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Updated 220 Days ago
Could someone PLEASE explain?
It's really quite simple. I don't get it. Jimmy Buffett is a fairly talented songwriter, but beyond that, I don't get it. Could someone please answer the following questions:
Why does the presence of Jimmy Buffett implore cause in their forties and fifties to don Hawaiian shirts?
What does the music of Buffett have to do with parrots?
Why would an old guy in a Hawaiian shirt want to put a parrot on his head?
Does anyone really think this guy is that good a singer?
How do songs about cheeseburgers and Margaritas translate into legendary status?
Aren't your "conga line" days supposed to cease upon receiving your college diploma?
Am I the only one who first saw the name "Buffett" and thought an "all you can eat" meal was in the offing?
Wouldn't a close relationship with Warren Buffett be more beneficial?
I certainly don't mean to discount the passions of the thousands of parrotheads who will descend tonight upon the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater (or Riverport, or whatever they're calling it this week)
I just wish someone would tell me where attraction turns to passion. Oh well, I didn't get the Grateful Dead either. Somebody help me! (Or get U2 to come through town so I can go nuts!)
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What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.