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Updated 148 Days ago
Mystery nice guy lurking at the MUNY
Kristine, a friend of ToastedRav.com, is in a state of wonderment. For the last week, both she and her daughter have been scratching their heads at a memory...and a mystery. Puzzling over one of those small things in life that makes your day and dominates your thoughts.
The trip last week to the MUNY began typically for a mother and her five year old. They arrived at the theater, the little girl full of energy and excitement, the mom wondering if that energy and excitement will last thorough the first act, let alone the entire performance of High School Musical.
The potential for a change of heart, and a demand to go home from the five year old left Kristine covering her bases. They would sit in the free seating, the MUNY's version of the nosebleeds, rather than blow anywhere from $18 to $128 on seats they might have to give up a quarter way through the performance.
Of course, as a parent, you can't win, and from the moment they arrived at their spot, the little girl a)knew she wasn't going to be able to see, and b)was quick to let mom know about it.
Apparently observing all this was a young man. That's about all Kristine knows about him. He was fairly young. He was there with his wife, daughter, and mom. That's her biography on the guy that was about to make her night.
Maybe, having a daughter of his own, he could appreciate Kristine fighting the regular battles of a mother. Or maybe he was just looking to perform a random act of kindness. For whatever the reason, he approached Kristine, simply saying he had a couple of extra tickets if she would like them. "They're a little closer," he said. He'd been looking for someone to give the extras to.
Kristine accepted what she describes as the "kind and generous offer." She and her daughter started walking down toward the seats. And they kept walking....and walking....until they were nearly to the front row!
Kristine's little girl, a big fan of High School Musical, was nearly beside herself according to mom. And now, a week later, Kristine still can't stop thinking about the mystery man she never got to properly thank.
"I don't think they realize they created a fantastic memory for my daughter and made such a lasting impression on her. She is still talking about the "nice family" that gave her tickets so she could see better! I would like to thank that family again - Thank you very much!"
It's nice to know there are still people who do nice things with no strings attached. Of course this kind of stuff is a big part of why we live in St. Louis, isn't it?
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KUDOS to you dear mystery Sir!
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.