We've all seen CAPTCHAs. They are those little images that pop-up with some distorted text. You have to type the text to set up a new account, see an e-mail address, etc. They're designed to differentiate a real human from a computer 'bot'. Computers can't interpret the distorted images as well as humans, so they will fail a CAPTCHA test.
Carnegie-Mellon University has a project relating to CAPTCHAs called reCAPTCHA. Their website explains:
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
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, to make them searchable, 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.
Through a simple process, the reCAPTCHA website generates code that you can insert into a webpage that will hide your e-mail address with a reCAPTCHA. Here's an example I built for my e-mail address. Try it out. As a reward, you will get my e-mail address and help the Internet Archive build it's library.
They've also build plug-ins for Wordpress, MediaWiki and phpBB. There's also a fully defined api and a php library. For more details on reCAPTCHA, visit http://recaptcha.net
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