Updated 167 Days ago
"The Sporting News" has been a staple of sports journalism and a staple of St. Louis for well over a century.
Now, thanks to the web, the way the journalism is delivered is changing, along with the location.
The magazine is preparing to launch a new, daily, online edition called "Sporting News Today," next month. It will be free, and will include the delivery of scores and stats into your email box.
According to the release from the magazine,"Sporting News Today will be delivered free to registered users' e-mailboxes each morning, 365 days a year. The digital newspaper will feature search (including archival), live links, video and audio, reader/fan interaction and rich media for advertisers."
Meanwhile, in what may be viewed as another nail in the coffin of traditional publishing, the magazine, which has been a weekly since 1886 will slow down, going to print only every two weeks. They are, however, trying to jazz things up.
"Sporting News has hired several contributors, including author and journalist John Feinstein, Deadspin.com founding editor Will Leitch, veteran baseball writer Roger Kahn, New York Yankees chairman Hank Steinbrenner and several current and former athletes, such as Troy Aikman, Tony Stewart, Greg Oden, John Elway and Rick Barry."
This all happens as this gray lady of sports coverage packs its collective bags to leave St. Louis. They're headquarters is headed for Charlotte, NC to be closer to their new parent company.
To sign up for the new, daily issue, you can go here.
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.