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Updated 100 Days ago
Ryan Ludwick and Fredbird Present the Ultimate Show and Tell
Parents, listen up; the St. Louis Cardinals and U.S. Cellular have hatched a plan to make one lucky St. Louisan the king or queen of the playground. You can win major cool points if your child wins this contest, so if you have a student between 6-13 years old, head to your nearest U.S. Cellular Store and sign 'em up.
Here's the deal if they win: your child will travel to school in a limo with Fredbird, and while standing in front of their class in their brand-new replica jersey, they can explain to everyone that Ryan Ludwick (who will be standing right there) is their new best friend.
It's the first time for this "ultimate show and tell," which will be decided on September 14 by a random drawing.
Ludwick is already excited to head to school with the lucky little fan: "The Cardinals really appreciate our young fans. This is a great way to put St. Louis students first and we appreciate U.S. Cellular’s commitment to sponsoring this fun activity.”
OK, so I'm sure that Ludwick's plug for U.S. Cellular was mandatory considering that there are over two years left in the contract that cites the phone company as the official wireless sponsor of the Red Birds, but it's a great opportunity none-the-less.
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.