In another "Genius!" moment (see post below on cardboard oven for the other one), I came across this article about CAPTCHAs. You know, those images where you type in the corresponding letters to show that you're a real human being and not some spybot infiltrating a site.
CAPTCHA is short for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” It was developed by a Guatemalan professor who thought he'd put it to greater use than just identity-verification. He has started a project that now spans from Facebook to Craigslist and other sites where the image is a snippet from a scanned-in book where the computer can't decipher the text... but the human eye can.
Find out much more by clicking here.
So whenever you think you're being pestered into deciphering some random letters, when they form words there's a good chance you're giving 10 seconds of your brain power to the global effort to turn out-of-copywrited texts into digitally-searchable material for the Internet. Alas, it doesn't seem blogger (my host for this blog) employs reCAPTCHA, but I'm urging them to do so if they aren't already! Anyone, let me know if they already are!
So how does it feel to be a part of an Eternal Digital Project? ;)
UPDATE: In a NY Times article, reCAPTCHA is reportedly being used by Twitter, Facebook, Craigslist, the NY Times and Ticketmaster, and is deciphering about 25 million words each day!!!
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