Captcha
Have you every wondered about these funny words?
Primarily they are to authenticate that you are a human and
not a machine.
And they have a couple of secondary functions that are world
changing/world enhancing! Yes, indeed. Have a look at this TED Talk to see the extent
of how we are all contributing to digitizing books – one word at a time! And how we can translate the internet into every language.
Even more exciting are these people asking the most amazing
questions and coming up with answers – this is really ‘out the box’ thinking at
its best.
Family History
I have been researching and collecting old information about
my family – in particular my grandfather.
He went by a couple of names during his lifetime and prior to where we
are at the moment with the Internet, tracking the family history was nearly impossible.
Now, if you know a few pertinent sites all you need do is go there and search
on names and words! So much information and so many records in so many countries
has now been digitized – can you imaging the size and scope of these exercises?
Australia has digitized their newspapers back to about 1800 – which
has provided a feast of information about my family, not just my wayward grandfather.
Interesting, a lot of people these days would be quite pleased to have as many
Google hits as my grandfather does in the old newspapers.
On the newspaper site, you can make corrections to the standard text where the OCR
has not been able to translate properly. The more people who access the records
and make corrections will result in improved standards and information – just like
Captcha – one word at a time!
