Sunday 15 April 2012

What did KMU do to you?

At work yesterday I spent the day checking the output of automatic recognition software and came to two conclusions.

1) The developer wanted to keep users on their feet. I got through four articles yesterday and one was almost perfect, one the software read horizontally from left-right (which would be fine except that the original text was vertical top-bottom!), one was read top-bottom but ignoring section breaks meaning that the first line of each section was one sentence and separating them out became a tedious process of cutting and pasting, and the fourth just misread every fifth character.

2) Based on my highly academic (heh!) analysis of the misread characters, I deduced that the developer was (a) male and (b) had been in a S&M relationship with a woman with the initials KMU. The relationship ended so badly that the software developer forswore the opposite sex and immersed himself in his work. He couldn't quite forget how mercilessly the mysterious KMU had been, however, and worked her and his pent-up negativity into his programs so that, when confronted with an article on the beginnings of higher education for women in Japan, his program failed to recognize the character for woman (女) properly even once. The compound 女子 (joshi, girl) mostly became KMU but elsewhere the character was replaced by the character for stand (立) or even bug (虫).

The moral of the story? Be careful of women with the initials KMU, avoid crossing software developers, and, most importantly, spending six hours by yourself editing articles captured by character recognition software can do funny things to your mind...

5 comments:

  1. "The compound 女子 (joshi, girl) was replaced by the character for ... bug (虫)."

    That is priceless! It could very well win the prize for best blog post sentence of the year! :D

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  2. It was pretty amusing to read so I am glad you enjoyed it too!

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  3. Very funny! This reminds me of spell check in Word. Once when I typed in Mikhail (as in Gorbachev), spell check identified it as an error and offered up what it thought was the correct word spelling: 'Mishap.'
    hugs, C

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    Replies
    1. Hehe! So Gorby was a mishap, was he? hehehehe!

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    2. Sadly, there's probably a significant segment of the Russian population (sentimental about the USSR and the good ol' days of superpowerdom) that does think Mikhail is synonymous with Mishap...

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