Updated 62 Days ago
St. Louis plays host to many a cultural festival, but how do you decide which festival to choose from? Here is a a quick guide to three popular festivals you can choose from; depending on what you are looking for in a cultural festival there is a festival pick for everyone:
|
Greek Festival |
Japanese Festival |
Lebanese Festival |
If I had to pick… |
|
|
love stuff... |
The Greek Festival features a marketplace inside the church with a grocery store, dolls, and jewelry for purchase |
There are multiple booths with traditional Japanese arts throughout the Garden with |
There are booths that sell t-shirts, medals featuring the Saints, videos, and imported Lebanese jewelry |
|
|
love dancing machines... |
The St. Nicholas Dance Troupe has five different performances including the ”Zorba The Greek” dance |
The Bon Odori, a dance that marks the end of the summer is performed on stage |
The St. Raymond's dance troupe performs the dabke (a dance of community often performed at happy occasions) |
Greek Festival |
|
love other performing arts... |
Bands featuring Bouzouki players play at an outdoor, Greecian inspired Taverna |
Stages throughout the Garden feature Sumo and martial arts performances, as well as top spinning, ice sculpting, Bonsai, and movies |
N/A |
Japanese Festival |
|
love liquid courage... |
Frozen Ouzo (aniseed liqueur) |
Frozen Red Bean and Green Tea |
Frozen Arak (aniseed liquor) |
|
|
love food... |
Spanikopita, lamb shish-kebob, tiropita |
Sushi |
Meat pies, hummus, and kibbeh |
|
|
love people watching... |
Mayor Slay |
Fans of Japanese animation turn out in full gear |
N/A |
|
There are several October celebrations of this type. Heck, they should have their own article with comparison chart.
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.