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The CDO crisis was in part due to a soft deal between regulating agencies and the banks. The Fed would look the other way and banks woudl give out mortgages to minorities they knew could not pay them back. A lot of the minority bias in loans is hogwash as the numbers were fudged as a number of studies show: https://www.utdallas.edu/~lieb...

However I do agree that decisions on loans should be financial and on history and be completely blind to race.

https://www.utdallas.edu/~lieb...

more detail. http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebo...

This study, for example, demonstrates conclusively that aerobic exercise (like running) delivers more blood to the brain and this nourishes the brain and stimulates it to higher performance, specifically for memory.

Ten miles a day might be bad. A half hour jog on an elliptical machine three times a week is definitely good.

And yet when Bradley Manning makes an eerily similar statement plenty of people are willing to take it as proof positive that he was a bad guy.

The definition of patriotism is believing your country is the best country on Earth simply because you were born in it. Nobody's national anthem starts with "We're Number Two!" So when America says someone's bad, americans believe it, but nobody else does. When the Chinese say someone's bad, the chinese people believe it, but nobody else. And so on, and so on.

Nationalism is hardly a problem confined to America; It blinds people equally the world over. Here's some Russian propaganda about American, and here's some American propaganda about Russians. It's all the same.

FAT/FAT32 isn't a poor technology, it's a simple technology.

FAT was a poor technology when it was introduced in the 80s: UNIX file systems already had many of the features we enjoy today in the 70s, see V6's file system in 1975, and 8.3 names were already a restrictive choice back then.
It also did not contain significant innovation, as it was basically an implementation of the CP/M file system.
So nobody would use it, unless for compatibility reasons, which is the point of my comment. It certainly never was "innovative technology that one would pay to use". Not in the 80s, and it would be risible if somebody said that it is now. And Microsoft are asking for money now.

It's not very complicated, but the implementation has evolved over nearly 40 years.

It's only been hacked to support larger disks and longer file names, and still it does that poorly (high internal fragmentation, small maximum file size, no support for extended attributes, poor performance on optical storage and flash, and let's not talk about missing features).

Secondly, you don't have to pay royalties to Microsoft for using FAT/FAT32 itself. You have to pay Microsoft if you use the same exact algorithm for storing larger than 8.3 filenames on FAT. You are free to use a different algorithm, and not pay any royalties, or stick to 8.3 filenames as the original FAT/FAT32 did.

The algorithm is part of the standard, You must implement it as it is. And even if you could omit that part of the standard while still claiming that you're implementing it, you would have to tell your customers that they need to only write 8.3 ASCII filenames, and that they won't be able to see files written by others if their names exceed 8 characters OR contain, say, an accented letter. Are you in all honesty convinced that a company could do this and be competitive in 2012?

As an additional information, know that Windows XP is known to blue screen when it encounters files with short filenames not conforming to the standard: Linux developers found that out when they were trying to implement an alternate 8.3 conversion scheme for the vfat Linux module.

There is a university in Texas that works on a solution to this problem, please consider making a donation: http://www.utdallas.edu/~kilgard/tinnitus.htm

What you write makes sense, and this is the approach taken by the researches mentioned above. I suspect that the method should work, because there are similar stories (related to other types of issues) discussed in:
- the brain that changes itself
- Dr. Ramachandran's stories about his patients

How long did it take you to learn to influence it that way?

I've done some similar experiments and I sometimes can make it less loud, just by imagining that it fades out into silence. I was never able to shut it off completely, at least not yet.

Perhaps if you went to the original post and followed the link and then followed the link that the author of that article provided maybe you could discover these things.

Here is linked source. Search for citation 16 and read onwards. The autor didn't read it properly. The article states: several things:
-QWERTY is a fast keyboard layout, and it has killed quite a few layouts because it is fast
-Dvorak is most likely a tad faster,
-The article that is the "counterpoint" of the article uses "If a typist has learned QWERTY, the cost of changing is likely too high compared to a "10% gain"*1
-The studies counterpoint is at citation 31, and seems a bit flawed, just as the NAVYs test

*1: Not actual numbers, a quote or anything, its a general expression

CC by-sa is a standard term. Not knowing CC licenses is non-standard.

CC-by-sa(Creative Commons by Share Alike license) is not only a non-standard term, it is also an acronym. Thus it should be expanded upon first use in ever writing. As I have now, not entirely correctly, demonstrated. The expanded term should first be used, followed by the acronym in parenthesis. Most write style guides agree on this.

My tall-horse riding friend above is correct.

Ugh ....
Maryland - Goddard Space Flight Center
New Mexico - AF Research Lab - Space Vehicles, Sandia Labs, Los Alamos Labs
Colorado - Ball, Raytheon, etc
California - JPL, Livermore Labs and way too many others to list
Virginia - Navy Research Lab, Wallops Island
Texas - UT Dallas, Texas A&M, Johnson Space Center, many more
Arizona - Orbital Sciences Corp., GD, etc
Tennessee - Oakridge
Alabama - U.S. Space and Rocket Center
Utah -Space Dynamics Laboratory, L3
Florida - Kennedy, ATK and many more
Alaska - Kodiak Island

The space industry is spread out over the entire country. This list could go on and on. Saying it is only Florida and Texas that benefit is mildly absurd. I agree with the idea, but it isn't nearly as narrow as that.

The idea that QWERTY was designed to slow us down, and that DVORAK is significantly better are both surprisingly long standing urban legends. Liebowitz and Margolis wrote the definitive article debunking this (in 1990!) with loads of research. The jamming issues were sorted out before QWERTY became standard, and it actually won out over a number of other layouts over a period of years. Additionally, the studies show DVORAK is better generally came from Dvorak himself. Independent studies (like one done in 1956) show there's no appreciable difference. This is probably the main reason DVORAK hasn't really made much ground, even though it's been around since 1936.

http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html (1990)

They wrote a follow up in 1996 showing how this myth keeps propagating, and how authors keep referring to each other, making the myth sound legitimate. Having 25 citations certainly makes it sound like it's true.

http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors (1996)

My guess is DVORAK users may have some form of "sunk cost" bias, considering they spent the time and energy converting to the new layout. Possibly some affirmation bias on the old studies. Not sure how else you could justify the costs of using a non-standard keyboard with no conclusively proven gains in speed.

A super capacitor is basically a highly convoluted labarynth of activated carbon, submerged in an electrolyte solution.

It works by radically increasing the surface area of the interface layer, where the electrical charge potential gets stored. More surface area==More theoretical maximum charge.

An electron micrograph of the kind of activated carbon in question is really all you need to see to understand just how much surface area you are talking here by using the activated carbon instead of the more traditional interfaces used in normal electrolytic capacitors.

(3) at least one study indicates that placing commonly used keys far apart, as with the QWERTY, actually speeds typing, since you frequently alternate hands[.]

That sounds backwards. A Dvorak has, for example, A and S on opposite sides of the keyboard. In fact, all the vowels are on the left side of the home row. And all of your most popular consonants are the other side.

Looking over at my wife's Qwerty, A and S are are close. So are E and R.

[This is off topic in regards to the above quote] Please realize that there's hardly anyone that just types Dvorak. Those that have two weeks to learn the new layout type both Qwerty and Dvorak! Your Qwerty speed can't go down, unless you neglect Qwerty entirely for years.

Here's the original reference mentioned in my link above. The high points of it are these:

(1) the research demonstrating the superiority of the Dvorak keyboard is sparse and methodologically suspect;

(2) a sizable body of work suggests that in fact the Dvorak offers little practical advantage over the QWERTY;

(3) at least one study indicates that placing commonly used keys far apart, as with the QWERTY, actually speeds typing, since you frequently alternate hands; and

(4) the QWERTY keyboard did not become a standard overnight but beat out several competing keyboards over a period of years.

And the standard QWERTY keyboard was designed to slow typists down.

This is a myth.

Just curious, but has anyone else taken a step back and wondered *why* the USAF needs to build satellites more quickly? In reality, they are probably just planning ahead for when giant satellite killing lasers litter the ground and they start dropping like flies (or whatever else the planners have come up with). If this trend continues, will we launch fleets of these things? We already have a pretty large cloud of sattelites orbiting the earth.

Because homosexuality, and transgendered people are generally lumped into a 'sexual identity' bucket, even when they might be drastically different in some respects. It's just a general label (including all of the baggage that goes with such labels).

I should also point out that not all transgendered folks are male to female. I wouldn't categorize all their pink bits as being 'chopped of' ;)

Self-Help: Sexual Identity and Orientation

No, Betamax was not superior to VHS. That's a myth.

http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/paths.html

The main benefit is that it feels so much better, as my fingers travel less.

Exactly.

Dvorak is a little faster than Qwerty, about 5% more or less. Liebowitz/Margolis essentially admit this, but downplay it because it's not all that big an advantage.

Its main advantage is that it reduces hand and wrist strain. Liebowitz/Margolis don't mention this, probably because Reason is not written for meat citizens who suffer from pain and inflammation. Its audience is corporate citizens who suffer from revenue de-enhancement and restructuring costs.

By the way, if you're interested in proof of Liebowitz/Margolis's bias, go read what they have to say about Earle Strong in the Reason article or The Fable of the Keys. They hold Strong up as the unbiased counterpart to Dvorak's "suspicious[]," "deck stacking" analysis. Nowhere do they mention that Strong had written seven years earlier that he was opposed to new keyboard design; that he seems to have had a strained relationship with Dvorak; and that, when asked by other researchers for his data, Strong said he had destroyed it all.

Actually the choice of that wording was determined by the folks helping us with the press conference at AGU. Most folks don't even know what an ionosphere is, so we had to go with something that would at least give the average reader (not the Slashdot reader) a concept to start with. The BBC article did a good job of explaining the science and the concepts once you get past the headline.

There is no universally agreed-upon definition of "where space begins." What we were reporting is that the "transition height" or "topside" in the ionosphere, the altitude where the density of O+ and the density of the light ions (H+ and He+) are equal, is lower than we have ever seen before. Here's a link for the definitions of these layers:

http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/IONO/ionostru.html

Note that above this level we don't have much interference with radio communications, so the practical interest is with the ionosphere below this altitude. Also this site points out that the topside rarely is below 500 km on the nightside, but the C/NOFS results show that it's currently almost always below that height (down to 400 km in places) .

Here's a link to the press release that went with this press conference that gives a bit more information and a nice graphic of the topside measured by the CINDI instrument on C/NOFS.

http://www.utdallas.edu/news/2008/12/16-001.html

(Full disclosure: I am a member of the CINDI-C/NOFS project.)

Here are the websites for the top three competitors:

1. University of Maryland
2. University of Texas at Dallas
3. Ecole de technologie superieure

The AUVSI's website also mentions that media coverage will be available soon. In the meantime, you can always look at some videos from the SONIA team.

they could set my hair on fire and I wouldn't gripe...

Wanna be our new mascot ?

Posting anonymously because I'm that ashamed of my school mascot...

There's no need to go to 60 GHz for this. Amimon already has a chipset that transmits low latency HD video on the 5GHz unlicensed band. It uses a combination of MIMO and Joint Source-Channel Coding.

First year Physics at MIT, UT and WSCC http://web.mit.edu/8.01t/www/syllabus.pdf http://dox.utdallas.edu/syl8645 http://www.wscc.cc.tn.us/science/Science%20Dept/Physics%20Dept/PHYS2111SYL&ATT.pdf

Even if you're correct, the fact that there may have not been a formal "touch-typing" method, doesn't mean that people didn't do a form of touch-typing.

Read the Liebowitz & Margulis article, where it describes the skills of Frank McGurrin (arguably the first touch-typist); he used a Remington machine with a pre-existing QWERTY layout. "Reportedly, no one else at that time had skills that could even approach McGurrin's."

L&M may be mistaken, but if you're aware of anyone else who was typing at comparable speeds using any touch-typing method on any layout, please point us in that direction!

- Neal

http://www.utdallas.edu/datacompromise/

and this

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12459840/

and I think that one more campus just got hit. Not sure which one.

Subject: [URGENT-STUDENTS] Computer Network Intrusion
Date: Dec 12, 2006 12:15 PM

Approximately 5,000 students, faculty, and staff at the University of Texas at Dallas as well as other individuals potentially have had sensitive information exposed by a computer network intrusion.

The personally identifiable information that may have been exposed includes names, addresses, Social Security numbers, email addresses and telephone numbers.

There is no indication that the information has been disclosed, disseminated or used to anyone's detriment at this time. However, the University does not seek to minimize concerns raised by this intrusion, and in the best interests of those potentially affected seeks to notify anyone whose information may have been disclosed.

The individuals whose information is known to be involved at this time
include:

        * In the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, students and faculty as well as applicants for admission dating back as far back as 1993.

        * All staff and faculty of the University who were employed from September 2003 through August 2005.

The potential disclosure of data was discovered Sunday, December 10, by The University of Texas at Dallas information resources staff. The University of Texas at Dallas is responding aggressively to defend the integrity of the system and to assess the level of the threat to information contained on the system. Most but not all of the networked computing resources on campus have been assessed. Investigation is ongoing and updated information will be issued via email and the University homepage.

The University is in the process of contacting those individuals whose information could have been exposed. Individuals who are concerned thatthey might be affected by this intrusion are encouraged to go to https://www.utdallas.edu/datacompromise/form.html to submit contact information so that the University can respond, or call 972-883-4325 to leave contact information. Further information about protecting yourself (whether your information has been disclosed or not) is available at http://www.utdallas.edu/datacompromise/

Staff will continue to assess and respond to the situation. As a part of that assessment, University computers are being automatically checked by a program that is continuously sweeping the network to search out attempted intrusions. If the sweep detects irregular activity, it will generate instructions regarding any action you need to take.

To assist with this process, be sure to log off of your computer at the end of your work day, and to log on at the beginning.

A press release on this incident will be issued shortly in an effort to contact as many affected individuals as possible. Please share this information with the UT Dallas community.

Thank you.

David E. Daniel

Subject: [URGENT-STUDENTS] Computer Network Intrusion
Date: Dec 12, 2006 12:15 PM

Approximately 5,000 students, faculty, and staff at the University of Texas at Dallas as well as other individuals potentially have had sensitive information exposed by a computer network intrusion.

The personally identifiable information that may have been exposed includes names, addresses, Social Security numbers, email addresses and telephone numbers.

There is no indication that the information has been disclosed, disseminated or used to anyone's detriment at this time. However, the University does not seek to minimize concerns raised by this intrusion, and in the best interests of those potentially affected seeks to notify anyone whose information may have been disclosed.

The individuals whose information is known to be involved at this time
include:

        * In the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, students and faculty as well as applicants for admission dating back as far back as 1993.

        * All staff and faculty of the University who were employed from September 2003 through August 2005.

The potential disclosure of data was discovered Sunday, December 10, by The University of Texas at Dallas information resources staff. The University of Texas at Dallas is responding aggressively to defend the integrity of the system and to assess the level of the threat to information contained on the system. Most but not all of the networked computing resources on campus have been assessed. Investigation is ongoing and updated information will be issued via email and the University homepage.

The University is in the process of contacting those individuals whose information could have been exposed. Individuals who are concerned thatthey might be affected by this intrusion are encouraged to go to https://www.utdallas.edu/datacompromise/form.html to submit contact information so that the University can respond, or call 972-883-4325 to leave contact information. Further information about protecting yourself (whether your information has been disclosed or not) is available at http://www.utdallas.edu/datacompromise/

Staff will continue to assess and respond to the situation. As a part of that assessment, University computers are being automatically checked by a program that is continuously sweeping the network to search out attempted intrusions. If the sweep detects irregular activity, it will generate instructions regarding any action you need to take.

To assist with this process, be sure to log off of your computer at the end of your work day, and to log on at the beginning.

A press release on this incident will be issued shortly in an effort to contact as many affected individuals as possible. Please share this information with the UT Dallas community.

Thank you.

David E. Daniel

(T)here is strong evidence that the impact of file-sharing has been to bring significant harm to the recording industry. The basic evidence in the United States over the last few years--the birth of file-sharing and the subsequent decline in CD sales--makes for an extremely compelling and simple explanation in spite of the protestations to the contrary from the large and vocal group of individuals supportive of file-sharing. The recent reversal in the decline in CD sales matches a reversal in the activity of file-sharing, providing additional support for this conclusion.

This conclusion is not likely to have been a surprise to most anyone, prior to this topic becoming so highly politicized. The basic intuition of most economists is not much different than that which occurs to members of the general population: when given the choice of free copies versus purchased originals, a significant number of individuals who might have purchased originals will chose to substitute the free copy. It would be amazing if there were not a strong substitution effect.

Although there are conditions which might work to mitigate or even overturn this theoretical expectation, those conditions are unlikely to occur in the case of file-sharing. Although the concept of 'sampling' has been mentioned as a possible mitigating factor, theory does not appear to support this surmise. A broad analysis of the various theoretical factors at work supports a view that file-sharing is likely to cause damage to the owners of copyright materials that are so shared.

The remarkable thing about this is that it is such an old story. I was involved in looking for improved ways of ensuring spreadsheet models were error free when i worked for the consultancy division of a large accounting firm back in the early 1990s.. Then we were focusing on developing structured methods for laying out / documenting simple spreadsheets (these were the days when Lotus 123 was top dog...), providing more specific training on how to build easy to follow spreadsheets and doing some formal auditing of work. But the biggest idea then was to simply use a better tool - even then people were developing software designed to make financial modelling (in particular) more rubust - including Javelin (from Ashton Tate I think) and Lotus Improv. Both these used multi-dimensional space to track results of formulaic relationships that defined the model (in Improv's case you could have up to 12 dimensions - and its innovative way of allowing the user to browse this datacube by shuffling 'axis tiles' was later crudely copied by MS to come up with the PivotTable - a pitiful copy of the original idea). The idea being that you define the relationship using (in Improv's case near-english language) formulas (such as Profit = Revenue - Costs, with Revenue and Costs being defined separately by other formulas, or simple data vectors). Improv included (as with other similar products) the idea of sequences within dimensions - so you could have 'previous' and 'next' modifiers in formulas which was great for financial type analysis etc. The key was the formulas were were distinct from the numbers themselves (separating code and data as you might now say). It allowed you to do some very powerful modeulling with high confidence levels. I used Improv a lot for a few years, but Lotus never worked out who its client base was, and it finally died in the mid 1990s. A great pity.

A short review of spreadsheet evolution appears here.

I seem to recall that someone still sells an Improv like product, but not sure where / what it is, or if it is well liked.. .

Are you sure? There are no shortage of Asians in the Ivy Leagues, Engineering programs, Mathematics, or CS.

At UTD, the chinks outnumber us probably 2 or 3 to 1 on the graduate level.

And who funded the proposal? "Schlumberger Tech"

http://www.utdallas.edu/orgs/sps/?CFID=659901&CFTO KEN=76141456

Perhaps you should read their research proposal to get before crying "Troll!" because someone dared to question the groupthink around here:

http://utdallas.edu/~roddy/Marfa_Lights/marfa_ligh ts.htm.

Who's the one making UTD look bad now?

Why was GP modded as flamebait? Doesn't seem like it to me.

It's true that science and technology answer some types of questions and provide us with certain tools and luxuries, but other more mundane stuff seems to go without explanation, like these lights.

And, on a cursory examination of the sites listed, I couldn't find any photos or video (other than this http://utdallas.edu/~roddy/Marfa_Lights/car1.WMV which is just a highway in the dark.)

Marfa Video

Now, it may be that I drink the kool-aid and actually *use* GNOME because I like it, but you're really talking out of your ass right now.

Firefox, in Linux, by default, does *not* use gnome dialogs. Period.
Firefox save-as dialog
Cramped, hard to use, file names are trunkated way too soon, and I'm not sure the size field really has a point being there.

Save-as dialog from gedit
Bigger, allows me to select media which I'm pretty likely to want to save to in a hurry, and navigating the file-system tree is quite a bit easier with the buttons instead of a forward-slash delimited string and an up button.

If you're used to the crappy save dialogs from other OSes and DEs, and what firefox offers, you may feel that the gnome filechooser sucks, and that's fine. For me, though, I feel that having something be easier to use from the outset (especially for individuals not familiar with the unix file system or those who just want to save their documents in a hurry). At any rate, bashing both projects because you're ill-informred serves no purpose aside from filling up comments on /.

Now, it may be that I drink the kool-aid and actually *use* GNOME because I like it, but you're really talking out of your ass right now.

Firefox, in Linux, by default, does *not* use gnome dialogs. Period.
Firefox save-as dialog
Cramped, hard to use, file names are trunkated way too soon, and I'm not sure the size field really has a point being there.

Save-as dialog from gedit
Bigger, allows me to select media which I'm pretty likely to want to save to in a hurry, and navigating the file-system tree is quite a bit easier with the buttons instead of a forward-slash delimited string and an up button.

If you're used to the crappy save dialogs from other OSes and DEs, and what firefox offers, you may feel that the gnome filechooser sucks, and that's fine. For me, though, I feel that having something be easier to use from the outset (especially for individuals not familiar with the unix file system or those who just want to save their documents in a hurry). At any rate, bashing both projects because you're ill-informred serves no purpose aside from filling up comments on /.

Betamax was never better than VHS. It was theoretically superior on picture quality, though most side-by-side reviews at the time of real equipment gave the edge to VHS except for a few short periods of a couple of months when Beta would implement a picture advance before VHS. But Beta was vastly inferior on sound quality and on tape length.

See, for instance, http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/st ory/0,12449,881780,00.html

Of course, whether or not Dvorak is any better than Qwerty is open to debate; I've seen at least one study showing that Qwerty's design (alternate hands to avoid typewriter jams) also turns out to be quite helpful to typing speed (alternating hands is faster than typing successive characters on the same hand), and that Dvorak typists with repetitive stress injury benefit by switching to Qwerty in exactly the same way that Qwerty RSI sufferers benefit by switching to Dvorak. The only studies I know of show major Dvorak benefits were done by the inventor and salesman of the Dvorak layout.

See, for instance, http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html

My university uses social security numbers as student IDs. So to view my GPA and such, I would log in with my social security number. This goes as far as writing the last 4, 6, or all digits of the SSN on exams.

You can request a random ID to be issued to you, but by the time incoming students realize that their SSN is their campuswide ID, it's pretty much too late.

Stan Liebowitz (a professor of economics at the University of Texas) makes a fairly convincing case that Word and Excel succeeded because they were better than the competing products. Both were market leaders on Mac before PC, so those who think Microsoft cheated have to come up with an explanation of how it did so on Mac.

Stan Liebowitz (a professor of economics at the University of Texas) makes a fairly convincing case that Word and Excel succeeded because they were better than the competing products. Both were market leaders on Mac before PC, so those who think Microsoft cheated have to come up with an explanation of how it did so on Mac.

From the conclusion:

As an empirical example of market failure, the typewriter keyboard has much appeal. The objective of the keyboard is fairly straightforward: to get words onto the recording medium. There are no conflicting objectives to complicate the interpretation of performance. But the evidence in the standard history of Qwerty versus Dvorak is flawed and incomplete. First, the claims for the superiority of the Dvorak keyboard are suspect. The most dramatic claims are traceable to Dvorak himself, and the best-documented experiments, as well as recent ergonomic studies, suggest little or no advantage for the Dvorak keyboard.

Second, by ignoring the vitality and variety of the rivals to the Remington machine with its Qwerty keyboard, the received history implies that Sholes's and McGurrin's choices, made largely as matters of immediate expediency, established the standard without ever being tested. More careful reading of historical accounts and checks of original sources reveal a different picture: there were touch-typists other than McGurrin: there were competing claims of speed records: and Remington was not so well established that a keyboard offering significant advantages could not have gained a foothold. If the fable is to carry lessons about the workings of markets, we need to know more than just who won. The victory of the tortoise is a different story without the hare.

Moiche

As far as CS programs are concerned, I think University of Texas at Dallas is bigger and better. The CS faculty at UT Dallas numbers about 60, vs about 35 for UT Austin. Of course there are corresponding differences in enrollment. Also, UT Austin's enrollment is declining, whereas UT Dallas's is increasing, and the average SAT for incoming freshmen to UT Dallas is perhaps the highest in the state at 1230. UT Austin has to deal with all those 10 percenters.

Every conversation about Dvorak, these two supposedly genius contrarians get brought up.

The big thing is, their whole agenda was to show that the market doesn't make mistakes. Since everyone using an inferior keyboard is obviously a market making a mistake, they decided to grab the bull by the horns and attack that.

Go ahead and read it. Then google the search, and find people who don't have an economic point of view to push have addressed its sketchy (and often ad hominem) attacks.

(Oh, here's a link to a plaintext version:
http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html )

It will point out that the Navy study is dubious, etc. It won't actually point out other important things, like that Sholes (the creator of the Qwerty keyboard) never intended it to become the defacto standard, and actually designed a somewhat Dvorak-like keyboard (vowels one place, consonants another, though he didn't have detailed statistics to get key placement) and intended for *that* to become the standard.

But, everyone already knew Qwerty by then! He knew his standard was substandard, but it was "good enough", and he couldn't move it. Dvorak, trying decades later, barely made a dent.

Anyway, Dvorak is better. The fastest typists in the world use it, and they know more than two guys who desperately want to show that the market is always right.

But I don't use it to type faster, I use it because my fingers hardly ever get tired (the mild performance increase is pretty much nothing). Typing is more pressing buttons and less fingers flying. I mean, just *look at the layouts with your own eyes*. What do you want to type a lot? J? K? How about H and T instead? Hey, "E" is the most common letter, get that the hell off the home row! Etc. Qwerty is a pretty arbitrary layout, meant for a specific purpose, over a century ago. If you don't want to learn to do it better because it's a big pain, then don't. But don't let these people go denying reality because it's convenient for them.

Anyway, if you don't want to google Fable Of The Keys to find it debunked, here's at least one link:
http://www.dvorak-keyboard.com/dvorak2.html

Check the following article. There isn't much evidence that Dvorak is better than QWERTY:

http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html

Here's a link to the Fable of the Keys.

I used to get in an argument at work all the time about DVORAK vs. QWERTY. At the end of the day, all that really matters is individual comfort and style. (It's a bit like where to put the curly braces in C++). But this guy would argue and argue with me that DVORAK is better. He'd send me all this literature and claim that if I could come up with one counter-example...

I pointed him to the "Fable of the Keys," and he never brought the argument up again.

A final word on all of this comes from Frank McGurrin, the world's first known touch-typist:

Let an operator take a new sentence and see how fast he can write it. Then, after practicing the sentence, time himself again, and he will find he can write it much faster: and further practice on the particular sentence will increase the speed on it to nearly or quite double that on the new matter. Now let the operator take another new sentence, and he will find his speed has dropped back to about what it was before he commenced practicing the first sentence. Why is this? The fingers are capable of the same rapidity. It is because the mind is not so familiar with the keys.45

Of course, performance in any physical activity can presumably be improved with practice. But the limitations of typing speed, in McGurrin's experiment, appear to have something to do with a mental or, at least, neurological skill and fairly little to do with the limitations on the speeds at which the fingers can complete their required motions.

(1) the research demonstrating the superiority of the Dvorak keyboard is sparse and methodologically suspect; (2) a sizable body of work suggests that in fact the Dvorak offers little practical advantage over the QWERTY; (3) at least one study indicates that placing commonly used keys far apart, as with the QWERTY, actually speeds typing, since you frequently alternate hands; and (4) the QWERTY keyboard did not become a standard overnight but beat out several competing keyboards over a period of years. Thus it may be fairly said to represent the considered choice of the marketplace.