Wohoo did you notice that

IE 8’s BING search provider box has support for the BING search images?! See the picture below where I typed MSFT and got the beloved Microsoft stock chart. I haven’t noticed that until recently but find it quite nice.

Also, I know it has been announced some time ago, but now, MSR advertises it more actively on their site: Project Tuva’s Feynman lectures  - a time window back to the active teaching days of Richard Feynmann.

 

On a side note: I find (i) this article (Can you trust crowd wisdom) very interesting in the context of (ii) this article (Teaching computers to read: Google acquires reCaptcha)

Especially if you directly correlate …

(ii)

Since computers have trouble reading squiggly words like these, CAPTCHAs are designed to allow humans in but prevent malicious programs from scalping tickets or obtain millions of email accounts for spamming. But there’s a twist — the words in many of the CAPTCHAs provided by reCAPTCHA come from scanned archival newspapers and old books. Computers find it hard to recognize these words because the ink and paper have degraded over time, but by typing them in as a CAPTCHA, crowds teach computers to read the scanned text.

with

(i)

When searching online for a new gadget to buy or a movie to rent, many people pay close attention to the number of stars awarded by customer-reviewers on popular websites. But new research confirms what some may already suspect: those ratings can easily be swayed by a small group of highly active users.

Clearly, it is a matter of valuing the quality and authority of individual’s contribution, as such I am not entitled to pass judgement. But maybe the option exists to skrew the little image’s recognition quality.