Pauls musings and tidbits

reCAPTCHA: Stop Spam, Read Books: A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from “bots,” or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.

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.

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then, to make them searchable, transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.

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.

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: 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.

Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive.

(Read Original Article - Via .)

Identify Galaxies Using Spare Wetware Cycles: “hazem invites us to have fun, learn about galaxies, and actually help astronomers by looking at pictures of galaxies and identifying the type. Warning: it’s more addictive than Tetris. From the site: ‘GalaxyZoo… harnesses the power of the internet — and your brain — to classify a million galaxies. By taking part, you’ll not only be contributing to scientific research, but you’ll view parts of the Universe that literally no-one has ever seen before and get a sense of the glorious diversity of galaxies that pepper the sky. Why do we need you? The simple answer is that the human brain is much better at recognizing patterns than a computer can ever be. Any computer program we write to sort our galaxies into categories would do a reasonable job, but it would also inevitably throw out the unusual, the weird and the wonderful. To rescue these interesting systems which have a story to tell, we need you.’

(Read Original Article - Via Slashdot.)

iPhone Researchers Gain a Shell: “SkiifGeek writes ‘A team of researchers dedicated to finding means to fully control and interact with the new Apple iPhone claim to have successfully gained an interactive shell on the device. In order to achieve this feat physical access to the phone is required, as it relies on some minor electronics to be created and connected to the phone’s serial port. It is believed that general control over the iPhone will be available to the enterprising researchers within a week (after all, it has only just been a week since the iPhone was released), with the promise of enough control to allow for self-propagating code not very far away.’

(Read Original Article - Via Slashdot.)

Papers Reveal Pentagon Funding of Boeing’s Psychic Research: “ESP, meditation, parapsychology … nothing’s too paranormal for a military contract.

[…]

Boeing researchers don’t just spend their days designing killer drones and networked tanks.  They also investigate unexplained powers of the mind, sometimes. Especially if those times are the late ’60s. 

This study, New Correlation Between a
Human Subject and a Quantum Mechanical Random Number Generator, conducted in 1967, "tentatively conclude[s]" that people can basically will particular numbers to appear. 

According to the Boeing-ites, there "exists a weak but significant
correlation" between the experiment’s "statistical processes" (that would be the generation of random numbers, "connected to four lamps and four corresponding pushbuttons") and "the experimenter who initiates the processes" ("the human subjects, asked to press the buttons… with the objective in mind of obtaining a high number of coincidences").   

There’s no mention of follow-up studies.  But this Boeing experiment is one of a number of fringe and alternative science projects we found after a quick dig through the online archives of the Defense Technical Information Center.  You’ll get a kick out of the others.  So keep reading…

(Read Original Article - Via Wired News.)

Ugly Airline Math: Planes Late, Fliers Even Later - New York Times: “As anyone who has flown recently can probably tell you, delays are getting worse this year. The on-time performance of airlines has reached an all-time low, but even the official numbers do not begin to capture the severity of the problem.

That is because these statistics track how late airplanes are, not how late passengers are. The longest delays — those resulting from missed connections and canceled flights — involve sitting around for hours or even days in airports and hotels and do not officially get counted. Researchers and consumer advocates have taken notice and urged more accurate reporting.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did a study several years ago and found that when missed connections and flight cancellations are factored in, the average wait was two-thirds longer than the official statistic. They also determined that as planes become more crowded — and jets have never been as jammed as they are today — the delays grow much longer because it becomes harder to find a seat on a later flight.”

(Read Original Article - Via .)

Ugly Airline Math: Planes Late, Fliers Even Later - New York Times: “As anyone who has flown recently can probably tell you, delays are getting worse this year. The on-time performance of airlines has reached an all-time low, but even the official numbers do not begin to capture the severity of the problem.

That is because these statistics track how late airplanes are, not how late passengers are. The longest delays — those resulting from missed connections and canceled flights — involve sitting around for hours or even days in airports and hotels and do not officially get counted. Researchers and consumer advocates have taken notice and urged more accurate reporting.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did a study several years ago and found that when missed connections and flight cancellations are factored in, the average wait was two-thirds longer than the official statistic. They also determined that as planes become more crowded — and jets have never been as jammed as they are today — the delays grow much longer because it becomes harder to find a seat on a later flight.”

(Read Original Article - Via .)

Thousands of rubber ducks to land on British shores after 15 year journey | the Daily Mail: “They were toys destined only to bob up and down in nothing bigger than a child’s bath - but so far they have floated halfway around the world.

The armada of 29,000 plastic yellow ducks, blue turtles and green frogs broke free from a cargo ship 15 years ago.

Since then they have travelled 17,000 miles, floating over the site where the Titanic sank, landing in Hawaii and even spending years frozen in an Arctic ice pack.

And now they are heading straight for Britain. At some point this summer they are expected to be spotted on beaches in South-West England.

While the ducks are undoubtedly a loss to the bath-time fun of thousands of children, their adventures at sea have proved an innvaluable aid to science.

[…]

So precious to science are they that the US firm that made them is offering a £50 bounty for finding one.

THE JOURNEY SO FAR:

10 JANUARY 1992: Somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean nearly 29,000 First Years bath toys, including bright yellow rubber ducks, are spilled from a cargo ship in the Pacific Ocean.

16 NOVEMBER 1992: Caught in the Subpolar Gyre (counter-clockwise ocean current in the Bering Sea, between Alaska and Siberia), the ducks take 10 months to begin landing on the shores of Alaska.

EARLY 1995: The ducks take three years to circle around. East from the drop site to Alaska, then west and south to Japan before turning back north and east passing the original drop site and again landing in North America. Some ducks are even found In Hawaii. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) worked out that the ducks travel approximately 50 per pent faster than the water in the current.

1995 - 2000: Some intrepid ducks escape the Subpolar Gyre and head North, through the Bering Straight and into the frozen waters of the Arctic. Frozen into the ice the ducks travel slowly across the pole, moving ever eastward.

2000: Ducks begin reaching the North Atlantic where they begin to thaw and move Southward. Soon ducks are sighted bobbing in the waves from Maine to Massachusetts.

2001: Ducks are tracked in the area where the Titanic sank.

JULY TO DECEMBER 2003: The First Years company offers a $100 savings bond reward for the recovery of wayward ducks from the 1992 spill. To be valid ducks must be sent to the company and must be found in New England, Canada or Iceland. Britain is told to prepare for an invasion of the wayward ducks as well.

2003: A lawyer called Sonali Naik was on holiday in the Hebrides in north-west Scotland when she found a faded green frog on the beach marked with the magic words ‘The First Years’. Unaware of the significance of her find she left it on the beach. It was only when she was chatting to other guests at her hotel that she realised what she had seen.
“

(Read Original Article - Via the Daily Mail .)

Thousands of Rubber Ducks to Finally End Journey: “Bert de Jong writes ‘The Daily Mail reports that thousands of rubber ducks who have traveled the seas of the world since 1992 are about to end their journey. After escaping out of a container fallen off a Chinese freight ship in a storm, scientists have been followed them on their fifteen year trek. This has turned out to be an invaluable source of information for studying ocean currents. Now it seems inevitable though that they will finally land on the shores of South-West England. ‘[Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer] correctly predicted what many thought was impossible - that thousands of them would end up washed into the Arctic ice near Alaska, and then move at a mile a day, frozen in the pack ice, around their very own North-West Passage to the Atlantic. It proved true years later and in 2003, the first Friendly Floatees were found, frozen and then thawed out, on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. and Canada. So precious to science are they that the US firm that made them is offering a £50 bounty for finding one.'’

(Read Original Article - Via Slashdot.)

iPhone Report: “

I got a chance to play with an iPhone Saturday. The big-city Apple Store was packed. Even though they had about twenty iPhones out for inspection, you had to wait ten minutes or so to get your hands on one. Here’s my quick review, based on a thorough in-store inspection.

It’s a sweet-looking device. I was blown away by the screen resolution, which made photos and videos look great. For the first time, I believed I might actually be willing to watch a movie on a handheld device.

The other software, from email to Safari, seemed as slick as advertised. This has to be the biggest attraction of the iPhone.

The screen seemed big when I was playing videos. But it seemed too small when I tried to browse the New York Times site. You had to choose between seeing a good portion of the page in nano-print, or zooming in to see a couple sentences in a comfortably readable size. Other newspaper and magazine websites had the same issue.

I tried typing on the on-screen keyboard, which worked poorly, getting about 20% of the keypresses wrong. I typed with my thumbs, Blackberry-style, which was the only way that seemed natural to me while holding the device. My thumbs aren’t particularly large, so I assume many people would have the same problem. Maybe I would get the hang of it after a few days of typing, but if I didn’t the device would be unacceptable for touch typing and I might have had to fall back on tapping keys with a stylus.

The AT&T cellular data network was painfully slow when browsing the web. A colleague and I had a conversation about cellular plans while we waited for one web page to download. A WiFi connection was much better.

My first reaction was that even if you never used your iPhone to make phone calls, it would be a nice little portable communications device. You could use it only with WiFi and be pretty happy.

But Apple won’t let you do that. If you buy an iPhone, it won’t do much of anything until you purchase an AT&T Cellular plan for it. You can’t even use the non-phone features unless accept a two-year contract from AT&T, which I’m not about to do.

So: no iPhone for me.

(Read Original Article - Via Freedom to Tinker.)

Editor: The restrictions mentioned along with the fact that you have to use the AT&T network as your carrier area reason enough for me to hold off getting an iPhone. But then there is also the cost. Sorry but thats to much of my own money, especially since without SSL (or so I’m told) I can’t use it for my primary reason for getting one. Oh well. But the price will probably come down and they will probably add SLL, and hopefully get another carrier. Then who knows

IBM 1401 Mainframe, the Musical: “A touring song-and-dance performance uses musical sounds recorded by Icelandic engineers in the 1960s who worked with the decades-old, room-size computer. Older IBM-heads are loving it.

[…]

When IBM chief maintenance engineer Jóhann Gunnarsson started tinkering with the IBM 1401 Data Processing System, believed to have been the first computer to arrive in his native Iceland in 1964, he noticed an electromagnetic leak from the machine’s memory caused a deep, cellolike hum to come from nearby AM radios.

It was a production defect but, captivated, amateur musician Gunnarson and his colleagues soon learned how to reprogram the room-size business workhorse’s innards to emit melodies that rank amongst the earliest in a long line of Scandinavian digital music.

Fast-forward four decades, and recently discovered tape recordings of Gunnarson’s works form the basis of a touring song-and-dance performance, IBM 1401: A User’s Manual. The show was composed by Gunnarson’s son Jóhann Jóhannsson, with interpretive dance choreographed by Erna Omarsdotti, whose father is another IBM alum.

(Read Original Article - Via Wired News.)

Editor: My first real full time job had a 1401 still in regular use. Luckily I wasn’t responsible for it. We had the same type of musical fun with radios using a Honeywell computer during Junior High.