Unscrambling the scrambled research
There is (now somewhat old) news about the well-circulated (and still circulating) but apocryphal report about reading scrambled text. Here is the original "report":
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
Matt Davis, a researcher at Cambridge University, was intrigued enough to try to pin down something of the truth about this. In 2003, he produced an enjoyable report of his own.
Harry Lipkin, intrigued, slightly amused, and somewhat annoyed that many people take the original "research" seriously, has produced a simple counterexample:
I had been previously annoyed by this so-called British research
when I thought that it was honest but sloppy that I invented a
counterexampleTry reading this sentence which has the first and last letters in the
right place and everything else scrambled:
Cepsmordtrenns roptreed ignursnet bendmobmart of canommdm psot wtih crisue
melisiss pudicorng tashudnos of cituleaass.
Now read this as the real message:
Correspondents reported insurgent bombardment of command post with cruise
missiles producing thousands of casualites.