Monday, April 27, 2009

Andthe (for And The)

Today’s typo reminds me of those boxes with nonsense words I see nowadays when creating an online account. This security device actually has a name: CAPTCHA, which was coined by some smart folks at Carnegie Mellon University and stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.” Currently, the school’s reCAPTCHA project helps digitize books by enlisting humans to decipher words that optical character recognition (OCR) cannot.

Andthe for the words and the is a typo of moderate probability on the Ballard list. There are 19 entries in the OhioLINK database, and perhaps some in your very own catalog to solve.

(An example of CAPTCHA, from Wikimedia Commons)

Deb Kulczak

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