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Manilow Brings Las Vegas to St Louis
by Rik Anthony for ToastedRav.com
The only thing different between the Barry Manilow Las Vegas Hilton show and the show he performed at the brand new Chaifetz Arena, was having to pass those tempting banks of slot machines to enter the concert hall.
WOW. The theme of last night's show was "Music and Passion" and Barry showed us, he still has a heart full of both.
This ageless superstar from the 70's still exudes the same souful passion when he sings the songs he made famous three decades ago as he captured us with way back when you couldn't dial through the radio airwaves without hearing his voice. Miraculouly, he's been able to keep that voice in top shape -- those powerful notes were held for just as long, still strong and vibrant. That, in and of itself, is an accomplishment. Barry started his show with "It's A Miracle" and performed just about every hit the audience could remember.
The show had the feel of actually being in Las Vegas. Show girl costumes, a full orchestra (thanks to some very talented native St. Louisans), Barry's many costume changes and a piano that raised and lowered from the stage so quickly you barely caught the switch. We were treated to a medley of 60's pop songs and Barry concluded his show with "I Write The Songs". The audience demanded several encores, including his famous "Copacabana" that made even the oldest audience members do a little hip shaking and a great choice to dedicate to fans, young and old, "Forever and a Day".
This was the inaugural concert at the brand new Chaifetz Arena and it did not disappoint. The setting was intimate and the sound quality was very good. There were a few seating issues, but the crew at the arena resolvedthem quickly.
Kudos also to Barry's opening act, Brian Culbertson who grew up in Decatur IL. He is a very talented musican and knew how to work up the crowd for a headliner by belting out some very tasty funk-infused jazz music.
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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.