I think your right about the touch-typing skills. I've often wished I taken lessons, rather than teaching myself my 3 1/2 fingers an 1 1/2 thumbs method.

Interesting. Some of that correlates closely with my gut feel based on people I know or worked with etc., but some of it flatly contradicts it, but then my "sample" is quite small, my record one of (notoriously poor) memory, and corrolation, a finger-in-the-air affair.

Without wishing to impune the veracity of your data:), how much of your conclusions are subjective and how much would you say was "pretty accurate"? Dumb question I know, but "ask the horse" and you usually get a pretty good answer:)

This all got started because of an on-line conversation with 3 people, who's opinions I value, all reached disparate conclusions, which is unusual. None of us are linguists, teachers or any other profession that would give any weight at all to our conclusions, but we do generally, more or less, reach agreement after discussion. On this subject, we each had different experiences, and drew different conclusions.

What I'm really looking for is some way to measure the effects of the phenomena (pressure, passion, mind-load), as well as any research data that might be available.

If anyone has any thoughts as to how to write a program (in perl of course) to do this, I'm all ears.