The future of OCR

One of my commenters suggested that old books will never be properly OCRed because the pages are apt to be warped because of early paper-making.

I believe this is a temporary problem-- that degree of warping is just mild and fairly simple geometrical transformation.

[Poll #1658707]

If the usual captchas are useless, one solution is to go to simple semantic captchas. I've seen a few of those which require answering a very simple arithmetic problem or figuring that "What is the opposite of hot?" isn't a trick question.

Are there other possibilities? Will the reverse Turing test (machines recognizing people) continue to be reliably solvable?

The future of OCR, and a poll policy

One of my commenters suggested that old books will never be properly OCRed because the pages are apt to be warped because of early paper-making.

I believe this is a temporary problem-- that degree of warping is just mild and fairly simple geometrical transformation.

If the usual captchas are useless, one solution is to go to simple semantic captchas. I've seen a few of those which require answering a very simple arithmetic problem or figuring that "What is the opposite of hot?" isn't a trick question.

Are there other possibilities? Will the reverse Turing test (machines recognizing people) continue to be reliably solvable?

There's a poll at my livejournal. Polls don't seem to get transferred with the automatic cross-post from dreamwidth, creating polls a second time by hand isn't my idea of fun, and most of my commenters are at livejournal.

Voice recognition comedy

The classic Scottish elevator routine....

I don't know if this is horrifying, but I can't hear some of the distinctions in the despairing efforts to get the elevator to recognize "eleven". Oh well, it took me years of listening to the BBC for me to be able to hear an American accent. Actually, I don't know how weird an experience that was, so.... Do you ever hear your own accent (whether it's you speaking or someone else) as a distinct thing?

It took me a considerable effort to hear the way I say "water". I have a Delaware/Philadelphia accent, and I pronounce it "warter". That first r isn't subtle, it's about the same as the second, but I'd blanked it out because I was pronouncing the word like a normal person and it's only got one r, and that r is at the end. Not only that, but I still believe that "warter" is more like the real stuff-- possibly wetter-- than "wahter" is.

Has there been work done how literacy affects what people hear?

Back to elevators-- if you have a more subtle sense of humor, here's a discussion which resulted when someone claimed that voice recognition had gotten so good that the comedy routine was an unfair insult to a well-developed field.

Computer languages and personality?

Discussion of programmer preferences-- is there a correlation between cognitive style or other personality factors and what languages a programmer loves or hates?

Does starting out with COBOL actually have long-term effects?

Link thanks to andrewducker.

...And disregard the rest

Several hundred vets chained themselves to the White House fence to protest US wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

USA Today seems to be the only mainstream media report about it. The first link has links to places like The Huffington Post, which did report on it.

Here's a link compendium from madfilkentist.