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Updated 48 Days ago
Five Things the VP Debates Really Mean for St. Louis
by Melody Meiners in "Quirky St. Louis"
Yeah! The VP debate is finally here and it is taking place tonight in our own backyard. It is a very exciting and historic time in our country and all eyes are on our fair and humble city. Here is a short list of what this really means for the citizens of St. Louis:
- Traffic will suck way worse during your drive home if you live anywhere remotely close to University City, the Central West End, or Clayton. Forget the flurry of anxiety over the Hwy 40 shutdown - this is the real traffic nightmare. If you happen to live around Wash U's campus you probably would have been better off bringing a cot to work with you because the motorcades and security mean you aren't getting home any time soon - no way, no how.
- There are going to be some ticked off blue-hairs walking around tomorrow because the local BINGO halls preempted the KENO game on the television to instead show some lady with an accent and some guy with a comb-over fighting about that Mavrick guy from "Top Gun" and some new fangled music called "Barock."
- If you have friends or family involved in a private liberal arts university in any form you will be subjected to a deluge of conversation that requires little more from you than head nodding and saying "oh my" as you listen to them recount their experience volunteering for the debates and the "crazy security."
- There is a good chance you will get out of that uber-uncomfortable, daily inquisition from your way political co-worker (you know the one who keeps asking who your voting for even though tell them you'd rather not say). The reason? They were probably at one of the viewing parties that were happening all over town and if your lucky they will probably be too hung over or hoarse to attempt it.
- The last bit of debate related bad news for St. Louis (and the entire nation actually) is that "The Office" is being preempted for the debate coverage. While choosing the next leader of the free-world is important, we really need to know if Angela is going to finally face up to her two-timing ways. We need to know as a city, and we need to know as a nation.
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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FORECLOSE ON THAT ONE!
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.