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Updated 297 Days ago
Does anyone have a friggin' telephone anymore?!
by George Sells
I get it! I work for a website. Computers are the wave of the future and email is my friend. I believe all of the above statements to be true, but I'm just as passionate in my irritation with the fact I can't get a local phone number (or in some cases any phone number) when I want to deal with a corporation.I'm not going to name names (yet, but that's a story for another blog), but I began my day trying to reach company A about a service appointment they were in the process of blowing off. I wanted to call someone and ask what was going on. I end up sitting on hold with a woman in Minneapolis, who, in turn, is on hold with someone else back here in St. Louis. Two people three miles apart have to have a message passed by someone who's barely in the same time zone!
So now I'm so irritated with company A that I've decided to call their competitor, company B, and simply switch. I'm done. So I go to company B's website, navigate my way to the contact us section, and the only option I have is email. There's not a single number posted anywhere. Not even one to Minneapolis. Don't get me wrong. I love email. But there's something about those forms deep in the recesses of websites owned by Fortune 500 companies that just eat away at my confidence. Who's reading those emails anyway? Do they ever actually respond? If so, does the response come from a person or another computer?
The first irony here is the fact that the 20-something computer generation is famous for it's need and demand for instant gratification, and this is one place where the quickest, most gratifying response is going to come from a good old fashioned phone call...a call all my high tech gadgets won't allow me to make.
The second irony is, with our nation plunging toward recession, and every company in desperate need of every dollar, I have one corporation chasing me away, and a second one essentially refusing to take my business because they won't let me get through. I'd call to complain, but.....
P.S. I think the guy in the attached video knows how I feel. Do you?
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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.