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Researchers Find Typos Indicative of Stupidity.

Tuesday, December 2, 2003 Posted: 8:18 PM EST (0118 GMT)

SANCHEZ, South Dakota (AP) -- A team of researchers have found typos to be indicative of intelligence levels.

Dr Stuart Coleman, the leading researcher of a team studying Internet typos, has found that there is a conclusive link between kinds and frequency of typos, and intelligence.

The team studied over 1,000 subjects from every walk of life. The subjects were asked to perform several different tasks, from E-mail to instant messaging and even Internet message boards, and the researchers would document the typos made and how often they occurred.

"We decided to focus specifically on 'typos' that are typically used as Internet slang, instead of accident related typos," said Dr Coleman. "These including things such as 'U-R' instead of 'you are.'"

Several others studied included "your" instead of "you're," "plz" instead of "please," "im" instead of "I'm." Other mistakes studied were grammatical, such as capitalization, correct comma use, even decipher made up words.

"Sometimes people would inquire about the study, and when I explained it to them, try to write off the typos as time saving," said Dr Coleman. "But when you think about, selling you intelligence for a few microseconds it takes to type the extra ' and e to spell "you're" correctly, is it really worth it?"

He continued to say; "It really gets me when people think that just because you're online you can typo like a ******* retard. If you have the motor control of a retarded chimpanzee with Parkinson's disease you should be able to do it."

The study concluded that people with advanced college degrees made almost no typos, and would actually fix accidental ones they found. People with a standard four year degree tended to use time savers, (i.e. skipping apostrophes in you're, as well as capitalization), while people with a high school diploma or less tended to type with the grammatical accuracy of a horse bashing its hoof against a keyboard.

Dr Coleman's main research analysts, Dr Anthony Doucet, had this to say about the results, "Generally as education improves grammar and spelling improve, as does diction and clarity of thought. But sometimes you'll find a douche bag who managed to struggle through a 2-year community college who would write like second grader on crack. Those were painful."

One post-based site frequented by the poorer performers was ubersite.com. Dr Doucet had this to say of people posting on this site, "I saw way too many posts that looked like they were written by a second grader with one hand two feet up his ass talking about how Black people suck, or how Mexicans are destroying the economy, or God knows what other garbage."

When some of these people were asked to take IQ tests, few accepted. "The ones who did enjoyed an average IQ of 57. That indicates severe mental retardation, or some form of brain trauma," said Dr Doucet. Dr Coleman was overheard saying, "Christ, even people who just had strokes and can barely move score better than that."

Dr Coleman gave a brief synopsis of the results as this, "As intelligence and education go up, generally these typos decrease. Of course, this is not always the case, but the trend is obvious. It is also important to note that there are many other factors playing into this, such as lifestyle, political views, ethnicity, et cetera. We still need further analysis to be able to conclusively identify trends in other areas."

These results may make dumbasses type correctly. For the sake of mankind, this reporter hopes so.