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Submission + - You Can Help Search for Jim Gray

Submitted by FreemanPatrickHenry on Saturday February 03, 2007 @05:17PM

FreemanPatrickHenry writes: You can help search for Jim Gray using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service. You must create a (free) account to participate.

Instructions from the site:
"You will be presented with 5 images. The task is to indicate any satellite images which contain any foreign objects in the water that may resemble Jim's sailboat or parts of a boat. Jim's sailboat will show up as a regular object with sharp edges, white or nearly white, about 10 pixels long and 4 pixels wide in the image. ...
Marked images will be sent to a team of specialists who will determine if they contain information on the whereabouts of Jim Gray."

Let's help our comrade who may be in grave danger!

Submission + - High Tech Search for Jim Gray

Submitted by necro81 on Saturday February 03, 2007 @01:45PM

necro81 writes: The NY Times has an article describing the high-tech involvement of Silicon Valley in the search for computer scientist Jim Gray, who went missing while sailing last week. High-resolution satellite images of the 132,000 sq. mi. search area were requisitioned from DigitalGlobe, and volunteers are pouring over them through Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Affluent dot-com'ers with small aircraft have searched the coastline. "'It wouldn't have surprised me to get a brush off [from the Coast Guard],' Professor [James] Frew said. 'They're professionals, and they know what they're doing, and here comes this army of nerds, bashing down the doors. But they've dealt with us very nicely.'"

Submission + - The distributed search for Jim Grey

Submitted by on Saturday February 03, 2007 @01:42PM

An anonymous reader writes: The search continues for Jim Grey, with a collaboration between Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and NASA. A combination of sattelite, radar, and aerial footage has been collected over the past several days, and volunteers have been asked to sift through this data SETI@Home style using first Google Earth, then Amazon's Mechanical Turk — looking for anything that looks like Grey's boat. It pays to have good connections, but more importantly I believe this could lay the groundwork for making such innovative search efforts generally available. This is an application of distributed computing/thinking that could really save some lives.

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