Week 11 - HON 1514

Captchas and Crowdsourcing:  These two topics were the focus of discussion in Dissecting the Internet last week.

On Tuesday, I was introduced to captchas.  I always knew what they were.  I can not even count how many times I have had to type out the letters in a captcha before completing forms on the internet, but I never knew what they were called or their unique purposes.  By watching two videos of the man who created captchas and the company reCAPTCHA, I felt pretty knowledgeable on the subject.  Captchas are used to prove that the internet user filling out a form over the computer is indeed a human, rather than a computer program designed to fill out multiple forms or buy multiple tickets for an event online.  Computers are not yet advanced enough to actually read the words hidden in these Captchas.  Unfortunately, these Captchas waste internet users valuable time, so the inventor created a company that makes the time spent filling out Captchas productive.  The program reCAPTCHA decided to put two words on Captchas.  One word is a word that the website already knows the answer to; therefore, it can still prove that a human is filling out the form.  The other word is a word unrecognized by the computer when it was pulled from a book that someone attempted to scan.  By filling out this second word, internet users help computers fill in the blanks of books when computers cannot recognize a word.  When multiple people match the same text with a word the computer was unable to recognized, it is deemed as correct.

These videos led into the class's discussion on crowdsourcing, which is when people are asked to voice their opinion on a particular subject.  On Tuesday, we played crowdsourcing games on the computer, which were kind of addicting.  I definitely played on that website a few times back in my dorm.  We were then instructed to come up with ideas of crowdsourcing activities in groups for Thursday's class.  These activities turned out to be quite interesting.  We had examples of crowdsourcing ranging from the Human Knot to arranging ourselves silently based on the UNO Cards taped to our backs.  My favorite activity would have to have been Josh and Chris's game, simply because we got to eat food!  Yum!

This week it looks like we will be talking about Cloud Computing.  Even after reading the Wikipedia explanation, I still have no idea what this is, so I am interested in learning about tomorrow!