We're positively e-bookish in this week's Technology Podcast (WTP 241). First, we discuss the merits, and demerits, of Google's Book Search project, which wants nothing more of less than to digitize every book on the planet (Google's not good at thinking small, we've noticed). Needless to say, Google's little scheme has its critics, and also its competitors. UNESCO has recently launched a little digitization project of its own, called The World Digital Library. We'll give you a little peek, and a listen, to some of what the United Nations is offering up, and not just in English. All of this talk about digitization got us to thinking: do traditional paper books have a future? Or, will more and more of us migrate to e-readers like Amazon's Kindle, Sony's e-reader, or...Apple's iPhone? It's a question worthy of discussion, and so we've got an in-depth report on what lies ahead for e-publishing. You'll be shocked to learn that some people think paper will vanish as a medium for publishing in the next 50 years, which others scoff and say that our attachment to the printed page is too strong for that to happen. One question sent in by podcast listener John Kapitzky struck me as pertinent here: "Will the e-book reader I have in 30 years be capable of reading the e-book I buy today, or will I have to keep buying new e-editions of books that I like?" It's a good question for a future podcast, methinks.
Moving on, we also take a look at some very cool software designed to help folks get around Internet filtering technologies. It's called Psiphon, and its brought to you by the same people who track online censorship around the world, the OpenNet Initiative, which WTP has covered before, most recently here and here. We have an interview with one of Psiphon's engineers, Nart Villeneuve.
And we end with Yahoo's Purple Pedals project. Take a look at what happens when you outfit some purple bikes with a webcam and geo-location software, and then let them loose in the world:
Chances are good that if you're online alot, the little red box and marked through words at left are already familiar to you. It's a system called Captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). First of all, you can see why they shorten it to Captcha. Second of all, this little service is employed by many websites for a very good reason. You, the person who wants to leave a comment, or otherwise use a website, are forced to parse out the obscured and distorted words, thereby proving that you're a human, and not a spambot looking to harvest addresses and send out junk mail.
Good on you, Captcha. The folks who run the project say that it's used around 100 million times a day. But as the infamous advertisement for Ginsu Knives goes, "But wait! There's more!"
According to a report in the journal Science, the Recaptcha folks, part of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, are going a step further. There's a new scheme that allows websites to choose words that have been deemed unreadable by the optical scanning software being used to digitize old texts. You see, damaged texts or faded ink can mean that up to 20 percent of a given text is unreadable by digital means. So, those words are farmed out in the Captcha system -- the same word to more than just one person of course -- and the results are compiled in a database.
Think of it as crowd-sourcing for the archivally-minded.
The results are impressive. Better than 99 percent accuracy, according to Recaptcha. So far, 40,000 websites have signed up for the project, and more than 440 million words have been resolved.
And that means more texts available online for our general perusal and edification. Delightful. Actually, it brings a tear to the eye, seeing humans and computers being able to work together like this.
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