Learning a New Skill

This week a spent a bit of time downloading newspaper articles from Factiva. As I’ve downloaded more than 100 at a time, the Factiva website kindly asked me to confirm that I am a human. Given that they make money archiving what others wrote, I guess this is a reasonable way to protect their income. Oddly enough, checking that I’m not an unsophisticated machine was so important that it had to be repeated after every search. I quite dislike captchas, especially as I seem to fail them all the time so often. Having to do them every few minutes had the strange consequence that I got better at solving the captchas Factiva threw at me. Who said skills had to be useful?