nacoran
4656 posts
Sep 22, 2011
3:58 PM
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That's pretty cool!
Can you imagine how many man-hours of work that would have taken to compile in the pre-digital era?
Of course 50 years from now you'll think the word harmonica and all those digitized books will be beamed into your computer enhanced brain instantly giving us a PHD level understanding of the humble harp in the blink of an eye, but this is a good beginning!
Another fun thing I discovered is that YouTube doesn't necessarily translate your searches. A while back I used Google translate to find different words for harmonica in different languages and then I cut and pasted those words into YouTube search and came up with entirely different results than just typing in English.
My favorite was a guy in the Middle East, Iran maybe, who was playing harmonica and guitar at the same time, but he didn't have a harp rack, so he'd piled a bunch of books on a table in front of him and put the harp in between the pages of one of the books near the top to hold it for him! Ingenious!
There were also slickly produced Greek harmonica videos, tons of videos from Asia, and all sorts of other crazy, great stuff.
:)
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Nate
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Matzen
315 posts
Sep 22, 2011
4:33 PM
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It's pretty cool how Captchas are used to digitally compile books & newspapers:
About 200 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.
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.
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nacoran
4657 posts
Sep 22, 2011
4:41 PM
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Matzen, yeah, it's a pretty clever system. The only problem is that some sites have figured out how lift Captchas from sites and put them on another site to get humans to solve Captchas. They show you a little nakedness if you solve X number of them, and then they use that answer to bypass the Captcha on the original site. :(
And that's just for the Captcha's that aren't easy enough for a computer to read on it's own!
(and I'll add this little note too... I just missed the Captcha and I must have done it before on the same one... my auto-fill feature offered me two choices 5 letters in. I guess I guessed the wrong one at least once before! :) )
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Nate
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isaacullah
1591 posts
Sep 22, 2011
9:22 PM
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N-Gram is a pretty cool tool. Last year I saw a talk here at the U from a visiting researcher (from UCL, I think) who was using the fall off patterns of certain terms in Ngram to study the nature of the adoption of ideas, and how new ideas are passed/spread. He was able to identify 4 separate patterns in the data, that relate to the 4 quadrants of a graph of population density and level of technology. Pretty cool stuff.
btw, don't know if you knew this, but you can graph multiple words on the same Ngram. Here is harmonica + blues and here is harmonica + jazz . Pretty interesting timing on that, eh?
EDIT: here's all three on the same graph, to make it easier to compare: harmonica + blues + jazz
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Last Edited by on Sep 22, 2011 9:23 PM
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isaacullah
1592 posts
Sep 22, 2011
9:25 PM
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"blues harp"
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nacoran
4661 posts
Sep 22, 2011
9:33 PM
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Unfortunately there are still different meanings for words that can confuse the meaning and skew your results and all that jazz. :)
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Nate
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Honkin On Bobo
795 posts
Sep 23, 2011
10:55 AM
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Pretty cool and addicting tool. I was about to go off on the fact that "blues" has been recorded in the 1700s?..and make the point that the music we all love didn't exist back then...then I read Nate's comment above.
What he said.
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HarpMan Freeman
189 posts
Sep 24, 2011
6:19 AM
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Miles... "Index of"
That is a great search tool! Thank you for sharing it.
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