Captcha and Duolingo!

Most of you must know what Captchas are (even if you have not heard the term) and have spent some time deciphering and typing what they display. They often are distorted words you see as figures and need to type, when paying a bill or making a comment online, ... so that a website verifies it is indeed a human filling out a form, doing a transaction, or making a comment and not an automatic computer program. Sometimes, it is hard for me to decipher what one of the words is to type and have to ask for a different Captcha before I succeed. Sometimes they are annoying, sometimes you think you are wasting time. This bothered captcha's inventor as well and motivated him to do something else with them.

Yesterday, I attended the 2011 TEDxMidAtlantic. Another wonderful event, with enthusiastic and passionate speakers and audience. A whole building full of enough positive energy to keep you going till the next year's conference. Among the speakers was Luis von Ahn, the inventor of Captcha, founder of reCaptcha, and a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

So it turns out we spend about 10 seconds every time we type a captcha, and that people around the world all together type about 200 million captchas a day, that is over 5000 hours a day. So, Luis von Ahn thought is there a harder problem that could be mapped and translated to typing captchas, so that by filling out the forms and doing transactions online people actually spend that 10 precious seconds doing something worthwhile, and solving a hard computational problem?

In fact there exists such a problem: digitizing books. Many old books have weird fonts, washed out words, or ones that are dragged across the paper over the years, in a way that it is very hard for computers to automatically understand them. For humans, on the other hand, that is an easy task. So, what do they do? They provide one of the words from the books they are digitizing to you in a captcha. However, since the point of the captcha was to verify you were in fact a human, they cannot test you with something that the computer does not know the answer to. So, they ask you to type two words: one is the word they know what it is and they can correctly verify your answer, and the other the one they are asking you to recognize to help them digitize books. They also gain some confidence when you type the word that they know what it should be. Then, when enough people distinguished the ambiguous word the same way you did, they declare it digitized. They continue the same process word by word, line by line, page by page, book after book. So, the next time you get frustrated digitizing books, do not! You are doing something great for free!

p.s. You can also learn a new language while helping translate the whole web! Brilliant idea by the same person on Duolingo!

References:
[1] Captcha
[2] reCaptcha
[2] Duolingo.
[3] Luis von Ahn.

NPP Launch

"The NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP) mission is scheduled to launch on Friday October 28 at 2:48 a.m. PDT/ 5:48 a.m. EDT from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., is managing NPP for the Earth Science Division in NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

NPP will extend and improve upon the Earth system data records established by NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) fleet of satellites that have provided critical insights into the dynamics of the entire Earth system: clouds, oceans, vegetation, ice, solid Earth and atmosphere."

You can watch it live on NASA TV or in person if you are in CA close to Vandenberg Air Force Base! Learn more about this mission here.

Reference:
[1] http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/NPP/main/index.html

No grounds for climate sceptics' concerns

Global warming has been a controversial topic. Policies required to revert its affects and progress have huge economical and thus political implications to the extent that global warming has often found its place in political debates and is treated as such instead of a scientific subject. It has many skeptics despite various scientific evidence supporting it. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore won the 2007 Nobel peace prize "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change" [1]. Some used the email leaks in 2009 to suggest conspiracies that exaggerated the data supporting global warming [2]. It was a huge setback but many scientists who used that data were willing to start their research and analysis all over again if they had to with enough transparency to win over the skeptics. Well, an independent group of international scientists made their job much easier and announced their investigation results: "Independent investigation of the key issues sceptics claim can skew global warming figures reports that they have no real effect"[3].

[1] http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2007/
[2] http://articles.businessinsider.com/2009-11-20/green_sheet/30085487_1_real-temps-warming-travesty
[3] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/20/global-warming-study-climate-sceptics

Plots!

"Use different line styles (solid, dashed, dotted, etc.) even if you
use color plots, because an estimated 10% of the population is color blind.", says a professor I admire immensely, and my dear co-editor!

Hubble Does it Again, Time After Time!

There are at least three major science news releases thanks to data of the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble is not giving up on the Jaw Dropping business!

1) "When astronomers detected intense radiation pumping out of the Crab Nebula, one of the most studied objects in space, at higher energies than anyone thought possible, they were nothing short of stunned." Learn more here.

2) "Observations made by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope of a special type of supernovae contributed to research on the expansion of the universe that today was honored with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics." Adam Reiss, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, Krieger-Eisenhower professor in physics and astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Saul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory won the Physics 2011 Nobel Award for transforming our understanding of our universe by discovering that not only the universe is expanding, but also its expansion is accelerating. Learn more here.

3] In a re-analysis of 1998 Hubble data, astronomers have found "visual evidence for two extrasolar planets that went undetected back then."

Kudos to NSF!

Balancing family life and professional work is a hard task, both for men and women. Today's job market and economy is so competitive that scientists and researchers have to put so many hours going extra miles, performing duties not necessarily listed in ones' job description. These can be reviewing papers, proposals, hosting events, mentoring interns, bringing money and resources for one's projects, etc. One cannot simply just sit behind a desk and do their assigned tasks. It is like scientists act as secretaries, accountants, lawyers, lobbyists, marketing specialists, teachers, ... and finally a scientist! This requires sacrificing personal time and family time. While both genders are affected by these, women are hit harder: the years you are supposed to put these efforts to get tenure, establish yourself in a field, etc coincide with when one wants to have family and children, specially after being out of the PhD program. While men may be able to delay parenthood, there is not much women can do about their biological clocks. Also, by nature women are more involved in the child rearing process because of unique tasks required of them from nine months of pregnancy to breast feeding. On the other hand, employers can change other clocks if they are interested in maintaining such skilled and educated work force and not make the already low women/men ratios in STEM fields approach zero.

NSF made a bold move. Now, one can delay, or get a break in, using already won research grant funds due to child birth or taking care of an elderly family. This is similar to universities stopping the tenure clock when one goes on maternity leave and restarting it again when the person comes back. I wish more professional conferences start offering child care services so that mothers could travel with their kids and attend talks and conferences with some peace of mind and without feeling guilty about having left their child in a different city, or simply choosing not to attend conferences or work related trips (the option that is often chosen due to circumstances).

Kudos to NSF for recognizing the values of supporting work-life balance policies and taking steps in addressing this issue by not asking scientists to choose between their jobs and families.

Reference:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/helping-women-reach-their-economic-potential/2011/09/25/gIQA1dODxK_story.html