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Updated 259 Days ago
Sex and the Colony?
by George Sells
In recent years, prime time on HBO has meant "Sex and the City," "The Sopranos," or "Entourage." In each case you were almost certain to laugh a little, cringe regularly, and see something of an adult nature which you wouldn't likely want to share with your grandma.
This is not one of those goofy, romance novel takes on history either. The series, running in seven parts over the coming weeks, is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by David McCullough.
I read it a few years back, and this is a painstakingly accurate account of Adams' life based on letters and documents that have been preserved for centuries.
Of course, among the founding fathers, John Adams is sort of like one of the Baldwin brothers. Everyone knows Alec, but he's no Brad Pitt. Everyone knows John, but he's no George Washington.
That's what makes HBO's choice of the subject so interesting. If people were surprised the book held an audience's interest, isn't a mini-series in the neighborhood of ten hours long a serious gamble? Apparently HBO and executive producer Tom Hanks don't think so.
I admit being a history nerd, but if the first part of the story is any indication, I think it will more than hold its own with a large number of people. Just don't come looking for "Sex and the City." The only nudity was a brief shot of a guy's private parts while he was being tarred and feathered by an angry mob. (They really covered him in hot tar! Ouch!) Not exactly Carrie and Big gettin' it on in the back of a limo, is it?
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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.