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Updated 219 Days ago
The soundtrack of hold
I'm currently on hold with the people you never want to be on hold with: the Internal Revenue Service. My harmless question will likely take some time to be answered, so, in the interim, I sit here listening to Beethoven.
I often wonder how hold music is chosen. It's logical that the IRS plays this nice, soothing, classical ditty. I would assume they're thinking that most people calling them are highly agitated or highly nervous. Leave 'em on hold and sooth them with the classical masters! There's the ticket.
The cable company goes with some canned, quasi-jazz sounding number. They should take a tip from the feds. Charter's music loops over and over again. The track isn't very long, so if you're waiting very long (which you inevitably are) you're going to hear it several times. I'm usually agitated when I call Charter, so repeatedly hearing that song starts to make me mad after a while. I'm pretty well ticked off when someone answers.
If you call the Cardinals, you get play by play of great Cardinal moments. I love that. By the time their operator answers, we've won a pennant and a World Series and I'm pumped! I bet the people answering their phones have customers in good moods all day long.
If you've ever called Churchill Downs in Louisville, they take a similar approach. They play Kentucky Derby calls. That can be really exciting, but I've always found a flaw in this. Anyone who lost money on the race they're playing is probably pretty depressed after being reminded of their failure. (And with a 20 horse field, most people lose those bets.)
Beethoven is reaching a crescendo, and the lady at the IRS is answering. I'm calm, though I'm not particularly thrilled to be talking to the feds. Maybe if they played just one Pujols home run I'd feel better.
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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.