Text Analysis under Time Pressure

Young men in Dili, East Timor, are selling apples and mobile phone cards on the sidewalk. Texts have been printed on T-shirts, apple boxes, and phone cards. None has been produced locally although youth gang membership may influence the choice of idols and thereby of images, logos and texts. Some kind of text analysis arguably happens when buyers copy the credit codes from the cards to their phones. The author, new to this brand, rubbed too fast, deleting a digit. Attempts to infer it from an adjacent card in the perforated sheet predictably failed; the company safeguarded itself against such clever analysis. Rubbing it carefully, even under time pressure, is the way to go.