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Updated 84 Days ago
What's in a Name?
by Audrey Holaday in "Technology/Gadgets"
I've always thought of my name (Audrey) as being particularly unique. I have only met a few other people in my life with my name, and I'm always quick to give props to my parents for stepping outside of the box.
But despite my name being unique to me, it's more common than I thought. I found that out because my uber-cool friend Cary brought this amazing tool to my attention. It's a way to find out statistics about how many people in the U.S. have your first and last name.
Here's what I found out about me:
- Audrey is the 319th most-popular name in the U.S.
- 193,666 total people in the U.S. have my first name, and more than 99.9% of those are females (shocking).
- A little more unique is my last name; only 1,311 people in the U.S. have the last name Holaday, probably because of the spelling.
- But hey - I'm the only Audrey Holaday in the whole U.S.! That's pretty sweet if you ask me.
Go to this website to see how your name holds up. How original were your parents when they named you?
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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An Equal Opportunity Employer all rights reserved
Flynn: Statistically the 518th most popular last name.
This explains why its always a pain in the butt to get a website username or email address with my name.
Margo: Statistically the 1178th most popular first name.
Hughes: Statistically the 86th most popular last name.
Statistically the 82nd most popular first name.
More than 99.9 percent of people with the first name Stephanie are female. (I feel bad for that guy that makes up the .01%)
There are 88,446 people in the U.S. with the last name Goodman.
Statistically the 379th most popular last name.
Famous people with the last name Goodman:
Benny Goodman
John Goodman
"Jennifer"
- 1,421,251 people in the U.S. with the same first name
- 21st most popular first name.
- And even though Mike has Jennifer beat on the most popular name count, I do share my first AND last name with my sister-in-law who is also a "Jennifer Danker"
Statistically the 41520th most popular last name.
Mike Merenda
There is 1 person in the U.S. named Mike Merenda.
theres another somewhere in south america...
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.