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Updated 41 Days ago
Fun Suggestions for the Weekend-10/10-10/12/08
Celebrate Spot is a Walk For Dogs And Their People In Forest Park. It benefits Siteman Cancer Center's Young Women's Breast Cancer Program. Its Sunday from 8 til 11:30am at the Upper Muny Parking Lot. ((Call 314-747-7222 or go to www.bjc.org to find out more))
Artica 2008 is an outdoor multi-media art festival featuring all kinds of good stuff. It's a free event tomorrow and Sunday from noon til midnight on the St. Louis Riverfront. ((To find out more-call 314-832-4924))
Michael Martin Murphy will be performing at Wildwood Springs Lodge in Steelville tonight and tomorrow night. ((To find out more-go to www.wildwoodspringslodge.com))
Jane Austen's Emma--a new musical is now being presented by The Repertory Theatre at the Loretto-Hilton Center. Performances throughout the weekend. ((For more-call 314-968-4925 or visit www.repstl.org))
It's the final weekend for The Lieutenant of Inishmore--the Off Ramp Production at the Grandel Theatre. ((For more info-call 314-968-4925 or visit www.repstl.org))
The Florissant Old Town Fall Festival is celebrating its 10th anniversary. Its on the streets of Old Town Florissant Sunday from noon til 5. ((For additional information, call 314-837-0033 or go to www.florissantoldtown.com))
It's the Walk Now for Autism in Forest Park tomorrow in Forest Park. Registration is at 8:30am at the Upper Muny Lot. ((Call 314-989-1003))
Michelle Steele will be at Lens Crafters in Lake St Louis tomorrow between 11 and 1.
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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.