{"id":2319,"date":"2007-10-04T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-10-04T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/?p=2319"},"modified":"2018-11-20T05:27:31","modified_gmt":"2018-11-20T05:27:31","slug":"bright-spot-for-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/?p=2319","title":{"rendered":"A Bright Spot for Books"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s the Frankfurt <a href=\"http:\/\/www.frankfurt-book-fair.com\/en\/portal.php\" target= _blank>Book Fair<\/a> (or Frankfurt Buchmesse) this weekend, and bookish people are scrambling to arrange meetups and coffee with other international book folks. Though Germany is mere hours away, I&#8217;m still too stunned to do that much traveling. Next time!<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, today&#8217;s cool news item comes from the American heartland in Pennsylvania. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cmu.edu\/index.shtml\" target= _blank>Carnegie Mellon University<\/a> is wielding technology in a truly awesome fashion <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/technology\/7023627.stm\" target= _blank>in order to preserve old books<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>You know how many of our blogs use CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) &#8212; those little distorted &#8216;write these letters you see&#8217; tests to be sure you&#8217;re not a spammer? Well, university researchers are digitizing old books in order to preserve ancient texts. Unfortunately, their software doesn&#8217;t allow them to really read the books well, because the letters are on aged paper and the type has smeared and distorted over time. According to the BBC report, &#8220;The only reliable way to decode them is for a human to examine them individually &#8211; a mammoth task since CMU processes thousands of pages of text every month.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Enter CAPTCHA &#8212; and you.<br \/>Those phrases the software can&#8217;t decipher? Coming soon to a blog near you.<br \/>I will never be grumpy about that extra ten seconds it takes to decipher those twisty letters and numbers. Through popular websites, the average person is helping decipher a million words a day.<\/p>\n<p>Go! Surf the web! You have the PERFECT excuse!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s the Frankfurt Book Fair (or Frankfurt Buchmesse) this weekend, and bookish people are scrambling to arrange meetups and coffee with other international book&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[15,10],"class_list":["post-2319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-random-notes-and-errata","tag-views"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2319"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2319\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4361,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2319\/revisions\/4361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}