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The Study: The Fable of the Keys, By S. J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis

Some Commentary: Typing Errors, By Stan Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis

By tell him, I mean tell him that the Qwerty being designed to slow down your typing is nothing more than a myth?. The layout is actually designed to between your two hands.

This sounds like exactly what the senile moron who runs the IT dept. at the University of Texas at Dallas would say. He tried and failed at banning wireless access points, as many might remember. Currently at UTD, all major P2P software is blocked (common outgoing ports are filtered at the border). We have received threatening sounding letters that all file sharing is illegal and that we should stop, etc.

If you don't mention the school, it will be hard to coordinate students and taxpayers (if its a public uni) to solve the problem.

I got the large copy from a mirror. It's Here

It should survive the /. effect.

Yeah, honestly this isn't really that sleezy.

Texas Instruments did the same thing to the state of Texas less then a year ago. Except that instead of threatening to close a plant, it "convinced" Texas to give it $135M to increase the budget of the University of Texas at Dallas significantly. UTD is getting a new research facility out of the deal.

Actually one of the coolest uses of blackmail ever, IMHO. (And not just because UTD is my alma mater, either.)

People talk about how great the Dvorak was, but there's no hard evidence that it was.

Stop perpetuating myths.

Dvorak made up that story as marketing for the keyboard design he hoped to profit from. And, could they have made that new keyboard any uglier?

Stop perpetuating myths.

Dvorak made up that story as marketing for the keyboard design he hoped to profit from. And, could they have made that new keyboard any uglier?

Can this be far off? The applications for Sci-Fi writing are enormous. 1st: This is motivated for military application (and thereby for the service of the "elite") 2nd: Does anyone think that your company insurance plan will be covering body transplants in the near future? 3rd: Who would be allowed access to quality parts? p.s. Here is the UTD press release: http://www.utdallas.edu/news/archive/2005/darpa-gr ant.html

The University of Texas at Dallas, which I attend, teaches MIPS assembly in its "Introduction to Digital Systems" course (CS 2310), as well as computer architecture (which is tightly coupled with assembly) in several other courses. Some of these courses are required for a CS major.

These are essentially what you're talking about. The reason it's not well known is that the resulting sensation is primarily useful for understanding speech. You wouldn't put these in for a more direct input of Beethoven's Ninth.

In many ways the eyes are actually simpler to deal with because the information coming in isn't mechanically transformed... light is focused on the retina, nerves light up, and bing.

In the ear sound waves bounce off all the crenellations of the external cartilage, phase shifting slightly forward or backward to provide spatial information. Different cilia respond to different sound frequncies... the nature of input that the ears are processing is less obvious and less uniform between people.

It's also harder to ask people to calibrate an audio implant. With the visual implants you're talking about they can say "is the second spot above or below the first? now where is it? Tell me when they merge." The patient actually does the calibration. With sound so many of the aspects are hard to describe and quantify even for a trained musician.

I know you're going to get slaughtered for the above, which is a shame because you make a reasonable point but with a bad example. Anyway, I know this is heading offtopic but it comes up a lot on Slashdot. Let me be the first to say:

Dvorak is NOT better than Qwerty.

The original studies that 'proved' the superiority of Dvorak were conducted by none other than Mr Dvorak himself! The tests were repeatedly and ridiculously unfair, in that they compared groups of typists who could never be reasonably compared.

Subsequent fair tests by independent parties have shown that Dvorak is no better once the typist reaches a reasonable degree of experience, and until that point they will perform much worse than on Qwerty if they are transitioning, as would presumably be the case for anyone reading this.

You can read about the total debunking here, and here if you still don't believe me.

Lots of things which are better don't catch on. But like Betamax (vs VHS), Dvorak isn't one of them.

According to the instructions at UTD (see here, thanks to the other poster) they have 802.1X in use. This would have helped, because you can have mutual authentication. Of course, everyone needs to install Univ's Cert beforehand, but anyway, fake AP's are pretty hard to do in mutually authenticated environment.

As a student who goes to UTD, Information Resources did provide a page just for that after the network was upgraded.

-Vic

I absolutely agree with the university's decision. There's already a wireless network in place, and since it is overseen by the IT staff, I think it's safe to assume that somebody there has the responsibility of making the network secure and functional for all the students, staff, and faculty to use. Use that, for everybody's sake. Be neighborly.

Setting up a wireless node implies that the node connects to the external network.

That means it uses university bandwidth,

and that means it falls under the university's computer use guidelines ( (here: ) One guideline is that "infrastructure modifications are to be performed only by authorized departments." Adding a wireless node counts as infrastructure.

I assume that a student doesn't count as an authorized department. You lose. Sorry.

If the node isn't on the LAN, perhaps that's a different story.

But I'd hate to have to discover and figure out which ones were live and which ones were contained. It's a drain on resources, and a pain in the ass.

If you're doing something that requires you to have your own network, go get an account with a service provider

or use the facilities provided by the school. Going that far out of your way would seem to indicate that a rogue wireless node probably is not the right solution anyway.

Where in the article does it say that Waterview isn't owned by the university? In fact, this page would seem to indicate that the complex is in fact owned and operated by the university.

Apparently UT Dallas is NOT even the landlord. From their own website, UTD states "U.T. Dallas has no University owned and operated housing facilities. However, the Waterview Park Apartments are located on the U.T. Dallas campus within easy walking distance to all campus facilities. U.T. Dallas students have priority for available units." http://www.utdallas.edu/utdgeneral/utdmaps/watervi ew.html. It appears that they do not have even the smallest right to impose this requirement.

I have the strangest feeling that "apartment" means "dorm room" in this context. At least, the article gave no indication that the problem was being caused by students living off-campus. So, the first problem is that they're renting space from the school. The school certainly has the right to set ground rules on their own property.

The assumption that everybody seems to be making is that the university owns the apartments in question. A quick google got me this page: U.T. Dallas has no University owned and operated housing facilities. However, the Waterview Park Apartments are located on the U.T. Dallas campus within easy walking distance to all campus facilities. U.T. Dallas students have priority for available units.

The university does not own nor operate the apartment building in question. Also, while university students have priority for apartments, it's implied that not all of the residents of this apartment complex are associated with the university. The article mentions that they are sharing Comcast cable. Comcast allows routing over wireless, and will even set it up for you for an additional fee, so they're not in violation of the internet provider's TOS.

In short, the university has banned use of a non-university regulated internet connection on non-university regulated property by people who may or may not even be university students(but probably are). Unless the apartment complex has some clause in the lease that tennants have to obey the whims of the university, I doubt this is legal.

These are NOT university property. http://www.utdallas.edu/utdgeneral/utdmaps/watervi ew.html These are private WAPs connected to private internet connections running in the same airspace as Waterview's crappy and unreliable wireless internet. I'm paying $50 a month for private Comcast internet, plus the price of a wireless router, and they want to require me to shell out even more for a 802.11a router, forget it.

University is not just banning the students from using Private Access Points but they also have restrictions / limitations on what kind of Wireless Access Cards students can use. "Please note that due to inconsistent performance with other products, UTD supports Orinico (Lucent) and Intel based products" http://webapps.utdallas.edu/irweb/index.html

If students use different brand / integrated cards with the Network, University Information Resources Department simply refuses to help the students. The slimy excuse given is that "your" card is not supported. So for all of us who have Integrated Wireless Cards with Notebooks, Other brand of wireless cards there is no support.

Most of the students end up using Private Internet Connections because the Wireless Signals for UTD Networks are poor and not reliable. Last month, there were major outages and whole network was sporadic. What are students supposed to do at these times? Just keep hoping that University connections will be up. Keep trying.

I just hope that UTD first updates their policy for support and improve the quality of their wireless network before they enforce any such policy of banning private Wireless Access points. Why will anyone want to get a separate Internet Connection when UTD offers once for free.

I absolutely agree with the university's decision. There's already a wireless network in place, and since it is overseen by the IT staff, I think it's safe to assume that somebody there has the responsibility of making the network secure and functional for all the students, staff, and faculty to use. Use that, for everybody's sake. Be neighborly.

Setting up a wireless node implies that the node connects to the external network. That means it uses university bandwidth, and that means it falls under the university's computer use guidelines (here: http://www.utdallas.edu/ir/tcs/general/policy.htm) One guideline is that "infrastructure modifications are to be performed only by authorized departments." Adding a wireless node counts as infrastructure. I assume that a student doesn't count as an authorized department. You lose. Sorry.

If the node isn't on the LAN, perhaps that's a different story. But I'd hate to have to discover and figure out which ones were live and which ones were contained. It's a drain on resources, and a pain in the ass.

If you're doing something that requires you to have your own network, go get an account with a service provider or use the facilities provided by the school. Going that far out of your way would seem to indicate that a rogue wireless node probably is not the right solution anyway.

Actually, the apartments do not belong to the university.

According to http://www.utdallas.edu/utdgeneral/utdmaps/watervi ew.html, U.T. Dallas has no University owned and operated housing facilities. However, the Waterview Park Apartments are located on the U.T. Dallas campus within easy walking distance to all campus facilities.

ACUTALLY, the apartments do not belong to the university.

According to http://www.utdallas.edu/utdgeneral/utdmaps/watervi ew.html, "U.T. Dallas has no University owned and operated housing facilities"

I, for one, used to live oncampus, and got tired of dealing with the apartment complex. The problem is that the buildings are owned (some of them) by the university, but leased out to the complex, Waterview Park Apartments. I'm looking at my old copy of my lease, and it says "This lease contract is between you, the resident ____________ and us, the owner: Waterview Park". I know that many of us had problems with the apartment complex and took them to the University. However, the university's take on it is that they don't control the buildings or the maintenance, and have no juristiction over them. Their police department patrols them, and you can be subject to discipline for underage drinking in them, but their main take on it so far (at least they tell the students) that if you have a problem with something in the apartments than you should "take it to the leasing office". I, and many others, moved out of there because of this. And, on the issue of wireless, I do remember 2.4Ghz phones being a huge problem, because everyone's parents bought them for their kids before they went. I'll bet if they started taking those away, there'd be a lot less issues. Also, it was common knowledge (for us engineering/CS majors there) that all you had to do was browse the network (i.e. browse in Network Neighborhood) and you could access all the unsecured boxes out there that were just broadcasting their info for all to see. And, of course, you can take into effect that the #1 answer by their IR (Information Resources staff: http://www.utdallas.edu/IR is to either reboot it or use the computer lab. In fact, if you look at their FAQ, they have lots of detailed posts about Kung-Fu, but not too many on how to fix the wireless. Those of us who needed wireless help researched it ourselves and went through trial-and-error to get a solution.

I went to UTD several years ago (before they rolled out wireless,) but I still have several friends that live there, so I'm pretty familiar with their setup.

First of all, the housing on campus isn't run by the university at all. It's a "privately managed community ... and conveniently located on the UTD campus." http://www.utdallas.edu/student/slife/housing/

Previous to the university's wireless rollout, residents were unable to connect to the university's network directly and had to rely solely on standard residential broadband (cable/DSL.) After enough pressure, the university caved in and started setting up their own wireless system using standard, unlicensed 802.11b. Each building has a panel antenna mounted on the roof for a backhaul to the campus (about 1/2 a mile away in parts.) That runs down to smaller panel antennas mounted in the center hallway of each floor. They use bluesocket centrally for access control.

Now theoretically you should be able to walk around the apartments and stay connected to their access points. It obviously never works like that, and even sitting in the same place you're subject to very frequent disconnects.

I'm still rather mixed as to how I feel about this overall. I can understand the interference issue with the university-sponsored network, but it was their choice to use unlicensed spectrum. Under FCC Part 15 there is no legal action they can take. I think its ridiculous they didn't even plan on a flood of unlicensed devices migrating in.

Puts on black hat. On the plus side, it was quite amusing to sit in any apartment and see 10-15 access points at once, only a small fraction being encrypted.

The notice explains clearly why they are doing it: the hundreds of WiFi access points set up by students are, in fact, interfering with each other.

This shows two things. a) Yes, folks, it really is necessary to have a regulatory agency like the FCC control use of the frequency spectrum. The Invisible Hand of the Marketplace will not magically solve technical engineering problems by itself.

b) The FCC currently isn't doing its job; they are allowing companies to set standards and sell gear that does interfere.

(This is nothing new, of course. The reason why your television set only picks up channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, etc. that the FCC botched the initial allocation of VHF spectrum. Adjacent channel assignments (2, 3, 4) weren't supposed to interfere with each other, but did)

As sort of a double whammy, there's also the: Code of Conduct that has clauses that ALSO specifically allow them to institute arbitrary rules for the good of the campus community, as determined by them.

I'm not trying to showboat myself here, but just for disclaimer/background, my name is Kathleen Fent, wife of CmdrTaco who runs this website.

I do work for the University of Texas at Dallas' Computer Crimes & Prevention institute. Some of the things my team has found out is that this is a pretty frequent occurance and that new technologies such as RFID are even more vulnerable. Right now with traditional magswip cards, you have scams such as clerks and waiters with portable mag-readers who can swipe the numbers from your card's magswipe and store them in their own database for thier own nefarious purposes leaving you with no clue as to how it happened.

An ever increasingly popular scam is card readers being installed over ATM machine slots that reads the card before the card enters the machine. Examples of this here. This makes things like PIN numbers and CVV2 numbers even more important for people to be careful with - its their last line of defense.

If you are interested in this topic, I suggest reading some of the papers I have posted over here on my blog.

No idea, but you'll notice that Hayao Miyazaki's movie "Laputa: Castle in the Sky" has been renamed to just "Castle In The Sky" by Disney in order not to offend their Spanish speaking market. see

you wouldn't believe the number of people who want to come to a CS degree for game programming

Hah, utdallas has a degree for video game programming. They even had John Romero teaching classes there for a while until he got fired for giving tests about himself.

It seems that most of the students here try to major in Computer Science... when they fail Calculus I, the student advisors tell them to take IAE because it doesn't require any higher level math skills.

Lame.

A myth? Hardly. The linkage jamming argument is often used in a misleading fashion. Yes, it's true that key placement was selected to avoid jamming...jamming that happened more often at higher speeds. Even if you don't count that as being 'to slow down typists' (which is arguable) it's still the net effect.

The study you refer to was considered suspicious by other researchers. When attempts were made to look at the raw data it turned out it had been destroyed (details). A single study with no access to the raw data isn't very convincing.

The usual study people mention as proof of qwerty's superiority was written by economists. Also not terribly convincing. Here's a refutation.

Either way, it's clear that the main design decision with qwerty was to in response to an engineering problem.

The best way to find out is to try it. I used to quote the same studies and had the same opinions until I tried it myself. It took about a weekend to get started and three weeks to exceed my previous level of proficiency.

"Sort of like the difference between a Ferrari and an Aston Matrin."

Spock did not seem to think laughter was illogical when he was doing this

Their main page

Publications

Note especially that they're continuing to publish in journals. That automatically puts them in a different category than most junk science like hydrinos, zero-point energy, gravity shields or cold fusion cited by Park.

Their main page

Publications

Note especially that they're continuing to publish in journals. That automatically puts them in a different category than most junk science like hydrinos, zero-point energy, gravity shields or cold fusion cited by Park.

My uni offers SE.

Difference between CS and SE as of the 2002-2004 schedule: 5 classes. Needless to say I'm going for both. =D

On an interesting note, all of my friends that graduated from EE are making ~$50K. (funny thing is half of them are doing coding jobs and I've seen the quality of their code... it ain't a pretty picture :-X )

It seems like to me IMHO that most companies are getting MIS and Computer Science majors confused...

UT Dallas Wireless coverage

In the on campus apartments, there is only wireless. They have 802.11b throughout all of the housing, as well as what's listed on that map.

To be honest I think it's a good thing. Many of my CS professors do all coursework submission through an online service, so students can keep up with what's posted on it and point out when things aren't posted as they should be in class, rather than by e-mail after class. The EE/CS building is the most widely covered, and while a bit flaky in a few lecture halls, it seems to be quite functional.

The only downside to having a totally wireless network in the housing end is that the positioning of the repeaters in the apartemnt buildings was bad enough that I cannot get a decen t enough signal in my bedroom (I fork out for cable).

My school (UT-Dallas) is still experiencing record growth in the CS department. We are now one of the biggest in the nation. Of course, 75% of the students are not US based, so the article still applies. However, we also have a sub-major called Software Engineering, and you're welcome to it, you XP-ing, OO-ing clods. I'll stick to the science of computing (theory, computability, algorithms, etc).

no, not really

A friend and I did the exact same thing a while ago, but using a hacked virgin webplayer. It's an internet appliance you can get for about $50 off of eBay. We just ran it off of NiMH batteries and woila, instant robot.

The details are here. We wrote up all of our notes, including the pinout of the roomba board in case anyone else wants to do this.

Somewhat OT, but it annoys the crap outta me that my university blocks the ports for BitTorrent (at least I think it does). I get, at most, 4kbps now, whereas when I first came here, it was 400-500kbps. It annoys me that BitTorrent ports are severely restricted for legitimate uses.

*sigh*

-Vic

Universal Standard Disclaimers.

Yeah, yeah I know they are not the same as TOS, but they're still a good read!

I'm a CS major at UT Dallas and I use half.com for a lot of my book purchasing. Also, for required non-CS classes (like government, history, english, etc..), I'll never write in the textbooks and keep them in good condition, and then sell them on half.com. I recently sold my $60 history book for $50. I win, the buyer wins. You can also get a lot of your textbooks on there really cheap, and if not, at least at a discount.

Also, for books you don't care about, look for softcover editions (physics, math, and CS books are usually hardback). As long as you can keep them in good condition, they'll last just as long as hardback books.

As for my core CS classes, I'll end up keeping those books because I use them and I'm sure I'll use them in the future.

-Vic

Might I suggest my alma mater, UTD?

It was a great tech school, it prepared me well in the fundamentals of CS (my EE friends also agree that their fundamentals were good).

Most importantly, UTD has excellent scholarships and is reasonably priced. During my time there, my fees were typically around $1500 per semester, although I obtained a scholarship the first year and because of my GPA (I was a 4-pointer), I had it upgraded to full tuition plus a living stipend by the end of my freshman year.

But a more dramatic example of the slowness of cultural change is the fact that I am typing this on a QWERTY keyboard. Dvorak [mwbrooks.com] has been around for years but still we type on devices that show their Victorian age heritage. Even when there is no need at all for the random shuffling of the alphabet across the current keyboard in the way we use it!

You know that this is all a myth, don't you? It is one of those "geek myths" people keep on repeating to each other without really bothering to check the facts.

I know, I used to do tell this story as well. Then I read a bit more about it and realized that there was a bit more to the story than I thought.

Straightdope summarizes it well: "(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."

I suggest you read The Fable of the Keys, which does a rather nice job of debunking this popular myth.

>QWERTY was designed to slow typists down, since old typewriters couldn't keep up with ultra-fast typists.

That's actually just a joke, not fact.

Some light reading.

The keyboard arrangement was considered important enough to be included on Sholes' patent granted in 1878 (see drawing), some years after the machine was into production. QWERTY's effect, by reducing those annoying clashes, was to speed up typing rather than slow it down.

Which really only make sense... The Straight Dope on this.

Furthermore, because hey, someone will bring it up, there are no quality studies that show the superiority of Dvorak layouts over QWERTY. :-)

I attend UTD which has been called the MIT of the south. Started in 1969 by the founders of Texas Instruments, it originally started as a PhD school only, and then moved to graduate only, and now is an undergrad and postgrad school too. It was just given 300 million dollars to play around with (the most any public university has ever been given, I believe), and has an incredible business and engineering school. I wouldn't be surprised if you see UTD a lot higher up on that list 10 years from now.

-Vic