Well, not the comment spam itself, but the methods of dealing with it. You know what ‘captchas’ are, right? The words you have to tpye in with a comment to prove to the website you’re not a spambot but a living human being? Well, here’s what the website of an outfit called reCAPTCHA has to say:
“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.”
Reading books? Que? But there’s more:
“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.”
See? They’re helping to digitise books by making good use of time we already have to expend on squelching spam! I really hope that it takes off - good ideas deserve to succeed.
Never quite as much as you just had, in my experience. The BBC looks into the theory of there being an optimum length of time for people to sleep each day, and signs seem to indicate that there is no hard and fast rule:
“In a nutshell, if you sleep for eight hours a night go to work and find yourself lolling and drooling on the keyboard, you aren’t getting enough. If you’re sleeping five hours and running the country, you probably are getting enough.”
Six hours a night is about my average, though I tend to catch up at the weekends - but there’s little sign of me running the country yet. Which is something I think we can all be grateful for …
Because time has been a dominant factor in my life recently, y’all can have a picture of the clocktower on Castle Road for your Friday fun:
The sky was a gorgeous colour that afternoon (though I need to get a polarising filter to really show that sort of thing off), but it was alsoo bloody cold and windy. Photography isn’t so much fun when you can’t feel the buttons under your fingetips. Continue reading “Friday Photo Blogging: the clocktower”
Time Magazine is no stranger to controversy as regards their ‘Person of the Year’ feature. Some folk have never forgiven them for once giving the dubious accolade to Adolf Hitler, but they have failed to realise that it’s not necessarily a valedictory honour - the Person of the Year is the one deemed to have been most influential on world events, for good or ill. Continue reading “My thoughts on being Time Magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’ 2006″
Tuesday night saw the return of Cafe Scientifique to Portsmouth, with a presentation title that predictably stirred up the science fiction reader in me - “Is time travel possible?” Continue reading “Cafe Scientifique: Is time travel possible?”
Sounds good, doesn’t it? I know I’d like to spend less hours with my nose to someone else’s grindstone, and I imagine my American readers feel even more strongly than I do, as studies indicate they work even harder (and longer hours) than we British. Continue reading “The 6 hour work-day”
Time is one of the bummers of being human. It’s a dimension we only experience in one linear fashion, and it moves too damn fast. Continue reading “Musings on lost time”
