doing my part

i installed a captcha plugin on my blog.

this means that when you want to comment, you get to play one of those little games where you type in letters to prove that you are not a robot (sorry victor ;).

i have been thinking of doing this for a while, but never got around to it, until today when i was pushed over the edge by the discovery of the cleverest distributed computing idea since seti@home. and maybe even cleverer. cuz aliens? they might already be here kicking back with some watermelon while they wait for us to wise up a bit. did you see my pictures from last weekend?

the captcha program i found, however, is all about the improvement of our earthly existence. it is called recaptcha, and it works by fusing two pieces of tedious data entry – captcha verification and OCR proofreading – into one handy package. in short, every time you comment on my site, you are helping to create a more complete digital library for us all. as the recaptcha site explains:

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.

this is so unbelievably clever that i cannot get over it. and since it took about ten minutes to sign up and pimp my website with the already built wordpress plugin that handles all the computer talky talk, well… let’s just say i can already check “further the revolution in some small way before lunch” off my todo list for the day.

and that just makes a body feel good, ya know?
:)

thanks, as often, to lifehacker for the heads up.

now back to saturday blogroll catchup. fun, ain’t it?

3 Responses to “doing my part”

  1. Mom Says:

    Well, this is a recaptcha experiment. I haven’t figured out what it is about!

  2. David Says:

    I also find this to be the cleverest thing I’ve heard of in a while. As I started typing, though, I thought of a question about it. It was asked and answered on their website: “But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle?” Also very clever: it’s always two words, and if you can do one, they let you in, and figure you probably did the other one correctly too. Then it gives the same image to a few people and if they all give the same answers, they assume it’s correct.

    Kudos, recaptcha folks!

  3. BlogSchmog | Blog Archive » reCAPTCHA = altruism Says:

    […] I heard about reCAPTCHA not long before Kynthia tried it out. Leveraging 150,000 hours of collective typing work each day for some other noble purpose—such as helping digitize books from the Internet Archive—is a great idea … provided the existing action is necessary in the first place. According to the reCAPTCHA application site, human wisdom is mined this way: 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. […]

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