Thursday, November 06, 2008 - Posts
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Perhaps the best piece of campaign trail gossip to leak since Election Day is the report—by Fox News, of all places—that Sarah Palin couldn't name the countries involved in the North American Free Trade Agreement. But if the question is which countries constitute North America, the answer isn't so simple.
Like the definition of the Bush Doctrine, it depends whom you ask. Most people think North America is just the United States, Canada, and Mexico. But the United Nations defines the continent of North America as including three different regions: Northern America (Canada, the United States, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Greenland, and Bermuda), Central America (Mexico, Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Panama), and the Caribbean (26 countries and territories). The CIA World Factbook takes a similar stance. "North America is commonly understood to include the island of Greenland, the isles of the Caribbean, and to extend south all the way to the Isthmus of Panama," it says. At the same time, people in some parts of the world don't distinguish between North America and South America. The five-continent model—which combines Europe and Asia into Eurasia and merges North and South America as the Americas—is taught in Latin America, Iran, and some parts of Europe.
Palin should be off the hook for not being able to name the countries of North America. Not being able to name the signatories of NAFTA? Well, that's a more serious blunder.
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Did you mean President-elect Boatman? Barack Obama may be
one of the most recognizable figures in America, but there's a decent chance your copy of
Microsoft Word or Outlook is still shrugging when you type in his name.
The 2003 Word nudges you in the direction of Osama or Bema, which, in one of life’s delectable little ironies, apparently
refers to a platform for
public oratory in Ancient Greece. Outlook 2003 also offers Boatman, Agama, and Boom, and a
handful of others.
A Microsoft spokesperson tells me that they added Obama into
their spell check library in April 2007, and issued a hotfix—basically, a small update
to the software—that adds both “Barack” and “Obama.” (I installed the 2003 version of the Hotfix,
which is at least a five-step process and requires installing a 5.9 MB file. It
worked.)
“We consider a number of factors when updating our content,
including user feedback, frequency of the words in market area publications,
and the first names of public figures whose last names have been added,” the
spokesperson says. According to the version of the hotfix for
Office 2007, the words Friendster, Klum, Nazr, and Racicot also
shipped out with Obama.
Because the Office products are using a spell check library
on your local machine, however, these updates don’t show up automatically. The Obama add was included in a large
batch of updates for Word 2007, while those of us using 2003 are stuck with
a corrugated red line under the president-elect. The Webmail version of Outlook that the Washington Post uses is similarly clueless, also suggesting "Barracks" for Obama's first name.
The built-in spell checker in Firefox 3 also fails to
recognize Obama—Obadiah? Bamako?—while
Gmail’s spell checker does. (It’s easy to confuse the two if you’re reading
mail in Firefox. The browser spell checker underlines words as you type, while
the Gmail version activates when you click “Check Spelling” to the upper right
of the body text.)
Update, 3:30 p.m.: In an e-mail, Firefox director Mike Beltzner says the browser uses an open-source framework called Hunspell for its spell checking. Hunspell, in turn, relies on open-source spelling dictionaries to determine which words are recognized. A ticket has been filed with the Hunspell team to add Barack and Obama. Like with Word, Beltzner notes that Firefox allows users to add custom words themselves in the mean time.
Update, Nov. 6: Predictably, Google has a innovative way to keep its library relevant. A spokeswoman passes along this statement: "Our vocabulary for spell checking is automatically derived from occurrences in
our query stream and in web documents. As soon as a word appears in the query
stream or web documents, it is eligible to be part of our spell check
vocabulary. The word will actually start getting used in spell check when we
next refresh the spell checking model. Thus, Barack Obama has probably been in
our spell check vocabulary for many years now."
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Just because Barack Obama is president does not mean you can now violate traffic laws. From today’s Obama pool report:
Obama left his house at 11:27 am, and heading to a security briefing at the FBI building (Chicago division). The motorcade drove along Lakeshore Drive, and past Grant Park (where there were scores of construction workers still tearing down the scaffolding and staging from Tuesday night's rally.
Some of the drivers here in Chicago do not seem to understand that a) the Chicago police car at the end of the president-elect's motorcade is serious about having traffic pull over when the officers flash their lights and hit their sirens, and b) it's not a great idea to jump ahead of traffic by trying to cut around the black SUV filled with five heavily-armed secret service CAT members. When the motorcade pulled onto Van Buren, an African-American couple driving a tan sedan tried to drive around the motorcade. The SUV cut the car off immediately, and the security team aimed their weapons at the car. The driver and passenger in the sedan stopped, and looked stunned--until the male driver appeared to understand what was happening (your pool reporter could see him mouth "Obama"). The motorcade continued on. The sedan remained stopped, near the side of the road.
The president-elect arrived at the FBI building at 11:48 am.
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