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Updated 65 Days ago
Have Your Pals Been in the Pen?
The other day, I decided to browse online for a friend of mine's suspected criminal record. It's a long story, and the details would probably bore you all, so I'll skip to the part where I discovered that it's really hard to find a "free" court case record search. I searched for Court case+free+[name removed] in just about every combination that I could think of, but just when I thought I was about to see the person's criminal history, BAM - "please enter your credit card information for further results."
Sure, I wanted to know whether or not this person had a crazy criminal mind, but I wasn't about to pay for it. That would make me pretty crazy myself. A few days went by, then I heard about this site. If you want to know about a Missourian's criminal history, this site will give you a few details about the ones that they didn't get fixed. (You know, pay $200 and it's suddenly a non-moving violation.)
Anyway, it turns out that this acquaintance of mine is a felon - literally. She pleaded guilty to credit card fraud, which means that every time she applies for a new job and they ask if you have committed any serious crimes against the U.S. government, she checks the "yes" box. Yikes.
I don't know about you all, but it certainly surprised me. I mean, she doesn't seem like the criminal type, which made me wonder who else I know might not be as innocent as they appear. I then proceeded to spend way too much time finding out who I knew that had traffic tickets, alcohol violations and more. I even have a couple of friends who check this before going on dates with new guys to see their prior marital status.
It does kind-of freak me out that anyone can type in anyone's name find out such personal information (which makes me start to wonder if I should be promoting this...), but it is nice to know if your friends or acquaintances have committed any serious crimes.
Know anyone who has been in the clinker?
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.
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I am amazed at the number of friends/co-workers who have been in the clink. It's a site that's chock full of information.
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.