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Updated 49 Days ago
Murder Sprees: Fun For The Whole Family
Halloween is just around the corner. It used be big inflatable displays were reserved for Christmas. But no more. Halloween is making its move. Typically those displays are made up of witches and ghosts. If you like your Halloween a bit more edgy, perhaps you choose a zombie or gravestones. Well, Wal-Mart thinks those are for wusses!
Wal-Mart proudly submits for your approval, an Airblown Inflatable Light Show Crime Scene. Yep, you read that right…a crime scene. It comes complete with crime scene tape, blood splatter and a silhouette of a stabbing in progress. Oh, and crime scene noises. Those are their words not mine, “crime scene noises”. I’m not exactly sure what that would entail. I guess screaming is a safe bet. Perhaps the chatter of cops making witty puns based on the murder weapon of choice; or a grizzled detective telling his rookie partner that he’s getting “too old for this s**t”.
I guess Halloween has revolved around death for years. But it always seemed more abstract or rooted in the past. A ghost from the civil war or zombies or something 99.9% of people will never actually encounter like a serial killer. But crime scenes aren’t really that uncommon.
Maybe it’s the fact that this isn’t designed to look like a decoration for an adult’s party. It’s not the hyper-realistic carnage with severed limbs and decapitated corpses that you might expect to see at a frat party. No, this thing is puffy and, well, kind of cute. The only time “puffy” and “cute” have ever been associated with a crime scene was the unfortunate Strawberry Shortcake/Pillsbury Dough Boy murder-suicide. (His outside was doughy, but his heart was hard.)
And let’s not overlook a little continuity error here. The police showed up, put out cones, cordoned off the scene and wrapped the area in crime tape. Is it too much to ask them to arrest the guy with the knife? I mean, he’s right there! Can’t they see him? Unless the crime scene is located in front of the Magic House’s Shadow Wall, I’m pretty sure the guy’s still at it.
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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.