Gee I love technology and the ways people use it sometimes.

Most of you will know of or at least will have used a CAPTCHA. That's those funny messed up words that you have to decipher on the bottom of a web form and type in what the letters are. If you get it right, you pass and your action is accepted and if you don't they tell you to try again. If you weren't already aware, these are called CAPTCHAs and the idea is to stop automated processes from filling in the form and using it for SPAM purposes. The logic being that only a human can work out what is written there. This logic was correct - for about 5 minutes. Since then the SPAM clan have managed to get around many of the common CAPTCHAs out there.

A recent study by Stanford university showed that they could get past 70% of hte CAPTCHA's used by corporate organisations.One of the ones that they could NOT get past was a thing called reCAPTCHA by Google. That in itself is pretty impressive, but what makes this unique is the 're' in reCAPTCHA. It's a fabulous example of creating a positive by product of an essential service.

Have I built it up enought yet?

OK - here's the thing. At the moment many old books, journals and newpaper articles are being scanned into computers for posterity. This project is also OCRing (Optical Character Rocognition) the books. One of the problems with OCR is that if a book or newspaper is smudged, damaged or just doesn't scan well, some words cannot be recognised or can come in incorrectly. The only way to fix them is to physically read them and update. Of course this is impossible - we just don't have the manpower or resources to do that.

But we do. There are over 200 million CAPTCHAs being used daily. So the concept of reCAPTCHA is that instead of randomly creating a word and obsfuscating it, they take a word that is already unreadable electronically and show you that one. At the same time they show a second word that is random. The idea being that if you get the second one right then there is a high chance that you got the first one right. So, then not only have you granted yourself access to whatever action you wanted to do, but you have also updated a book or newspaper that has been scanned in thereby doing your part for the future of humanity.

Something to feel good about :-)