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Updated 159 Days ago
Subway's Jared: Dead or Alive?
There are people out there who want Subway's Jared Fogle dead. Nothing makes that more clear than a website that's emerged, Jaredremembered.com.
The hoax website (yes, it's a hoax) is trying to perpetuate the myth that Jared, the formerly husky spokesman for Subway, has bought the farm. The question is, why?
I have my suspicions. You may recall mention of Jared in an early ToastedRav.com column. It seems Mr. Big Time Dieter had gotten a little big for his breeches as he joined a long (and ever growing) group of B-Listers that were just a little too close to the top to waste time on ToastedRav.com. (May the fate of Icarus befall them!)
Maybe Mr. Fogle has put his nose in the air one time too many?
The next question is who has gone to all the trouble of putting up this website? They don't want you to know. Whoever registered the domain went through a Florida group known as Moniker Privacy Services. MPS puts the company information on all the paperwork, thus leaving the actual owner's identity a secret.
There are plenty of people out there with motive. means, and opportunity. That Ronald McDonald guy, maybe?
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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.