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Updated 58 Days ago
Manly Ways to Support Breasts
As most of you already know, October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. It's pretty easy for women to support the cause since practically every cosmetic company, departments store, clothing line, yogurt brand and jeweler has jumped on board. But what about those with a bit more testosterone?
In case you guys didn't know, in 2004 (the most recent stats) 1,815 men in the U.S. were diagnosed with breast cancer, and 362 of them died. Saving Jack: A Man's Struggle With Breast Cancer is an incredibly well-written book from a male survivor's perspective. Sure, the chances are slim, but breast cancer can affect you. At the very least, the odds are that it has affected several women you're close to, so here are a few ways that you can show your support this month in a manly way.
What's manlier than shaving with Lab Series, right? If you buy their Daily Moisture Defense Lotion, you'll help add to their $10,000 donation.
And nothing says tough, burly manly man like sports, especially when we're talking about Madden 09 for XBox 360. You guys should be able to look past the pink ribbon on the outside of the box after you experience Brett's perfect spiral while playing the game.
If you want to put your masculine support out there in plain sight, this Pink Ribbon Tie makes it easy for others to spot your advocacy for breast cancer. I hear chick dig that. If you want to go a little more subtle in the clothing department, try these signature Pink Boxers.
If you really want to get involved with the fight to cure breast cancer, join a group like Men Against Breast Cancer.
About The Author:
I just moved back to The Lou from CoMo and I'd love to hear from you. Shoot me an idea/comment/bored rambling at audrey@toastedrav.com.I am also an expert at the Chicken Dance, and I am willing to give lessons for a small fee.
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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.