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Updated 198 Days ago
We're #26!
As I lie awake for the second straight night, fighting pressure in my sinuses and the sneezing fits that would rouse me every time sleep began to set in, I started to wonder: Just how bad an allergy city have I moved to?
Well, it just so happens the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America released it's top 100 list just a few weeks ago. St. Louis checks in at #26. Quite frankly, I'm surprised, because I've lived in a couple of places that the list says are worse, but I've never had it so bad.
Of course St. Louis' 26th place finish may have something to do with the toughness of our population. Allergy prevalence and seasonal pollen are only two of the factors. The amount of drugs being taken in a city and the number of allergy doctors make up the rest of the equation.
It could be St. Louisans are more apt to suck it up and cope than run to the pharmacy. That would knock us down the list a bit.
I certainly think the figures are tainted by the doctor and drug thing. I had minimal problems with this in New York, yet NYC is listed number 45. It makes sense, though, because people there pop a pill when the wind changes direction and they've got a medical specialist for everything. Don't let the bravado fool you, they're pansies when it comes to being sick.
But some of the list just doesn't make sense. Lexington, Kentucky and Louisville are 78 miles apart. Yet Lexington is the allergy capital of America and Louisville is down at #21. Does that add up? (By the way, I lived in Louisville, and, again, it's not worse than St. Louis by any stretch!)
In the end, I guess it's good to be where we are. Who wants to be number one on a list like this one anyway? Our chamber of commerce has enough problems. Click here for the full results!
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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.
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Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.