The Download: autocorrect's surprising origins, and how to pre-bunk electoral misinformation

It has been lightly edited. When a young Chinese man sat down at his QWERTY keyboard in 2013 and rattled off an enigmatic string of letters and numbers, his forty-four keystrokes marked the first steps in a process known as "input" or shuru. Shuru is the act of getting Chinese characters to appear on a computer monitor or other digital device using a QWERTY keyboard or trackpad. The young man, Huang Zhenyu, was one of around 60 contestants in the 2013 National Chinese Characters Typing Competition. But Zhenyu's prizewinning performance wasn't solely noteworthy for his impressive typing speed--one of the fastest ever recorded.