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Updated 105 Days ago
Plant A Tree, Show Some Love
Today as I was driving into work, I could not help but notice how beautiful the morning was. Bright blue sky and soft sunlight made the drive quite enjoyable in comparison to recent weeks. The trees are gently letting out their leaves and flowering Bradford Pears and Red Buds are beginning to color the landscapes. It is this time of year that we are reminded of the beauty on this earth we live on. The new craze is "Going Green" and I can appreciate 
that.
Arbor Day is right around the corner, April 25th. I am not a ritualistic Arbor Day participant, but I have enjoyed planting a tree almost every Mother's Day in her honor. Over the years, the trees have become massive beauties at my parents' house and we are reminded each time we look out the window, or walk out the door.
If you are looking for a great Mother's Day gift or a way to celebrate the arrival of Spring and Arbor Day, you can give the gift of a tree. It changes with the seasons, grows with us, and never loses its beauty. To me that is better than any diamond. 
Reasons to give a tree:
- Anniversary
- Birthday
- Mother's/Father's Day
- National Arbor Day
- Passing of a Loved One
- Memorials
- Birth
- Graduation
- Any Reason
In honor of Spring, I give you Shel Silverstein's "The Giving Tree". Once you enter the site, click on "The Giving Tree" for the animated story accompanied by Shel's music (I believe).
You can order trees from the National Arbor Foundation to plant any place you like or you can receive 10 Free Trees with Membership (which is about $15yr). Last year National Arbor Foundation members planted over 8.5 million trees!
"Sow Love" by Myself
The seed you plant, the seed you sow.
In time the gift of the harvest will grow.
Sow Love.
About The Author:
Have you ever been duct-taped to a chair and then locked in an empty parking garage? I have.
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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.