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Updated 254 Days ago
The illness rears its head
by George Sells
It's 6:30 am. The sun is still half an hour from rising. Our two year old is still asleep, and there is a flicker of light coming from our bedroom. I'm sitting, immersed in that light, when I hear my wife's voice. "Is that baseball?"Yes it is. And thank God for it. At 5:30 this morning (7:30pm Tokyo time) the Boston Red Sox and Oakland A's began Major League Baseball's regular season in Japan.
Let me put my baseball loyalties on the table for you: The Cardinals are my National League team. I am a fan. I've gone so far as to wear a Redbirds jersey into Shea Stadium in New York. (This is considered by some to be at least stupid, and at most suicidal) However, my heart resides in Fenway Park. I am a die hard Red Sox fan above all. I will route against the Cards three times this year. That will be June 20-22 when they play the Sox in Boston.
As for this morning, I don't know just how many people around St. Louis decided to take in the pre-dawn festivities from the other side of the globe. I'm sure only the sickest of the sick were sipping their morning coffee as Daisuke Matsuzaka scuffled through 5. I imagine viewership picked up (the slightly insane now joining in) by the time Manny Ramirez knocked in the winning runs in the bottom of the 10th.
I know it's a long season. 161 games to go. I need to pace myself. But it's worth an early morning in front of the tube to get 2008 baseball underway. All seems right in the world.
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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.