This is unbelievably brilliant and moving.Absolutely blew my mind.
CAPTCHA is the widely-used Internet security method of asking you to type some squiggly-written letters to prove you are a human, and not a robotic software program when you join a website.
The people who invented this method noticed that 10 seconds of human time and intelligence were being wasted millions of times a day, every time someone typed a set of squiggly letters to join a website.
So, they re-configured the system to ask you to please type one squiggly word to prove you’re human and a second squiggly word which comes from an actual, old book that we are trying to digitize, but current computers can’t discern what the word is because the book is so old.
In doing this, they have harnessed enough human labor – given in 10-second increments – to digitize millions of books! 750,000,000 of us have participated in Re-CAPTCHA so far. This is called “crowdsourcing.”
Historically, the largest known human projects involved 100,000 people. Beyond that number of people, it became too hard to manage. But, now, with the Internet….
Their next project is to harness us all to translate the Web into every major language for free. (Currently, there are large amounts of information available only in one language, eg English, Japanese.) The project is called “duolingo” where people can learn a new language for free while contributing to translating the Web.
They’re in the testing phase and it works! People actually learn a language as well as they would from traditional language software, and the material is more interesting and topical. And the translations are highly competent. This also makes learning a language affordable (free) to many people on the planet who would never have disposable income for this purpose.
The speaker is Luis von Ahn and he is fantastic! www.duolingo.com
Just think what else we could accomplish together!
http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ah...aboration.html
