Inside The Search For Jim Gray

An anonymous reader writes "InformationWeek adds some interesting new details to the story of unprecedented grass-roots search for Jim Gray, the Turing Award-winning database guru who helped set up Microsoft Research's San Francisco lab. Gray disappeared Jan. 26 after sailing out of San Francisco Bay to scatter his mother's ashes at the Farallon Islands, 27 miles offshore. Once the Coast Guard had given up its massive search, Gray's friends rallied the tech community — including people like Google co-founder Sergey Brin — into action. 12,000 volunteers spent 3 days examining 1.6 million hi-res images of ocean gathered by a NASA pilot who flew a U2 low over the area where Gray was thought to have disappeared. But it was all for naught. As Sendmail creator Eric Allman notes, Gray was expert at 'stripping away mystery by making things simple. It's an irony to me that he should end in a mystery.'"

Comments

Wisdom of Crowds (of geeks)

[(Robo_Bro)]

FTFA:

I decided I'd organize a group that would predict where an object would drift in that period If anyone's read James Surowiecki's "The Wisdom of Crowds", they'd be familiar with a story in which a lost ship was located by tabulating/averaging the guesses from individuals (most with no search and rescue experience). This technique is roughly based on the idea of nature's bell-curve; collect enough guesses and the mean will be RIGHT ON. Anyways, I was simply curious if this technique was employed. How poetic would it be for Jim to be found because of a database's average?