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Updated 105 Days ago
The Dharma Initiative Wants You
The Dharma Initiative is a multidisciplinary research collective dedicated to improving the human condition through innovative scientific research. Dharma's directors are recognized leaders in their fields, with distinguishing research histories in a wide range of social and scientific disciplines.
A new research project will commence, Tuesday August 19th, which will play a vital role in furthering the Dharma Initiative's objectives. We require research volunteers to asist in a range of unpaid positions.
Complete an Eligibility Test to enroll in our Volunteer Recruiting Program. Over a number of weeks, you will undergo a series of tests scientifically designed to assess the most appropriate research role for your talents and abilities.
"Dharma Wants You is an online experience connected to the ABC TV show LOST. The story follows a fictitious scientific community from LOST, The Dharma Initiative, as it attempts to recruit and assess volunteers for a secret research project.By completing an 'Eligibility Test' and registering on dharmawantsyou.com audience members enroll as volunteer recruits for the Dharma Initiative. Each week audience members will have the opportunity to complete a test that assesses their abilities in a particular skill."
Something fun to do while waiting for LOST 2009! I signed up and have waited for a few weeks for the launch. I was notified today that commencement begins tomorrow (Tuesday 8/19).
Please note that the information required to volunteer is fictional with the exception of email and password. No personal information is actually necessary. This is for fun!
About The Author:
Have you ever been duct-taped to a chair and then locked in an empty parking garage? I have.
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An Equal Opportunity Employer all rights reserved
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.