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Updated 101 Days ago
Lesson From a Newlywed
When you become a newlywed you and your new spouse get a lot of advice, and a surprisingly large number of questions about reproductive plans. I recently discovered a deep dark secret of marriage that everyone failed to tell me about: cleaning the bathroom is a married couple's version of the staring game.
Heres how to play: utilize your new shared (yippee!) bathroom space as normal. Allow the bathroom to accumulate soap scum, toothpaste spatters, and hair strands as usual. When the time for a typical cleaning rolls around the challenge starts. Whoever can stand to go the longest using that dirty bathroom without breaking down and cleaning it, wins.
If you are still engaged, it might be a good time to start practicing. One way to test out the rigidity of your mate might be to leave a plate on the coffee table and see if how long that remains where you left it. But, you must escalate the test to find out if the plate results are typical. The next test: squirt a dot of mustard, or another choice condiment, on the corner of a countertop and watch the calendar. If you end up breaking down and cleaning the squirt or plate, chances are you will loose the bathroom competition, at least you know now and can prepare yourself. (Note: this test is void if he/she lives with their parents)
This has been a lesson from a newlywed.
About The Author:
Got a story you want to share, or just need someone to talk to? Email Me! melody@toastedrav.comI have a penchant for pizza, a love of books, and a strong cup of coffee always makes me smile. When I'm not writing for ToastedRav I like long walks on concrete sidewalks, hanging-lamp lit dinners, and a good bottle of Shiraz.
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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.