I occasionally enter the ITV Daybreak (Adrian Chiles and Christine Brinkley) competition - the prize is usually worth having and web entry is free. You never know.
Anyway, they have one of those anti-bot entry systems where you have to enter the words displayed in a funny font before your entry is accepted. Eg:
i969.photobucket.com/albums/ae173/focushj/recaptcha5.jpg
But yesterday it started showing words containing what looked like Greek letters:
i969.photobucket.com/albums/ae173/focushj/recaptcha4.jpg
Now I guess there's probably a way of entering these if you try hard enough, but I suspected it was more likely to be a mistake, and emailed ITV.
Today I received a reply, waffling on about why such a system is required (fair enough), but it also said:
"The distorted words are randomly generated and by entering the words in the box, viewers are also helping to digitize texts that were written before the computer age"
Have I uncovered yet another ITV competition scam, where viewers are being duped into doing unpaid work for ITV who have been subcontracted out by the British Museum to translate some of their archive material? Or isn't it as simple as that?
Try it yourself:
www.itv.com/daybreak/competitions/comp1/default.html
Last edited by: Focus on Wed 16 Mar 11 at 20:32
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Judging by comments in Private Eye (my favourite organ) you stand a good chance of winning...
Last edited by: Pugugly on Wed 16 Mar 11 at 20:34
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>> Private Eye (my favourite organ)
p.16 I think in today's PU, anyway a l/h letters page, cartoon top right... I'm still chortling...
I'd like to post it really.
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Fine by me....The Romans ?
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>> The Romans ?
Indeed. Julius Caesar and the soothsayer. But it's the soothsayer's briefcase that breaks you up and leaves you chortling all day. More or less dog Latin, not challenging surely?
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No its not - post if you want.
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I don't know how. But since elf'n's is such an issue to so many here I thought some might like it.
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You have a point. I have a mental debate now whether to keep or bin all my Eyes going back to the 80s....
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...Try it yourself...
Perhaps it's dodgy contrast on my screen, but don't Christine and Adrian look rather orange?
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I thought it was well known, but in retrospect realise it's a bit geeky so perhaps it's not - yes, those captcha texts are often bits of text that computers haven't succeeded in digitising. Good idea I reckon.
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>> those captcha texts are often bits of text that computers
>> haven't succeeded in digitising. Good idea I reckon.
But if humans can't convert them into 'ordinary' letters, what's the point?
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True in this instance, but hey, someone at the captcha company picked a duff bit of text to use. Usually it's more obviously a smeary or distorted bit of English.
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>> True in this instance, but hey, someone at the captcha company picked a duff bit
>> of text to use. Usually it's more obviously a smeary or distorted bit of English.
Like this (second word)?
i969.photobucket.com/albums/ae173/focushj/recaptcha2.jpg
Perhaps a slightly more plausible theory is that they're deliberately making it as hard as possible to force people to use the methods of entry that cost money.
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>> Perhaps it's dodgy contrast on my screen, but don't Christine and Adrian look rather orange?
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They look rather browny-orange to me too.
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>> Perhaps it's dodgy contrast on my screen, but don't Christine and Adrian look rather orange?
It shouldn't be dodgy on your screen iffy! Anyway, mine's the same - the amount they get for defecting from BBC, they can probably afford some nice sunny holidays.
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I know it ruins the conspiracy theory, but you could use the sounds instead of the pictures.
Press the little speaker logo
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>> Press the little speaker logo
But that plays something else, not what is displayed. I say conspiracy.
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>> >> Press the little speaker logo
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>> But that plays something else, not what is displayed.
Ah - I guess you weren't implying that.
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Noo. As you discovered, its not designed to.
Mind you, I cant see why a machine would want to enter this competition.
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>> Mind you, I cant see why a machine would want to enter this competition.
Well I can perhaps see someone going to the bother of writing a bit of script that could do automatic entries if there was no preventative mechanism. But does the displayed text have to be that hard to read, to the extent that even humans with reasonable eyesight can't decipher it?
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>>But yesterday it started showing words containing what looked like Greek letters:
i969.photobucket.com/albums/ae173/focushj/recaptcha4.jpg>>
But it's not Greek letters, it's:
yeveta onljtin
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>> But it's not Greek letters, it's:
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>> yeveta onljtin
Good effort - how about this one then, first word:
i969.photobucket.com/albums/ae173/focushj/recaptcha.jpg
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Yeeeeeeeees Now that's a cracker.
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Should have looked here first, the reCaptcha website. We really are being used to do translation work! Interesting stuff:
www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore
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 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 old editions of the New York Times and books from Google Books.
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Yes indeed.
Personally I'm happy with that, as I spend considerable time looking at old copies of the New York Times online.
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Well, knowing what is being done, and how it works - hmmm, opportunity for mischief?
Surely not.
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The answer is geneta or generation.
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ITV Daybreak viewers translating ancient texts - R.P.
