Re: Dvorak keyboard @harmjschoonhoven
I think you've fallen for a common piece of propaganda; the Navy has no record of the trial, and Reason magazine (though, warning: libertarians, so with their own bias towards proving that markets work) sought a copy they managed to obtain it only from an organisation called Dvorak International and noted that:
(i) it has no listed authors;
(ii) it discards out of hand two prior studies that seemed to have the opposite outcome;
(iii) does not fairly compare the QWERTY and Dvorak results it contains, picking alternative summarisations for each that produce better numbers for the latter;
(iv) the Australian Post Office test of Dvorak, which is much better documented, found no improvement;
(v) the Navy experiment was conducted by: Dvorak himself (!); and
(vi) when the study was repeated after the war by the General Services Administration, they got exactly the opposite result: QWERTY was the better layout.
So they concluded that the idea that a worse standard defeated a better one here seems to be a myth. I can see why Dvorak should be better, with most of ETAOIN SHRDLU on the home row (though I don't know what 'L' did to suffer its banishment to the far corner of the keyboard), but it sounds like the empirical evidence might be a myth.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
