally, a species' gene pool mutates wildly and "shatters" into many new species, most of which are nonviable and soon die out. I think domestication hit dogs at a "shatter point", and because dogs no longer had to fend for themselves, many genes were preserved that would have disappeared in the wild -- thus the modern dog's incredibly varied gene pool. (I have a further suspicion that coyotes are a =descendant= of the earliest domesticated dogs, rather than being originally a wild species or an ancestor of modern dogs. Coyotes' behaviour is much more dog-like than wolf-like.)
I breed Labradors, if you hadn't already guessed
## From this old-timer's perspective, they BOTH suck.
It doesn't take much to get different limb lengths and proportions to breed true, even to the point of looking "wrong" to someone from another tribe (thus from another gene pool). There are plenty of examples among modern ordinary humans, even without delving into genetic anomalies like dwarfism.## Some races are long-bodied and short-limbed, others are long-limbed and short-bodied; some have large round skulls, others have small narrow skulls; etc, etc. If you put extreme (yet still normal-range) examples side by side, they'll barely LOOK like the same genus, let alone the same species.
:)
Point being, you can't judge by appearance at that level. Now, if they had DNA evidence to back up their speculation about these people being a different species... that would mean something.
## Selection for proportions can be done in just a couple generations in dogs**. Humans aren't that much more complex, and human mating behaviour tends toward selecting the familiar (ie. someone who looks at least sortof like your own tribe). Types do develop and breed true in humans, if sufficiently isolated by geography and/or tribal behaviour. -- I've heard how some Orientals can peg another Oriental by physical type right down to their native village and even family, because the local types are so consistent. [I can do the same with some bloodlines in dogs.]
(**Something I'm intimately aware of, as a professional dog breeder/trainer with 11 generations of my own bloodline, and 35 years experience.)
Great, now you've made me do nested footnotes
I was recently reading about African Pygmies, and how Pygmy tribes interact with other tribes -- these naturally pint-sized people (which despite their small stature are still ordinary Homo sapiens, genetically) live in the deep forest, maintain a very primitive lifestyle by choice, and only come to town to trade (or sometimes to beg or work). Some "town tribes" regard them more or less as "forest elves". Their numbers, never great, have declined radically in some areas, and doubtless some Pygmy tribes now exist only as mouldering or even fossilized bones.
These newly-discovered "hobbitt-sized people" may well be no more than a sort of local pygmy tribe, now extinct.
OTOH, it's perfectly possible that remnants of genetic side-branches of Homo Whatever persisted into historical times, if sufficiently isolated and protected by their local environment.
Size is no indication of being a different species; hell, look at dogs, which even among wild species range from 25 to 100 lbs. A closed environment can select for even larger extremes; also, note the radically different brain size among different breeds of domestic dogs, even tho they are all the same species.
Sounds like maybe one of the first 92xx series? Most of what I had were 89xx (ISA) and 94xx (VLB), IIRC. The latter were still over $100 in 1994... amazing what we considered "cheap" back then. I remember being delerious with joy to find memory at $40 a meg!
Never had a Genoa card, myself. I did have one off-brand very early VGA card that had the most wonderful colour, deep and rich like nothing else I'd seen at the time -- but its memory chips got so hot that it would only work for a little while at a time before the smoke started escaping. So much for the bleeding edge in the early days!
Say what? I've run WordPerfect 5.1 on a number of XT-class machines (so have numerous friends and clients) -- and it works just fine on every one I've encountered. No idea what you're talking about re "requires the 286 instruction set"; first time I've ever heard anything like that!
I don't recall when WP4.x came out (I've got 4.1 and 4.2 here tho -- I collect WP versions when I can pick 'em up cheap) tho without going to look, I believe it was in 1987. WP5.0 for the PC was released in 1988, and WP5.1 a few months later. The first commonly-seen version of WP5.1 for DOS is dated 1989.
WP ports to other OSs didn't bear much relationship to the PC version; frex, I've got WP4.2 for Xenix that IIRC is dated 1988, so it was at least a year behind the PC version, and it wouldn't surprise me if the NeXT port ran a version behind. The Mac version ran several years behind, too (WPMac 3.5 is essentially WPDOS 5.1).
As of WP5.1+ (the final 5.1 version, released in 1994), the installer still had a floppy-only option. AND.. it still runs perfectly on an XT, as I can attest from firsthand experience.
Damn, you had *VGA* snow? You lucky dog you ... :)
I've heard about issues with the old Trident cards, but I've never seen it, and I had a shitload of 'em back in the Olden Days. I never had a bit of trouble with the ISA and VLB models. But they went completely to hell as of the PCI era (damned slowest things I've ever seen), and Trident-based AGP cards are no better.
I wonder if the "VGA snow" was an interaction with a particular motherboard chipset??
[I now use Matrox video cards, and they're rock-stable, if not geared toward gamers.]
LOL! Nope, tho if you want, next time I can try emulating it on the XT ;)
Ah, machine code, that would be before my time. But I'm reminded of tales told by a programmer fellow I know who flew in Navy spyplanes in the 1960s. The onboard computer had this array of plugs that you moved around to program it, and a bunch of blinkenlights one had to interpret results from.
We still live with its legacy to this day -- in every SF film that depicts a computer!!