~article~ Are you Google's gopher?

On Mon, 02 Oct 2006 14:41:24 GMT, "edinny" <ralphyboy (AT) adfd (DOT) com> wrote:

Why don't you set up shop as:

What's your problem ?
Can you not post properly ?

This was an article that some here will find useful.

Now go away before your mommy knows you are on her PC.

--
Wank a man off, and he will enjoy himself for a day. Teach a man how to wank, and he'll be a wanker for the rest of his life.

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Hey half brain quote choker.
It's better when you leave the original message
in the post.

Why don't you set up shop as:

Half Made Brain by Paul.

You don't contribute anything to the solution. Just wasting space.
You'd be better off posting the results of you sticking a wireless
mouse
up your arse. At best you'd get better personal pleasure and maybe a
wider audience.

Nice life you got there, keyboard cop.


"Paul" <lamewolf2004[REMOVE]@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:0m1jg2l57r4nkrrv3j5lu0o25bjqe95tmf (AT) 4ax (DOT) com...
From : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/5336284.stm

Google has just taken on legions of new workers. None are being
paid -
and you might be one of them.

Since workplace computers were hooked up to the internet, office
workers have found more ways of wasting time at work, with e-mailed
jokes or videos of apparently-amusing accidents.

And then there are the games. Dr Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon
University estimated that in 2003, nine billion human hours were
spent
playing computer solitaire.

To put this in context, the construction of the Panama Canal took 20
million human-hours.

Being a computer scientist, Dr von Ahn was aware of projects like
SETI@home, where volunteers donate "wasted cycles" (the spare time
of
their home computers) to help the Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory
look for signs of extra-terrestrial life.

For all the elaborate projects that computers are working on, there
are still some things these machines are very poor at. One of these
is
seeing. A computer will recognise that something is an image, but
will
have no idea what it is an image of. So a project to, say, label all
the images on the web will need to get humans to pitch in and help.

But who is going to sit around saying what they see for hours at a
time? Enter Dr von Ahn, with a new game.

"Rather than paying people to label images for me, I get them to
want
to label images for free."

How to play

This is the game you might have been playing online: paired up with
a
stranger, both of you are shown the same image, and both come up
with
a label for that image that the other will have thought of. Once you
get a match, you move on, building up points.

It's important to understand how compulsive this simple activity can
be: it is a race, and it is rewarding when you find a partner on the
same wavelength. And if a partner fails to label quickly enough,
there
is the frustration of lost points - even though the rewarding of
said
points is wholly arbitrary and worthless.

Dr von Ahn has created a suite of image-labelling games, and noticed
many players putting in more than hours each week. For the public
good, he decided to cut players off after 10 hours of continuous
play
if they had connected from a university computer.

So, many images are getting many labels. To what end?

A scientist, of course, should not need to have applications in mind
in order to be seized by a challenge. For his part, Dr von Ahn talks
of better browsing for the visually impaired, and better cataloguing
of data.

And when he talked about these things at Google HQ recently, it is
not
hard to imagine the appeal of the game to his hosts - and their
shareholders.

One licensing agreement later, and an academic research project has
become a Google Images game - and the results are proliferating.

In fact, you do not even need to be online to be contributing: your
strings of guesses are memorised, and other players may be playing
against a phantom "you" - or it might even be a phantom "them"
against
a phantom "you", building up matches all the time.

Sweatshop potential

Having spent time helping out computers with the tasks they cannot
do,
you might wonder - was this not supposed to be the other way round?

Dr von Ahn's previous contribution to the web was the "captcha", the
distorted string of letters or numbers that have to be decoded
before
pressing "send" in online forms.

One unintended consequence has been the alleged existence of
"captcha
sweatshops" in the developing world, where spammers employ humans to
decode 12 "captchas" a minute, all day long.

So what might the unintended consequences of the Google Image
Labeler
be? The answer probably depends on how literally to take the Matrix
films.

But making humans enjoy helping computers to see things - primarily
to
see humans - is likely to affect more than web-browsing for the
visually impaired.

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