Spam and teaching computers to read

After my last admission of 43 comments, 40 of which were spam I decided to do something about it. I’ve installed reCAPTCHA for a try out. As well as trying to weed out spam robots, it has a novel secondary purpose of using the results to digitise books.

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.

We’ll see how well it does.

The first month

Well I’ve had this blog running one month so far and in that time I’ve had over 300 visits (probably half of them mine) 800 pageviews and the most popular post has been the car game interfaces one.

Firefox is overwhelmingly the most popular browser used on this site, and Windows users just beat out Macs. I’ve had 43 comments, and 3 of them were not spam, and that dipsy viral seeding company got back in touch to remind me about their stupid video and obviously didn’t read the post I made about them.

I’ve got a bit of work going on now but really I don’t think I can post any examples here until they’ve been fully signed off by the client. I’ve got a few posts in mind showing off my final degree project with all the different iterations it went through and hopefully that will inspire me to create an independent site for it for some publicity and maybe a print run if there is a measured interest and I have the finances.

Also tonight I had the hiccups for probably the first time in over a decade and the first cure linked on google actually worked.

Also I need to fix the monthly archive pages.