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Updated 230 Days ago
Starting the day off right!
There are many who believe you can will yourself into having a good day by simply waking up in the morning and saying, "I'm gonna have a great day today!" I am giving this a try this morning.
This experiment began when my boss observed that many of my blogs were a little....acerbic. Those who know me will tell you I'm not a particularly plaintive person, so I really took this observation to heart.
I began looking at my past blogs, and discovered the pieces that tended to go down the road of ranting were often the first blog of the day. (I like to come in and put "pen to paper" first thing every morning.) Upon discovering this pattern, I began to wonder if I've been starting my days off all wrong...coming in and griping about something that ticked me off the night before.
Well, today will begin with nothing but positive thoughts! We got paid!
The forecast actually says the sun is going to come out this weekend!
There are cute puppies in the world!
My Boston Red Sox are still the World Champs!
My boss is happy. (When the boss is happy, everyone's happy!)
There. I feel much better. Don't you? So everyone repeat after me, "Today is going to be a GREAT DAY!" Ahhh. :)
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PS - Did you really have to post a picture of me? ugh.
I'm not sure if it was motivational, or if she was addicted to hallucinogenics. But there it is.
All of the above is true. I am a big Cardinal fan! They are my favorite team in the National League. I've worn a Cards jersey into Shea Stadium in NYC at risk of life and limb!
I am 100% behind the Cardinals for 159 games this year! (During the three in Boston in June I'll just have to be quietly ostracized by my friends here in STL....and my wife.)
From a sunny friend! :)
From a sunny friend! :)
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.