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Updated 297 Days ago
Shedding a collective tear
by George Sells
Did I mention I'm new to town? Tonight my wife, son, and I sat down to dinner about 7. There was a noise...a siren. A police car sped past. Then another...a third. They just kept coming. Three bites into dinner there had been ten. Not long after there were fifteen. Then twenty. Soon helicopters droned overhead.As you may have guessed, our new St. Louis area home isn't far from Kirkwood Road. We chose it as our home for a number of reasons, one being the fact that it seemed like a place with a real sense of community. Tonight our new community is shedding a collective tear.
I haven't been here long enough to have met the mayor, or, quite frankly, to know who my councilperson is. It's somewhat unsettling to sit here knowing my councilperson may not be alive. It's heartbreaking to think of the degree of separation....maybe one...maybe two, between folks who've lived here for several years, and the faces of the dead who'll soon be splashed across the front page of the paper.
I also haven't been here long enough to know the face of Charles "Cookie" Thornton. Thornton, apparently, had a reputation for being the town "nut." He was that guy who showed up at every city council meeting and raised hell until he was kicked out. I used to work in news, and you knew the faces of people like this. Sometimes the regulars at such meetings snickered. Maybe they pointed. Maybe they laughed. Rarely, however, do they take the "Cookie" Thornton's of the world very seriously.
On this night, failing to take this guy seriously may have cost five people their lives. It's caused countless hearts to break. It also has likely cost this idyllic community another sliver of its innocence. Metal detectors will likely be set up at the next public meeting. The few people left who don't lock their doors will probably re-think their habits. And everyone will look with a great deal of suspicion on those who had previously just been considered a bit weird or a bit crazy.
This will, by no means, be the end of Kirkwood as we know it. Communities across our nation have endured similar tragedies and persevered. When spring arrives, people will still sit on their porches at night, and stroll into town on breezy afternoons. They'll just do it with the recollection of absent faces and the memory of sirens interrupting dinner.
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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.