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Updated 155 Days ago
The Mini-Van: too many eggs in a bad basket?
When I met my wife 12 years ago she informed me on our first date that if I ever saw her driving a mini-van, I was to shoot her on the spot. Of course she was kidding (I think), but it demonstrates the passion with which she disliked the poster-vehicle of 90's suburban practical.
Over the years, as she's made similar comments to friends and acquaintances, they've almost always been met with agreement. In a few cases, people who drove mini-vans would say, "hey wait a minute!" But even their tone was a little apologetic, citing the challenges of having multiple kids.
Now, 1500 people in Fenton find themselves combing the want ads because no one at Chrysler caught on to the fact that they were manufacturing America's most popular fashion faux pau.
I'm in no way making light of the job losses. I think the workers are victims of borderline brainless management.
But, that said, have you seen the product they've been turning out? Is there anything even remotely cool about a mini-van? Is there anything practical enough about one to make you wear a nerd stamp on your head in return for the perceived benefit? As the years have gone by, more and more alternatives have shown up on the road to allow people to say, "no" to the Dodge Caravan and all it has begot.
In typical Detroit fashion, however, they kept churning them out. "Hey," they kept saying, "we've produced America's most innovative new vehicle!" Somewhere along the line they forgot it was innovative in 1983, not a quarter century later.
This too shall pass. I just wish they'd thought of shooting a dying concept when the economy was still half decent. Maybe then they could have re-tooled, and some jobs could have been saved. Instead, now, the mini-van will go away, and a bunch of people's livelihoods will go with it. All this because multi-million dollar executives couldn't spot a trend in taste that my wife had nailed a dozen years ago. When in doubt, stay out of the business of selling ugly.
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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.