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Updated 42 Days ago
Are We More Fresh Air or Times Square?
There is no doubt about that St. Louis has a butt load of suburban sprawl, but it also isn't breaking news that more people moving to urban locales and setting up their homesteads. Just take a look around you at all those hip "City" stickers - they are everywhere. The city is definitely coming back to life with little neighborhoods being invigorated by businesses and residents even in this period of economic downturn. As the tide changes and neighborhoods like Benton Park, Maplewood, and Lafayette Square are opening new businesses and residents, has St. Louis changed all that much? And to shamelessly quote a terrible sitcom - are we still more fresh air than Times Square?
Developments like "New Town," way out in the nether regions of the metro-area might suggest that we may still be in our fresh air phase but when people come to town I doubt they would ever say, "Take me to New Town, friend!" But are visitors thinking about the great neighborhoods that continue to grow like the Central West End, The Loop, and The Grove when they are coming through town either? Times Square is the heart of New York to the outsider. Do we have an equivalent? Is there a neighborhood, attraction, or location is the one spot that people need to go before they leave to really experience St. Louis, or are we really more fresh air? No fair saying the Arch - that has nothin' to do with the culture in our city.
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.
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Visit over Memorial Day?? Must do RibAmerica! Over July 4th? The VP Fair (Fair St Louis). In October? The wineries are a must.
That's the beauty of St Louis. Variety by season. Something to do all year long. And something new for the visitors every time they come. You also always have the staples- like the Science Center and the brewery tour- to add consistency to each visit here.
St Louis is a great place to visit and a great place to live! I'm proud to live here and am happy to show all my out-of-town relatives and friends what a great place St Louis can be!
I love the St. Louis flag!
The Central West End is probably the largest hub of activity, commercial, residential, and otherwise, that the city has to offer.
There are a plethora of fantastic little areas, but they are all so disconnected from each other, and the public transit does little to bridge the gap.
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.