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Updated 145 Days ago
Secret Talents of the Stars
Did you watch it last night on CBS? I was oddly intrigued by this show. I felt like I was watching a really bad high school talent competition but something kept me watching. It might have been to watch George Takai sing country (wow, it was bad) or because I was rooting for Clint Black and his stand-up. Also performing last night, Mya and Sasha Cohen. (click the video tab above to see the performances.)
The only thing that bugs me about the new reality competition series..they all try to be like American Idol. In the judges, we definitely had a Simon, Randy and Paula. (or at least they tried to be.) The judges are Brian McKnight, Debbie Reynolds and Gavin Polone (a producer..he's the Simon.)
The really odd thing about the show is how we vote. It's up to us America but you only have about three minutes to vote. It isn't over the phone lines. You vote via the internet. You do it during the commercial break after each performance. Really odd. So at the end of the show, two performers move on to the semi-finals and two go home.
Moving on this week, Clint Black and Sasha Cohen. Next week, a new batch of stars take the stage.
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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.