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Updated 249 Days ago
Feeling S.A.D.?
by George Sells
Quick. What was your first reaction when you looked out the window this morning? Disgust? Dread? Frustration? A longing to slash your wrists with a spoon? We had ten inches of snow on March 3-4. In some spots we've had more than ten inches of rain since. (Probably closer to 6 at my house, but who's counting?) I am sick of gray skies, wet socks, windshield wipers, slick roads, and wiping mud off my dog's feet every time she goes out to the bathroom. I'm sick of meteorologists saying with a guffaw, "It's gonna be another wet one! I am, in general, sick, tired, and mildly depressed!
Sound familiar? Well, believe it or not, we may all be suffering from a mental malady that only Spring can fully take care of. It's called Seasonal Affective Disorder. (SAD) It must be real. It has it's own website!
As you shoot your spouse a nasty look and backhand your dog, tell me if any of these symptoms sound familiar:
| Sleep problems: | Usually desire to oversleep and difficulty staying awake
but, in some cases, disturbed sleep and early morning wakening |
| Lethargy: | Feeling of fatigue and inability to carry out normal routine |
| Overeating: | Craving for carbohydrates and sweet foods, usually resulting
in weight gain |
| Depression: | Feelings of misery, guilt and loss of self-esteem, sometimes
hopelessness and despair, sometimes apathy and loss of feelings |
| Social problems: | Irritability and desire to avoid social contact |
| Anxiety: | Tension and inability to tolerate stress |
| Loss of libido | Decreased interest in sex and physical contact |
| Mood changes | In some sufferers, extremes of mood and short periods of
hypomania (overactivity) in spring and autumn. |
I'm making some light of this,(pun intended) but my dad was actually diagnosed with SAD in the midst of a long Michigan winter years ago. They actually sent him out to buy a sun lamp! (He'll never live in Seattle!)
These days, companies out there are actually selling sunlight that you can hook to your computer! So you don't have to feel alone. Just remember that, eventually, the sun will show up as it is supposed to. The light will make us all feel better. Our longing to kick the neighbor's cat through a hedge will (probably) subside. If not, I guess there's always sunlamps and prescription medication!
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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.