Stop wasting it!

As Americans we've been a consumer nation. We're extremely affluent as a nation when compared to other nations. As such, we've become a little sloppy in our conservation of resources. Some of that's finally changing as people adjust to massive layoffs, the cost of gasoline and everything else rising, an invigorated Green movement, and more and better education about what we're leaving behind for our next generations.

One thing that we're still working on preserving is human mind power. As the UNCF states in its slogan, "The mind is a terrible thing to waste." Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University must agree because they saw a lot of that mind power being wasted on necessary, but some might say frivolous, CAPTCHA responses. CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. In plain English, it's those pesky little distorted letters or words that a lot of web sites put up for you to type in before you can get to where you want to go, or do what you want to do. They're really hard for computers intent on spamming sites to understand and reply to, but, for the most part, easy for true humans to interpret.

Carnegie Mellon had a large collection of images that looked just like CAPTCHAs. Problem was, they were not computer generated, but rather text from old and decaying books they were trying to preserve by digitally scanning and converting to text. So, in a classic academic move, they made a game out of it and released it to the public for assistance (remind me of the Google Image Labeler project). Another great example of crowdsourcing -- getting a bunch of random people to do the work normally reserved for an employee.

You can read the full article on how they enlisted major Internet players to utilize their "CAPTCHA" images to do what computer scanners could not effectively do in this arstechnica article.

Those academics are really pretty smart after all... :-)