« Well this is certainly a way to make sure no auction house ever accepts your agency's bids! | Main | Communists? All nuts. All. »
March 3, 2009
Making amends - spectacularly
The man who invented those little squiggly letter things you read and type to confirm online things has found a parallel use for them - helping the let's-scan-all-the-old-books-and-put-them-online movement!
He realized that he had unwittingly created a system that was frittering away, in ten-second increments, millions of hours of a most precious resource: human brain cycles. With the help of a MacArthur "genius" grant, von Ahn set out to make amends. Now a growing number of websites, from e-commerce (Ticketmaster) to social networking (Facebook) to blogging (Wordpress), have implemented the precocious professor's new tool, dubbed recaptcha. If you've visited those sites, your squiggly-letter- reading ability has been harnessed for a massive project that aims to scan and make freely available every out-of- copyright book in the world, by deciphering words from old texts that have stumped scanning software.
via Mirabilis.ca
Posted by CrankyProfessor at March 3, 2009 7:49 AM