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Updated 49 Days ago
Making Fun of The Campaign Debates: Two Buzz Word Games
Espousing on foreign policy and the economy just got fun again. In just 34 days citizens will be taking to the polls, and that means candidate debate season is in high gear. Every major television network is televising the political throw downs in primetime (and yes, tomorrow night's episode of "The Office" is being preempted for the VP debates), and since Missouri was the largest viewing audience in the nation for Friday night's cage match there is a pretty good chance you, dear St. Louisans, were probably watching and will probably be watching again. For the non-pundits among us here are a couple of debate inspired games to help take the jargon and lingo laden edge off.
Last Friday, September 26, marked the first presidential debate. Since it wasn't a school night many people around the nation joined in on the Presidential debate drinking game. Every time Obama said "change" it's one down the hatch, and every time McCain referred to viewers as "friends" it was bottoms up. Though it might not make for the best conversation afterwards, it does make those ninety minutes pass pretty quickly.
Tomorrow, October 2, is the one and only VP debate which is taking place right here in the Lou. The Biden-Palin match up falls on a school night, though, and as not to leave you with a throbbing skull on Friday the corresponding debate game is a little tamer. Tomorrow night you can turn on the debates and play a rousing game of vice presidential debate Bingo. To play, print off your cards and get a marker. Just like real BINGO, when you get five across, down or on the diagonal you win. I am not sure what you win... but you win!
See and you thought if you heard these words again you would scream. Happy debate gaming!
(Caricatures and cards by Bob Staake)
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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Wall Street vs. Main Street
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.