This week, we’ve prepared a collection of stories that originally aired in the fall of 2009. But never fear, we are working on a brand new Spark for next week.
On this week’s episode: CAPTCHAs, America’s Funniest Videos and data visualization. Click below to listen, or download the MP3 (runs 54:00).
Play audio:
- Luis von Ahn fights spam and digitizes books with CAPTCHAs and reCAPTCHA
- GWAP: Games With a Purpose
- Jon Lee plays matchmaker for mismatched shoes with unevenfeet.com
- Your Job Before the Internet: Todd Thicke and Michele Nasraway, co-executive producers of America’s Funniest Videos
- Marla Thirsk is still on dial-up, and wishes she had broadband
- Hannah Classen wonders why we don’t have robotic butlers
- Rehman Merali, PhD student in Autonomous Space Robotics
- Fernanda Viegas visualizes data with Many Eyes
- Lawrence Lessig explains the perils of openness in government (full interview)
- “Butta Fly’s Jazz Handz” by KCentric
- “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama
- “Rest (For A While) (Demo)” by The Orchestral Movement of 1932
- “acclimate” by General Fuzz
- “theOtherSide” by airtone
- Clips from Leave It to Roll-Oh (1940)
- “Toboggan” and “Sunday Morning” by Podington Bear
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When a Captcha is being used to digitize a text, it presents two words: one of them is known, the other is from the text being digitized. Your response for the known word is used to determine your human-ness, your response for the other word is used to help digitize the text.
Michael is right, Lisa. I had the same question, and this info really should have made it into the final piece. Hindsight=20/20 and all that!
Thank you! Took me a long time to get back to this. Makes perfect sense. One more thing I can stop worrying about at night!