CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are those little “type the word\/letters\/numbers you see above” tests on various web pages to prove you are actually a human not just a computer. If you spend much time online, you are likely to run into them.<\/p>\n
Two articles in the past couple of days — one on NPR<\/a>, one at the BBC<\/a>, talk about a new program, “reCAPTCHA,” that is tying CAPTCHAs into library scanning efforts to put the human brain to use deciphering faded text that computers can’t recognize.<\/p>\n In some documents, where ink has faded and paper has yellowed, the character reading software can flag up to 20% of words as indecipherable. The hard-to-read words are then farmed out to the many thousands of sites that have signed up to be Recaptcha partners. Words are supplied to sites along with a control word that aims to ensure the person answering is human.<\/p>\n The responses to the obscured text are added to a database and particularly mangled text will be put before several people to ensure it is read accurately. Reporting in the journal Science the Recaptcha team says the scheme is about 99.1% accurate – as good as professional transcribers and beyond the limit demanded by archivists.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Deucedly clever.<\/p>\n In the last year it has helped resolve more than 440 million words and has just helped to complete the conversion of the entire archive of the New York Times from 1908 into digital form.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Excellent. If I didn’t already have a similar mechanism on this site (the little TinyTuring “type the letter” test at my comments) that works so well and easily, I’d be sorely tempted to sign up. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are those little “type the word\/letters\/numbers you see above” tests on various web pages to prove you are…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[36,20,39,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media-books","category-hi-tech","category-spam","category-writing-and-language"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":13789,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2009\/02\/18\/recaptcha.html","url_meta":{"origin":13013,"position":0},"title":"ReCAPTCHA","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 18-Feb-09 9:44pm","format":false,"excerpt":"I love it when a plan comes together ...\u00a0 Last August, I noted with glee the introduction of reCAPTCHA. Rather than a CAPTCHA schema that just grabs random words, reCAPTCHA actually serves a purpose other than \"just\" security.\u00a0 To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging - Technical"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging - Technical","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/blogging-technical"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7747,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2005\/08\/23\/released_from_c.html","url_meta":{"origin":13013,"position":1},"title":"Released from CAPTCHA","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 23-Aug-05 11:14am","format":false,"excerpt":"CAPTCHAs are those little graphic boxes with distorted-but-visible number and letter combinations that you're asked to retype in order to authenticate that you are a human being with eyeballs, not...","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging & Internet"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging & Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":48631,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2014\/12\/04\/humans-forced-to-testify-that-they-are-not-robots.html","url_meta":{"origin":13013,"position":2},"title":"Humans forced to testify that they are not robots!","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 4-Dec-14 6:17am","format":false,"excerpt":"Our evil robotic overlords have taken over!Well, not, that's not really what's going on, but Google is replacing the reCAPTCHA tech used in a lot of places (including my blogs) with tech that detects how you move your mouse, etc., when you click on a box that says \"I am\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":17066,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2010\/04\/08\/if-it-seems-that-my-blog-is-eating-your-comments.html","url_meta":{"origin":13013,"position":3},"title":"If it seems that my blog is eating your comments …","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 8-Apr-10 7:47am","format":false,"excerpt":"... then what is probably happening is that you are not logged in, and so having to use reCAPTCHA to verify your comments, and you are tabbing to it from the comment text area, which is leaving the Preview button as the default when you hit Enter, which means it\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging - Technical"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging - Technical","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/blogging-technical"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":132785,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2017\/02\/07\/the-story-of-captcha-recaptcha-and-im-not-a-robot.html","url_meta":{"origin":13013,"position":4},"title":"The Story of CAPTCHA, ReCAPTCHA, and "I'm not a robot"","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 7-Feb-17 1:27pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Also known as The Eternal Battle between Good and Evil (but in a way that is perhaps additionally useful or else not hurtful).I knew some of this, but overall, informative stuff.[h\/t +Les Jenkins] View on Google+","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12983,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2008\/08\/26\/potpourri_on_a_warm_tuesd.html","url_meta":{"origin":13013,"position":5},"title":"Potpourri on a Warm Tuesday Night","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 26-Aug-08 10:42pm","format":false,"excerpt":"POLITICAL Obama\u2019s Likes and Dislikes - Hold the Mayo - NYTimes.com\u00a0- He dislikes mayonnaise. He must be our next president. Sound familiar?\u00a0- So why are the pundits not calling Ahnold...","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging - Technical"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging - Technical","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/blogging-technical"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13013\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n