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Updated 168 Days ago
Shingles: Now a problem for people in their 30's!
I was walking into a Walgreen's last night to pick something up, and an enormous sign stared me in the face: Shingles Vaccination Available Here!
I wasn't aware there was an epidemic, but I'm beginning to wonder. I used to think this was an affliction for old people until one friend and one family member, both in their 30's, came down with it. (Both here in St. Louis, by the way)
First, to backtrack, the disease itself is essentially chickenpox for grown ups. And, yes, you can get it even if you've had the chickenpox. The disease apparently stays dormant in you once you've had it, and then can come back as shingles.
It used to return mostly due to a weakened immune system or old age, but now some think the chickenpox vaccine for kids is leading to more shingles cases in younger adults who have had "the pox." National Public Radio reported on the issue:
"'The theory,' dermatologist Stephen Tyring says, 'is that as more and more children get vaccinated against chickenpox, there's less wild-type chickenpox virus around.'
Consequently, children don't bring the virus home, and parents and grandparents don't get re-exposed to it. That used to act like a booster shot."
The other contributing factor is high stress, and we all know there's plenty of that in people's lives these days.
It all leads to an enormously uncomfortable and painful rash that's turning up more and more in younger people.
It also leads to that sign in front of the Walgreen's offering the vaccine for shingles, which has been around for about two years now. The vaccine is recommended for people sixty and over, but if others in your family have had it and you're under a lot of stress, you may want to ask a doctor. It couldn't hurt...and shingles definitely can.
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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.