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Updated 51 Days ago
Bank Madness: The Depression Can Be Fun
Banks are going under faster than extras in Titanic. Financial institutions are changing hands so rapidly; the only people making money are the companies that print business cards and letterhead. Every morning the newspaper reads like the opening chapters of Grapes Of Wrath 2: The Wrath Of Grapes. Well, our friends over at Tech Crunch have a great way to make our economy circling the drain more fun. It’s Bank Madness!
That’s right, simply print out the bracket below and start your own office pool! JP Morgan Chase scored an upset in Round 1 by taking out Bear Stearns. And they continued their reign of terror by destroying Washington Mutual. Well, technically I think WaMu destroyed themselves. But Morgan Chase was there to claim victory.
That wasn’t the only upset in Round 1. First-seed “Bail Out” was taken down by the U.S. Congress. It wasn’t even a contest.
It’s been an exciting time. Who’d have guessed that the only thing that could run faster than Wachovia were its customers? Not Wachovia, that’s for sure.
But don’t rule out the U.S. Federal Reserve. This time last year they were just a referee. But even they got caught up in the action. I haven’t seen the lines get this blurred since the last time the Harlem Globetrotters were in town.
So print out your Bank Madness Bracket and let the fun begin. And the best part it, thanks to the sinking value of the dollar it doesn’t even matter if you lose. Those scraps of paper weren’t worth anything anyway. You might as well be using Confederate currency.
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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.