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Updated 130 Days ago
The Sheldon's $100 C.D. (Don't worry, it's for a cause!)
At least when they ask you for a donation at the Sheldon, they give you something a little bit unique.
Rather than just hit up patrons for money, the Sheldon has produced a very cool CD, full of songs about the Mighty Mississippi and Missouri rivers. (Thus, the name: Acoustic River)
This is what the release says about the collection:
"The CD features the donated talents of top national and local artists including Mike Marshall and Chris Thile, John
McEuen, Kathy Chiavola, Lydia Ruffin, Dave Toretta and Connie Fairchild, Darrell Scott, Mark Holland, Pete Huttlinger,
Peter Mayer, John Higgins, Tom Hall, and Dale Benz, and pays tribute to the majesty, beauty, magic, and as we have unfortunately
seen here in the St. Louis area, sometimes destructive power of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers."
A $100 donation is the price for this unique collection. More details are available at 314-533-9900.
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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.