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Updated 103 Days ago
MySpace: Kool-Aid or Creep-Aid?
I was chatting with a friend from Minnesota last weekend, and somehow, the subject of MySpace came up. (As it seems to more and more these days.) According to him, facebook is the only acceptable "friend network," because MySpace is "only for 15-year-old girls in bikinis who are pretending to be older, or creepy old men with less-than-honorable intentions."
As I sat there listening to his rant. I wondered which one of his categories I fell into. I am on MySpace, and check my page on a daily basis. I'm not 16, and I'm not an older male, so I tried explaining to him that he was mistaken. There are lots of normal adults on MySpace, right?
He was quick to inform me that I was wrong. He told me I was crazy, and that it must just be a Missouri thing. Where he was from, everyone thought that MySpace was horribly dirty and wrong, and those who are on it are looked down upon. At least that's what he told me.
Is it possible that where you live geographically has an affect on your city or town's acceptance of online friend networks?
Most studies out there state that the average MySpace user is 31ish, which doesn't play into either of my friend's assumptions. I have friends from high school, college and work on MySpace, and my privacy settings ensure that you can only see my page if I'm friends with you. Still, my friend was so adamant that MySpace is only accepted in a few areas, that I began to wonder.
What does everyone think? Can you be a normal participant on MySpace, or is it for those who need to get a life?
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.
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Will all things, technologies and the like, it's bound to be misused and corrupted by someone. It's an individual's responsibility to be aware and protect themselves anyway.
I would have quite MySpace all together, but I just can’t bring myself to do it because of one special person . . . Tom. He’s been my friend since the beginning. I feel like for once in my life, someone really, truly knows me. I’m pretty sure Tom is like a Saint or our next President or something. I know he has my vote . . to canonize or whatever. Tom is the wind beneath my wings. God Bless you Tom.
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.