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Updated 269 Days ago
Do you know this man? You should be begging to know him!
by George Sells
So who is this guy? He lives here in St. Louis. He's 85 years old. I'll even tell you his name: Jack Taylor. Still nothing? Are you wondering why you should care? Are you wondering why you'd want to be on his good side?The reason is very simple. According to Forbes magazine new list of the world's richest people, Jack Taylor has more money than anyone in Missouri. Its pretty amazing that he could bump into you at Schnuck's, excuse himself and move on, and you'd barely give him a second thought.
Jack is a Wash-U drop out. He flew planes in the navy, then came home and sold Cadillacs.
Speaking of Bill Gates, he's not the richest guy in the world anymore. For those of us who like to make fun of the "hay-rakes" in Nebraska and the "hoosiers" in Arkansas, those seem to be the homes of the truly wealthy these days. The world's richest man is now Warren Buffet of Omaha, Nebraska. And all that Wal-Mart money is still floating around the hills and hollers down there in Arkansas. Maybe we should re-think which states we're going to make fun of!
As a St. Louisan, you may be wondering about Augie Busch. I was surprised to find he's not on the billionaires list at all! I'm new to town, but with the history A-B has, I just would have assumed the billions were in hand.
As for Mr. Taylor: there's a guy who's worth knowing. If he needs an extra heir I'm available!
For the Forbes list in it's entirety, go here.
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Enterprise is still privately held, so no stockholders to share with.
I used to wash cars for Enterprise. And did the "we'll pick you up" thing. Do you have any idea how hard it is to drive with brown wrapping paper all over the car?
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.