- » ToastedRav.com
- » The Funnies
- » Article
The Newest Videos:
|
|
|
| The Toast - 11.21.08 - PETA Attacks Lindsay Lohan and Will Smith Stops By! | Ask St. Louis: What's Your Favorite Pick-Up Line? | Giving It A One-Two Punch: A Boxing Lesson With Sweat Gym |
Updated 51 Days ago
The Advantage To The In-Bev Buyout
Yesterday InBev shareholders officially approved the AB buyout. The real issue that has St. Louisans concerned isn't the impact on the local economy or jobs, but what will become of the Clydesdales. Well, friends, herein lies the good news of the buyout. What better way to "reign in" the rising costs of fuel than by getting rid of your gas guzzler in the garage and replacing it with an out of work Clydesdale? By putting an unemployed Clydesdale to work you will not only save money on gas, you will also gain a friend for life.
Some of you who participate in a car pool at work may be thinking, "What a great idea, but how would this work for me and my car pool buddies?" Don't worry, Clydesdales are work horses so you can attach a carriage to your new friend/ride and in no time your car pool group will stop being angry over the stink from Harry's onion bagel and start enjoying the open air ride from the driver's seat or carriage. And just think of the cost savings you will reap when you split the price of hay per week as opposed to gas.
Without the car in the garage you can easily convert the space to boarding quarters for your new Clydesdale. The neighborhood kids are sure to love it, and cleaning out the garage has never been so interesting. As an added benefit of taking in an out of work Clydesdale your new horse can help dramatically offset soaring food prices by helping you grow your own food (trust me, you will have enough fertilizer).
St. Louis drivers, there has never been a better time to buy a Clydesdale. Save on gas, save on food, and help put these iconic stallions back into the work force.
About The Author:
Got a story you want to share, or just need someone to talk to? Email Me! melody@toastedrav.comI have a penchant for pizza, a love of books, and a strong cup of coffee always makes me smile. When I'm not writing for ToastedRav I like long walks on concrete sidewalks, hanging-lamp lit dinners, and a good bottle of Shiraz.
© Copyright 2008 ToastedRav.com and Bonneville International
An Equal Opportunity Employer all rights reserved
When I was in high school, late one Friday night, several of my friends and I went to the corral across from Grant's Farm. The Clydesdales were out and came right up to the fence where we were standing. They are just like big dogs...really, really big dogs. We could pet them and they were very friendly.
I think I want two... now!!!!
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 Ń 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.