Captcha - Reading along the Lines

You know those little puzzles you get on some web sites that make you translate blurred and distorted pictures of letters and number before you can get whatever it is you are after...

...well there's more to them than meets the eye.

The most common variety is 'captcha' (as in capture). They have two words and look like this:

 
The puzzle checks to see that you are a 'real' person before allowing you to access the site. People are quite good at dechiphering them, computers aren't. And there are other people 'out there' who write programmes which log into millions of sites automatically to steal email addresss,  leave links, sell Viagra, break into your bank account, steal your children and generally make life difficult. But so far computers generally find this sort of puzzle too difficult and cannot enter the sites protected by these garbled guardians.

In an intreguing bit of double-think Google has come up with a practical use for this process.

You may be aware that Google are in the process of digitising a shed load of printed material including millions of books, magazines and newspapers.

All the books in the world in Google's shed...

The intention is to make them available online in an easily searchable form. They scan the pages of print and use OCR (optical character recognition) programmes to convert the pictures into words, sentences and paragrpahs. Sometimes the computers cannot come up with an acceptable interpretation of a particular word. This maybe because the text has been printed at a small size on absorbent paper, printed on a fold, scribbled over, or otherwise damaged.

Books damaged by a deluge of 1988 Chardonnay following
an accident in the basement of a restaurantnext to a
rare book dealer in the Charing Cross Road

Google has a 'captcha' application called ReCaptcha. It uses these garbled words as the fodder for its puzzles. ReCaptcha looks like this:

Every time we 'solve' one of these puzzles our answer is sent back to Google who use it to suggest a meaning for a word that their character recognition programme could not understand.

This is a nifty implementation of distributed computing (where a massive task is divided up between a load of people who all do a little bit each) but it does give rise an interesting scenario and one big question.

The scenario concerns what happens if the answers we supply are fed back into the character recognition programme so that it learns to decipher garbled words? This sort of feedback loop must be an irresistable temptation to the programmers. It is elegant in the extreme and will help speed up the process - but if the programme escapes and the bad guys will get hold of it they will destroy the  'is this a real person' test.

I expect the answer is 'We wouldn't do that' or alternatively 'It won't happen'. Hmmm, we shall see...

The big and more obvious question is: If they do not know what the word is, how do they know we have typed in the correct letters?

Of course they have thought of this. As noted above, there are always two words. The reason being that one word is known and the other is an unknown word from the scanning project. They work on the basis that if you get the known one right, the unknown one will be either right or nearly right. They will collect a load of suggestions for the unknown word and (probably) choose the most popular. An exercise in democracy in translation (discuss).

But as far as the 'is this a real person' test is concerned, only the known word counts. So next time you are having trouble with one of the words it is 50/50 at worst that you need to get it right at all. If fact the easier it is to read the more likely it is to be the one that counts. If it is a number, has accents or punctuation or is truly indecpipherable there is a good chance that you can type in just about anything and still pass the test.

Among the issues yet to be addressed is: Do they try to prevent rude and offensive words appearing? If so how?

Self Spamming

My email address was hijacked by some Russian spammers recently. I have been getting several hundred bounced email notifications a day for the last few weeks.

Fortunately my mail server bins them and sends me a list of what it has binned so I can oik them out of the bin if I want to. But I have to scan this list one line at a time for stuff I actually want. This is OK for the odd half-dozen emails, but when they are in their hundreds is is a bit of a bore and a lot of a chore. But one day while scanning the list I saw this:

Not only have I spammed myself, but my spam filter recognised it and binned it - a complete work cycle with no input from me - brilliant!

Now all I need do is extend this principle to work and I can take the rest of my life off.

Upton Downton

It is the third week of November and while it is lovely and warm during the day we have just started burning logs in the evenings. This also means we have started watching a bit more TV. We used to have four analogue channels, much of it crap. But, Glory be! our part of France went digital last week and we now have a new digibox which delivers some 20 digital channels, much of it crap. It is just like English crap except it is in French. Most of it is formula chat shows and game shows, US imports voiced in French and genre shows like Strictly Come Truffling and World's Tallest Truffle.

I kid you not ($160,406)

So we tend to watch the odd video cassette or DVD for a change. Among the goodies which always deliver are classic movies, and classy comedy including current favourites Black Books, Gimme Gimme Gimme, The New Statesman and Blackadder. I have also enjoyed The Sopranos and The Wire but Mrs PJ was not so impressed by these foul-mouthed, expressions of violent savagery - can't see the problem myself...

Anyway, in an attempt to drag ourselves into the 21st century we have just obtained a copy of the first series of Downton Abbey.

Even here in the depths of Le Countryside we have heard of this phenomenon, but have completely failed to grasp the awful truth. The filming is quality, the cast is mainly quality, the script average, the storylines drab, character development pitiful, and the prognosis dire.

In some respects it is a perverse inversion of East Enders. The characters, while coming from a different era have fewer skin complaints, more tiaras, and know their place. True to the requirements of the soap genre they live in each other’s pockets and treat one another with the usual mix of love, hate, curiosity, concern, contempt, devotion, lust, greed, hypocrisy and dismissive arrogance, but lack any imagination.

While Albert Square is a rectangle of greenery surrounded by dwellings, Downton Abbey is a rectangular dwelling surrounded by greenery.

Cute!


For Christmas I would like a promise that there will not be a second series. I expect to be disappointed.

[Your expectation has been pre-empted, the folks back home are enjoying series two as you write and series three is due for release into the environment in September 2012 – Ed.]

Maggie Smith must be turning in her grave.

[Wrong again. - Ed.]

So What?

So much to do, so little time. I only wrote that sentence so that I could write this sentence. So, I was bored and decided to write this.

These three sentences include two valid uses of the word ‘so’ and one which is spurious. In the first example it is an adverb – it modifies another word. In the second it is a conjunction – it joins two things.

In the third it is just an annoying way of starting a sentence which could have been omitted without changing the meaning of what was being said and is becoming increasingly common. 

Listen to people interviewed on the radio and you will hear it.

Interviewer: How are you?

Interviewee: So, I’m very well.

It is starting to spread to sales people.

Customer: Have you got one of these in red?

Sales person: So, let me go and have a look.

I only mention it in an attempt to stop this linguistic twitch from spreading into the home.

I do not expect to be successful.

The news-introspection-misery-bomb

My granny was old, and I mean old like Victorian-old. She remembered ‘the Old Queen’ dying. And in case you think I am talking of Quentin Crisp, I mean Queen Vic and if you think by Queen Vic I mean the pub in East Enders, I mean:

Her Majesty Victoria, by the Grace of God,
of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
Queen, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India.

Strange syntax, but Gawd bless ‘er nonetheless.

Anyway, the thing is, my granny lived through some of the Boer War, two World Wars, the Great Depression and a whole load of other difficulties, most of which were instigated by politicians, bankers and arms dealers who stood to make a lot of money. The end result for ordinary people being the usual: premature death for some and poverty for most of the rest.

Like most prudent Victorians, Granny was very wary of borrowing money. Had she not died in the 1970s she would have tut-tutted loudly about the ease with which people were getting credit in the 1990s – and she would not have been alone.

 

After the second world war, she also experienced the growth of American influence on the world stage including the Korea and Vietnam wars, most of the Cold War, the creation of Israel, and a whole array of US based events such as race riots, the shootings of Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the moon landings and much of Watergate. US cultural imperialism did not pass her by and she was as swamped as anyone by Hollywood films and  imported TV shows and the new language they brought with them, and more. And no doubt at some point she may well have thought ‘they are making trouble for themselves’.

What these things had in common was an element of predictability. Many of us thought ‘almost unlimited credit will end in tears’. Most of us probably thought that ‘someone’ was keeping an eye on the apparent folly of the finance industry. Few of us expected that it would involve the banks, financial institutions and regulatory bodies behaving quite as badly as they did, and (at the time of writing) the near collapse of the Euro.

And I think many of us have thought at some time or other ‘those American cousins are getting a little pushy, there’ll be tears before bedtime’. Though, having avoided nuclear war with the Russians, none of us expected it’s most brutal realisation (to date) to take the form of the spectacular destruction of the World Trade Centre and the emergence of suicide bombings as a regular feature of the news.

Which brings me to the point: The News. I find news coverage is making me more concerned about  financial and political issues I can do nothing about. The sheer number of hours of news devoted to pundits picking over 'events' is going to have unintended consequences. It must effect the thoughts of those with power and influence as well as those egregious tossers speculating on the financial markets with greed as their only motive.

And what effect will it have on rest of us who so often feel we can do nothing? In the short term people will just become more paranoid. The long term tangible result is likely to be that most people will become poorer and gap between those who have and those who have not will continue getting wider. This is seldom a good thing.

So what are we doing about reducing the amount of bad news? Sod all, that's what. In fact BBC Radio 4 has just announced that it is extending its lunchtime news programme, The World at One, by 15 mins. I listen to a lot of Radio 4 (you can tell by the very little information I have on a lot of topics) and the thought of yet another 15 mins of daily misery is little short of depressing.

Radio 4 already has three hours of Today, half an hour of lunchtime grimness,  60 minutess of the PM show, followed immediately by another 30 minutes of much the same at 6pm (but this time the presenter is wearing a suit), and the 3 minute news hits every hour. To those you can add the regular current affairs programmes including Question Time, Any Questions, Any Answers, Today in Parliament, The Westminster Hour, The Week in Westminster, What the Papers Say, and a load of one-off political and news based shows.

There is also the print press, other radio networks, innumerable bulletins and rolling news channels on TV, Internet news and campaigning sites at home and abroad - a veritible tsunami of (mostly) bad news. All these channels need to fill their schedules with something, but as there is not enought factual information, much of their content is 'speculation' or what most of us would understand as unfounded tosh.

We have all heard the fanatical probing of interviewers, fairy-footed evasions of politicians, denials of bankers, distortions of industrialists, speculation of pundits, arguments between experts and the plain bollocks contributed by anyone who just happened to be passing the broadcaster’s microphone. And most of us must have thought ‘just take a break, give us some breathing space’  or maybe ‘this is not helping’ or possibly ‘stop picking at it, it’ll never get better’ or even ‘this is going to end in tears’.

Our media cannot generate all this information (think of it as light) without producing a lot of nonsense (think of it as heat).  One day it will ignite. No one knows how or when the news-introspection-misery-bomb will go off or how the detonation will manifest itself, but it is likely to be in the political or financial sectors triggered by a significant number of people looking after number one... leading to a societal breakdown brought about by mass public discontent with the unfairness of it all resulting on some form of anarchy. And I don’t mean  the fun sort of anarchy with a nice logo...

which relies on a functioning brewing industry, dogs on string and the welfare state in order to exist, but a rather more unpleasant one where a big bloke takes all your stuff, kills your family and enslaves you to work in his salt mine.

Or it could be a very scared political class, led from behind by a wealthy elite closing ranks and instigating martial law. Or both.

But whatever and whenever, most of us will say ‘I knew that was going to happen.’

I know I will.