I recently joined the Council of Science Editors (CSE), mainly because I saw some articles on their website that were only accessible to members. Since joining, I haven’t had time to go back to the CSE website, so I thought I had perhaps wasted my money. However, as a member of CSE, I’m now receiving hard copies of Science Editor, the organisation’s bimonthly publication, which contains lots of useful information. In the latest issue (January – February 2010) I was particularly interested in a ‘book alert’ about the publication Origins of the specious: myths and misconceptions of the English language, which apparently debunks myths about various grammar ‘rules’ and word origins. This is one I will definitely be buying; I can imagine it will come in useful when I’m giving courses about writing and editing.
A report from the annual CSE meeting also caught my eye. It was about using humans to solve problems that leave computers stumped; for example, through the use of CAPTCHAs (those annoying little words that you sometimes have to type to log on to a website or purchase something online). It seems that more than 200 million of these are typed each day, and some of that typing is now being used to digitise printed materials. Certain words in old books and newspapers cannot be deciphered by optical character recognition, but through a program called reCAPTCHA, humans can recognise and type in those words.