Ever heard of CAPTCHA? I'll bet you have! It stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.
Did you know that when you use a CAPTCHA, which is where you do what you do on a web site and then have to type in those numbers and letters that are shown in a box before you press enter or submit, you might actually being used to solve a problem?
Apparently, some of the words/phrases used in CAPTCHA boxes have been causing problems arising from scanning texts: so, if you get it right, you might have solved a particularly difficult transcription problem for someone.
I got this from this month's Harvard Business Review which says that this wheeze is helping to transcribe the equivalent of 150,000 books a year, labour that would otherwise require 37,500 full time workers. Don't take that too literally as I think the operative word there is helping.
I think this is such a good idea.
DW
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