The Fremont Bridge
The Fremont Bridge (mini version)
In the last five years, students from the five boroughs have been admitted at a rate five to eight percentage points higher than that of the overall applicant pool.
i know all of you have seen one of these tests at one point or another in you online existance. a ‘captcha’ test are those funky letters or numbers that you have to type in when signing up for an account somewhere.
this test was originally invented to make it so that only humans could sign up for, and do do different things on the web, and to stop ‘bots’ from spamming and signing up automatically. this idea became very popular and is now utilized by almost every internet outlet out there.
the creator of the captcha test later realized that while it did stop bots from doing things, it really did nothing for the human population. so he had an idea.
right now there are multiple organizations who are working to scan and digitize every book in the world. they scan the pages, and computer software recognizes the letters, and ‘types’ it out. sadly, there are some letter or words in books that the computer is not able to ‘read’ and type out. they originally hired people who would go through and manually type these words in, one at a time, so that the book may be complete. this however took too much time.
so the captcha creator decided to essentially hire the entire world population to help with the project.
this started the TWO-word captcha tests. one of the words is just like any other captcha and matters when signing up for something. the other word is a scan from some book that the computer wasn’t able to digitize.
so when you type in that word, it sends it back to the database of books, and fills in that blank. the entire world is doing in one day what it would have taken months for the research group to do on their own.
so congrats world, you are helping preserve books for eternity and you didn’t even know it.
“They were always given trophies just for showing up,” he said. “Now, they’re being told ‘no’ when they really want a job or an internship.”
“One of the most commonly cited statistics about marriage is that half of marriages end in divorce. But that number reflects the expected lifetime divorce rate of people married in the 1970s.
The story is different for more-recently married couples. A comparison of 10-year divorce rates among college-educated men married in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s shows that divorce is becoming less common, said Dr. Stevenson, the Wharton researcher. Among men who married in the 1970s, for example, about 23 percent had divorced by the 10th year of marriage. Among similar men married in the 1980s, about 20 percent had divorced by the 10th year. Men married in the 1990s are doing even better — with a 10-year divorce rate of 16 percent.” (via NYT)
