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Updated 159 Days ago
When Free Isn't Free...or even close
We're all constantly receiving these spam emails promising us something for free in return for "required participation." Usually I just hit the delete button, but today I got to wondering what I was missing.
It seems today I have just won the Rachel Ray Chef's package! I'm not a Rachel Ray fan, but I am a fan of a ten piece set of cookware, a knife set, and three easy to use cookbooks. It's a $400 dollar value after all!
But how free is it?
First, I'm going to have to fill out a survey. In this survey I'll spend a significant amount of time answering mundane questions and, more importantly, I'll have to give my name and address to every solicitor on the internet. (I don't know exactly how many questions there are because, while I'll "click here for details," I'm not sending them my email and actually starting the process.)
Next comes the "sponsor offers." It's so kind of them to make me an offer. I only have to participate in seven of them to qualify.
These apparently come on different levels because you're required to sign up for 2 offers on one page, two on a second, and three on a third. I went through some of their "sample offers" and tried to guess how they might be dispersed. (You have to figure there's at least one pricey one on each page.)
Through various record clubs, wine clubs, and coffee clubs I managed to spend my way through $388...a whopping twelve bucks shy of the value of my "free" gift.
I expect I could probably come in a little lower than that amount on my initial outlay, but I'll have to be very organized. Nearly every one of these offers requires you to give a credit card number and join a "something of the month" club. Only after the trial period are you allowed to cancel. If you don't cancel, you'll be billed a healthy chunk of change as you continue your membership. This could take you way beyond your free $400 gift.
It's not all bad. If you really want the Rachel Ray set, and there are a number of items among the offers that you really want as well, then, why not? Join wine of the month, coffee of the month, and Columbia House, and get free pots for doing it.
But this really look like an online version of the very old adage, "if it looks too good to be true, in probably is."
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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.