Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!dino!atanasoff!jwright
From: jwright@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu (Jim Wright)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Urban Legends (was Re: Dvorak Keyboard Layout)
Message-ID: <1268@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu>
Date: 29 Jul 89 10:32:17 GMT
References: <787@dms> <10500004@prisma> <43460@bbn.COM>
Reply-To: jwright@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu.UUCP (Jim Wright)
Organization: Iowa State U. Computer Science Department, Ames, IA
Lines: 18

In article <43460@bbn.COM> cosell@BBN.COM (Bernie Cosell) writes:
| Try rerunning your results over English, instead of a dictionary.  A
| reasonable and easy way to do this is pick a mostly-text newsgroup (one that
| doesn't have a lot of "tty graphics" and acronyms and odd words and such),
| and run your program over the bodies of the message in it (e.g.,
| talk.politics.misc would be pretty good, but comp.dcom.telecom is all filled
| with NXX's and ISDNx ahd LATAs and such that'll skew the stats).
                       ^^^ :-)
I would suggest that Usenet is not the place to look for good examples
of the English language.  Just one supporting argument...  The word "ahd"
would yield different results than "and".  Since the QWERTY keyboard is
used by most of the population under study, this is an obvious bias.

(I don't claim innocence in this matter! :-)

-- 
Jim Wright
jwright@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu