Slashdot Mirror
reCAPTCHA Hard At Work, Rescuing Fading Texts
sciencehabit writes "Computer scientists have developed a program, called reCAPTCHA, which is being used in lieu of CAPTCHA by several sites, to help digitize old books and newspapers. The reCAPTCHA takes entries from old and faded texts that optical scanners and digital-text readers have trouble with. So every time you solve that string of crooked letters, you may actually be helping historians digitally reconstruct a page from the 1908 New York Times." The Science Now story links to the longer and more informative article at Ars Technica. (We last mentioned this program last year — and now it's good to get some sense of how well it's working.)
I can usually tell which of the two words is from a real old text. With high probability (>90%) I can correctly answer the real CAPTCHA and replace someone's OCR'd word with "penis".
I've only ever done this maybe ten or twenty times, but it could easily become an automatic part of using the system.
The New York Times is already online from 1851 onwards. the concept is cool, truly, but why not CAPTCHA something not already accomplished? Oh, I know. That was, like, a metaphor, right?
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
The feature known as FADING was designed to protect copyright works from being pirated by becoming illegible before the work could fall into the public domain.
I think that erosion on stone tablets predates fading by quite a bit....
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Facebook uses reCAPTCHA. I guess you can make something useful out of the millions of useless teenagers wasting their time on Facebook.
Facebook uses reCAPTCHA. I guess you can make something useful out of the millions of useless teenagers wasting their time on Facebook.
That's not fair.
Plenty of useless adults waste their time on Facebook.
Or perhaps SLASHDOT-READER:
OVERWEIGHT
GEEK
SPENDS-TO-MUCH-TIME-USING-COMPUTERS
ALL-OF-THE-ABOVE
I fit into the category ALL-OF-THE-ABOVE. The only generalisation that is missing about slashdotters is the one about girlfriends.
The following security test allows us to validate you are a human and not an automated script.
please type the following two words in the text box below
you moron
____________ _____________
Took me a bit to get past the new security measures, But I got a coupon 5 cents off my next shoe purchase.
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
Let me introduce you to my friend, the question mark.
One FUNDAMENTAL problem with this
... is that you didn't RTFA.
Just use an alt tag.
But you...
*sigh* ...Nevermind. It's Friday. Go have a beer or something.