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Updated 97 Days ago
Professional Soccer Coming to St. Louis?
St. Louis has always thought of itself as a baseball town, but will we soon become a soccer town? There are two major news stories that are making it appear that St. Louis's soccer "scene" is escalating from the domain of overzealous moms driving repurposed military vehicles to not only a professional level, but possibly moving to the center of the world's soccer stage.
The first report that is more likely to have something come of it comes from St. Louis Soccer United. According to their website, St. Louis is pretty darn close to landing the 17th Major League Soccer franchise team that is up for grabs right now. A deal for a new soccer stadium is in the works now; just waiting for the ink on the franchise deal to dry. The new stadium would be built on 400 acres in Collinsville and have 18,500 seats, some youth fields, and a "mixed-use development" that hopefully doesn't go down the same path as our pride and joy - Lake DeWitt downtown.
The second, more up in the air report relies on the outcome of Chicago's bid for the Olympics in 2016. If Chicago gets the Olympics, which a reports claims they are favored to, St. Louis may host the soccer events. Let's see... I am probably going to be past my professional soccer playing prime by the time that rolls around, so there is little chance I will be tapped to play for team USA (that combined with the fact that I haven't played soccer for almost eleven years, but whatever). I will, however, accept the consolation prize of living in a city co-hosting the games. So basically we would get soccer because Chicago gets the big games - I am starting to understand why St. Louis kind of has an inferiority complex with Chicago.
So, what do you think St. Louis? Is there room for another professional sports team here in the biggest small town and is the Lou in particular ready for another brand of football?
Editor's Note: For more about a possible St. Louis soccer franchise, check out our past article and video that included an interview with Mr. St. Louis Soccer United himself!
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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That said- I hope they don't look for tax dollars to build a new stadium. Or promise to renovate an opera house.
http://stlouis.bizjournals.com/stlouis/stories/2008/08/11/daily4.html
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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.