- » ToastedRav.com
- » Deep Fried St. Louis
- » Technology/Gadgets
- » Article
The Newest Videos:
|
|
|
| Public Disservice Announcement: Screw Holiday Shopping, Give Cash! | Emily Riesen - 'My Heart's in St. Louis' | The Toast - 11.28.08 - Tila Tequila Out, Ikki Twins In And An Interview With Vince Vaughn |
Updated 100 Days ago
FWD: A Rant
Eye color? Green
Oreos or Chips Ahoy? Neither
Bud Light or Coors Light? Coors Light (Please don't come hunt me down with pitchforks!)
Do you smoke? Nope
What shoes are you wearing? My shoes are next to me under the desk, so technically, I am barefoot.
Middle name? Lynn
Favorite movie? Boondock Saints
Red Bull or coffee? Both, with an emphasis on sugar free Red Bull.
Had enough? Me too. Why is it that every time someone fills out an internet survey that describes some of the most intimate details about their life (Boxers or briefs?), they think that everyone on their e-mail contact list would love to read it?
If you're one of those forward-happy people, listen up: most of us now automatically delete any and everything from you that starts with a "FWD." We don't care what the name of your first school was. We also don't care how many piercings you have, the name of your goldfish or what age you were when you had your first kiss. If you want people to actually take the time to read through a billion details about your likes and dislikes, at least make it a yearly event that I can prepare myself to suffer through it.
Chances are, if you're a chronic survey-forwarder, you're also the first one to pass along anything even remotely informative that makes it into your inbox. Before you think to yourself, "Wow, I can win a million dollars if I forward this to 40 of my friends," NO YOU CAN'T! Keep that in mind before you tick off 40 of the only friends that haven't already blocked you from sending them anything else.
What's the most stupid thing that someone has "kindly" passed your way?
About The Author:
I just moved back to The Lou from CoMo and I'd love to hear from you. Shoot me an idea/comment/bored rambling at audrey@toastedrav.com.I am also an expert at the Chicken Dance, and I am willing to give lessons for a small fee.
© Copyright 2008 ToastedRav.com and Bonneville International
An Equal Opportunity Employer all rights reserved
You nailed it!
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.