- » ToastedRav.com
- » Quirky St. Louis
- » Article
The Newest Videos:
|
|
|
| The Toast - 11.21.08 - PETA Attacks Lindsay Lohan and Will Smith Stops By! | Ask St. Louis: What's Your Favorite Pick-Up Line? | Giving It A One-Two Punch: A Boxing Lesson With Sweat Gym |
Updated 59 Days ago
The Mission Behind Plowsharing Crafts
ToastedRav Video
From the outside, Plowsharing Crafts is unassuming. It looks similar to many of the other pleasantly artistic stores that the Loop plays host to. But two minutes into a conversation with Rich Howard-Willms, the manager of the store, I knew that the store was about something bigger than providing unique, decorative objects for St. Louisans.
I appreciate people who are passionate about their work, and Rich certainly fits into that category. He told me how Plowsharing Crafts has been helping crafts people in Third World countries for over 20 years. A large portion of what the item sells for here in the non-for-profit store goes back to the person who made the product. (They would otherwise be extremely underpaid for their labor.) Other than Rich, the store is run by volunteers. If you're interesting in helping out this great cause, click here.
Besides home decor and gifts, Plowsharing Crafts has coffee, clothing, jewlery and countless other interesting pieces from all over the world. While I was there, I bought a really cool silver and black ring. I bought it because it was reasonably priced and I liked it, but let me tell you, it also felt good to know that I was helping make a difference to a hard-working crafts person half a world away.
Click on the ToastedRav Video tab to learn more about the mission behind this impressive store.
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.
© Copyright 2008 ToastedRav.com and Bonneville International
An Equal Opportunity Employer all rights reserved
So, "plowsharing" is...?
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.