Updated 81 Days ago
Who's hungry for Toast? Here's what's up this week in the world of celebrities.
Tube Talk
MTV's 2008 VMAs were a flop by most accounts. Even a suddenly hot again Britney Spears couldn't repair the damage brought on by lame host Russell Brand.
Joe Francis had his day in court and even a bit of a small victory. After all, if anyone deserves a break, it's porn pusher Joey Francis!
Reel World
Tyler Perry brings us yet another movie called "Tyler Perry's blah blah blah." Apparently this guy isn't aware that his name isn't helping his films to not suck.
Brad Pitt, George Clooney and John Malkovich?...one of these three is not like the others. However, they've teamed up for a new film that's getting decent reviews.
Star Gazing
Pete Wentz spilled the beans to Playboy...no twins for Ashlee, just a baby boy due this fall.
Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher got a mouthfull of speaker after a "fan" rushed the stage and threw him down. We have the video!
Billy Ray Cyrus (you know, Miley's poppa,) dropped into Granite City to attend a hamburger eating contest...good times!
That and much more is ahead, so click the ToastedRav Video tab to watch.
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.