Luis Van Ahn + the visual cortex

This is a great article on a Carnegie Mellon researcher, Luis Van Ahn, and his work farming our idle hours to power various processes via games and other visualizations. My favorite of his inventions is the 'captchas' - those little validations at the bottom of forms to confirm you're human - he has designed a new type of captcha that feeds illegible words from the scans of digital archives, so that while you confirm your not a bot, you help fill in the fuzzy words of the database.

Link