I found an interesting article about how each of us may be helping digitize books and periodicals. You have probably encountered a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) at some point and with some frequency. CAPTCHAs use text generated in images that must be replicated by the user to allow access to a site. About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved on a daily basis. Many of those are actually reCAPTCHAs which use two sets of text. In reality, replicating only one of those text images correctly is necessary to gain access. The other text image is actually taken from a book or periodical that a computer was unable to accurately interpret through OCR. These fragments are generated into the reCAPTCHA. If you replicate the actual text key accurately, then the program figures that you probably had a high probability of interpreting the text fragment that the computer was unable to determine through OCR. A consensus of a plurality of the answers is determined and then that fragment is plugged into the digital text.
A sneaky way to use distributed computing to solve problems without most of the users even knowing about it.
"Remember to always be yourself. Unless you can be batman. Then always be batman." Unknown
