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To some, a web site like Craigslist asking you to verify that you are indeed a human by retyping distorted, nonsensical words is irritating. But the next time you do it, you could be helping to fill in some historical blanks.

NPR ran a story yesterday on Luis von Ahn, assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the guys who helped develop the CAPTCHA technology. The short version: Efforts to digitize (really) old books and newspapers were being hampered by faded ink that confounded OCR software. The solution von Ahn came up with was to use the words that the software couldn’t recognize and insert them into these so-called reCAPTCHAs and use the power of human brains to decipher them. CAPTCHAs serve up two words, one is the security word, the other goes toward the book digitization effort. It sounded interesting, so I called von Ahn to find out more.

Here’s how it works. The New York Times is working to digitize all of its issues starting way back in 1851. It starts by scanning every single page as an image. That’s where reCAPTCHA comes in. It runs two optical character recognition (OCR) programs to turn all of those images of pages into text. Different OCR programs tend to make different mistakes. When the two programs disagree on a word, that word is plucked out and distributed among CAPTCHA security programs spread out across 45,000 web sites like Craigslist and TicketMaster.

Human beings then look at the words as part of the CAPTCHA security measure and do the deciphering by retyping what they think the mangled word is. Depending on the word, as little as two or three people agreeing on what it is is enough to figure it out. The word is then sent back to the New York Times to be reinserted into the text version of the image.

Initially, this project was part of Carnegie Mellon, but von Ahn said that they are spinning out reCAPTCHA as its own company. While The New York Times is paying to use the service, reCAPTCHA is also doing work free of charge for the Internet Archive’s project to digitize every book published before 1980.

But von Ahn is looking beyond just re-typing words as security measures. He says that his team has tried using images and having people type what they see. The problem, von Ahn says, is that people don’t spell very well, so even though the image is of a “cat” people could spell “kat” and not answer the question correctly. ReCAPTCHA is also expanding into audio, and using the audio version of CAPTCHAs to have people listen to and decipher words from garbled old recordings or closed captioning transcriptions.

The idea of taking a necessary evil like spam prevention and turning it into something useful is a good one. Who knew selling my old digital camera on Craigslist was actually an act of historical preservation?

For those of you underappreciated server jockeys keeping data center costs down and utilization up using duct tape and homemade software, the New York Times salutes you. Actually it recognizes how important people like you are, especially now that demand for compute power and energy efficiency is soaring. Most of the article highlights the need for data centers to go green, which as we’ve pointed out, is neither easy nor cheap — just yesterday a startup building a “green” data center said construction would cost $100 million.

But the need to save energy is only a symptom of the rising demand for hardware and compute power — power that needs to be managed by someone. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the demand for computer and network administrators will grow by 48.5 percent from 2006 to 2016. The demand for designers of such networks and folks to maintain web sites will grow by 82.3 percent, making them two of the fastest-growing jobs in the computer systems design category. According to other data from the agency, the pay isn’t bad, either.

Until software and hardware mature to the point of automating routine tasks around energy efficiency, virtualization and management, more servers mean more people. Which means that instead of social networking, the next generation of startups will need to figure out hardware-oriented tasks. Entrepreneurs focused on how to manage heterogeneous virtualized environments, compliance and security in virtualized servers, or on better ways to bring storage into the data center as Ethernet replaces Fibre Channel for storage area networks, will find funding. These days, we’re moving from programming to pipes.

If this story interests you then you should definitely check out our upcoming conference, Structure 08.

The New York Times had an article today about the loss of women in the science and technology fields as they hit their 30s and beyond. It cites a report that blames a macho culture intrinsic to those fields. But it’s possible that readers in the tech field missed it as it only ran in the Style section of the paper’s web site rather than the Technology section. Because apparently the loss of female programming and engineering talent has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with the latest swimsuits. An article on the Wii Fit however, was deemed worthy of appearing in both sections.

I actually think the “macho culture” inherent to these fields has less to do with the lack of women sticking around than the persistent assumption that’s behind the NYTimes confining the article to the Style pages. The assumption is that work-life balance is a female issue. Aside from tales of overt sexual harassment, the main trends that emerge in the report are that women need to “act like a man” to succeed (code for working a lot and not talking about family), and that the hours are not conducive for working mothers.

Women aren’t less capable of doing math and science, but they do tend to be less available when it comes to working long hours after having a child, unless they have a husband with a 9-5 job. Those all-night programming sessions or the week-long visits to foreign fabs to make sure a chip design is implemented correctly are costly to families. For the type of competitive person who ends up in the technology field, deciding between giving 110 percent to solving a technological problem and giving 90 or even 100 percent when junior is sick, is too frustrating. So they back off, because if the game is rigged so you can’t win, smart people pick a new game.

These women aren’t dumb, but their employers might be. The Silicon Valley startup culture demands a person give 110 percent and can be gruelingly inflexible. Academia and research labs are similar. But after a child –or maybe a heart attack — people tend to look at the rigged game and decline to play. So either the culture in technology will be forced to change, or it will continue to feed on canon fodder in the form of youth and single men. Regardless, it’s not just a female problem.

It’s times like this I wish I still lived in Brooklyn. It looks like New Yorkers from Staten Island to the Bronx could eventually get Verizon’s FiOS TV service in their homes if regulators and city lawmakers approve. Verizon already offers its fiber to the home broadband service in portions of the five boroughs, but under this plan, 3.1 million homes within the city will have the ability to dump their cable provider for FiOS TV by mid-2014.

Dave Winer, whom I have dubbed “The Constant Tinkerer,” has come up with yet another way to consume information in a simple and easily navigable manner. Well known for his work on RSS and OPML, he is now shifting his attention to finding new ways to consume news from large information sources such as the New York Times — in a style that is common to blogs.

Blogs almost always display the latest posts at the top, making it easy to get a quick bite of the latest information, and is one of the reasons they have gained in popularity. Using that framework, he has come up with an outline view of news.

A flat completely chronologic view of news probably isn’t enough. And earlier this month at a meeting in NY, two engineers at the NY Times set me off in a new direction, with a very simple bit of advice…[T]hey had applied a taxonomy to their news flow, and this opened the door to what I would like to show you today — an outline view of the news.

Winer likes to call his new experiment a “river,” but I prefer to call it real simple navigation. Using The New York Times’ taxonomy, he has come up with an example that allows you to easily find the latest news from the Times’ vast media machine. I think it is a format that should be adopted by other media companies — it is simple, and more importantly it translates into easy discovery of what’s new and hot. It helps you find related information rather easily, too.

It can also be easily adapted to mobile devices and other non-PC devices, without making major changes to their internal content management systems. Now all that the news organizations have to do is figure out how to make money off this new news view.