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Updated 125 Days ago
Welcome to the Bridal Blog
by Jen Danker
The Bridal Blog will feature experiences, ideas, frustrations and triumphs of two local St. Louis brides as they prepare for their weddings. Their journey has begun and you'll get to lend your opinions and comments along their way before they end this journey with a walk down the aisle. You'll learn about their plans, the choices that they have to make, their grooms-to-be, in-laws and family. Ultimately they'll unveil the amount of hard work and time that goes into planning one of the most memorable events of your lifetime from local perspectives.
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Back up... We got engaged on December 21, 2007 by the Riverfront in St. Charles. Very cold, romantic and cute. We are both recent college graduates from SEMO. I have a job and he didn't at the time. I told him I wouldn't look at anything wedding "ish" until he found a job. Well, 11 months later by some sweet stroke of luck he found the job he's been wanting for a long time. Ok, you're up to speed. We have found the reception which is at a hotel and the ceremony is at church just like he wanted. Needless to say, I did ALL of the research calling around to find the perfect chuch. It was quite the experience....I have been told by pastor's "to look elswhere" because we don't do non-member weddings. Eventually, I found one. Then I called around to find reception locations. It was more like what's your price and how many people can you hold. We are having between 150-200 people. So now those two things were done. On to find the perfect wedding dress. I actually found one on my birthday a couple of days ago. What a memorable moment! I found a dress on my 23rd birthday. My fiance keeps kidding around that I'm going to have this thing planned in a few more months. Maybe wedding planning is my calling?
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.