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Help Find Steve Fossett

Posted by kdawson on from the spare-wetware-cycles dept.

An anonymous reader invites us to join in the hunt for the missing Steve Fossett using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. DigitalGlobe, one of Google's imaging partners, has acquired new high-resolution satellite imagery of the area where Fossett disappeared on Monday. The public can now go through this imagery and quickly flag any images that might contain Fossett's plane. Flagged images will receive further review by search and rescue experts.

2 of 439 comments (clear)

  1. Found a plane... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    38 29' 03.51" N
    119 24' 21.64" W

  2. Fast Turk Interaction by Dan+East · · Score: 5, Informative

    I keep hearing people whine about the Mechanical Turk interface. Each image only requires one mouse click and two keyboard presses (no mouse movement at all required). Here's how:

    1 - When you manually accept the first hit, make sure you check "Automatically accept the next HIT".
    2 - Press the END key to scroll all the way down to see the image.
    3 - Click the mouse on Yes or No.
    4 - Press the ENTER key to accept the HIT.
    5 - Goto 2

    I've found two images that are really good candidates for a crash. One was at 38.020248,-119.368515. It looks like a line of tree damage, with a bright object at the edge of the tree line.

    Next, I keep hearing people saying that laypeople aren't useful for something like this. This is simply to flag interesting images so experts can spend their time looking only at the most likely candidates. Also, this is free for them. So they could use an algorithm something like this:
    Show each image to at least 5 people.
    Each time someone says "Yes" to a specific image, show it to two additional people, up to a max of 20 reviews.
    Sort the images by descending Yes vote count and show them to the experts in that order.

    Dan East

    --
    Better known as 318230.