- » ToastedRav.com
- » Sports
- » 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 71 Days ago
ToastedRav Hangs with Paddy Harrington and the Evans Scholars at Bellerive
ToastedRav Video
* Photos courtesy of Roger Hacker; video produced in association with St. Louis Sports Magazine.
When ToastedRav got the opportunity to tag along with Padraig Harrington's foursome for the Chick Evans Memorial Pro-Am at Bellerive Country Club last week, Mike Merenda and I jumped at the chance.
At first, we didn't know what to expect. We were in awe of the meticulously maintained greens, the perfect-in-every-way fairways and the sprawling white tents that dotted the entire country club. I still am in awe of the phenomenal course, but after spending a few holes talking to the other golfers and caddies in Paddy's group, I gained a new appreciation for who the Pro-Am was actually benefiting.
The PGA's BMW Championship on the PGA Tour is one of three national tournaments that the Western Golf Association sponsors each year. All of these tournaments benefit the Evans Scholars. 'Who are the Evans Scholars?' you ask; well, they are over 800 hard-working caddies across the nation who are given full tuition and housing scholarships to go to college.
Yes, seeing Padraig Harrington play the front nine and Phil Mickelson tee off right here in St. Louis made me pretty star-struck. And because of our time spent with the Chairman of the WGA and the President of the Evans Scholars House at Mizzou, I know that the tournament was about more than just the $8,000 golfers spent to play with their favorite PGA Tour pros.
Click the ToastedRav Video tab for ToastedRav's coverage of the BMW Championship Pro-Am last week, and be sure to check out our photo gallery as well.
About The Author:
I just moved back to The Lou from CoMo and I'd love to hear from you. Shoot me an idea/comment/bored rambling at audrey@toastedrav.com.I am also an expert at the Chicken Dance, and I am willing to give lessons for a small fee.
© Copyright 2008 ToastedRav.com and Bonneville International
An Equal Opportunity Employer all rights reserved
Thanks for the Evans Scholars props!
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.