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Help Find Steve Fossett
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.
CATS/Diebold '08- All your vote are belong to us!
I suppose there are already trained people looking at the images. From the Police, Fire-Department, or whatever organization handles these kinds of emergencies in Nevada. I stress the word trained because the satellite data definetely needs experienced eyes to look out for the right stuff.
The article starts by explaining what to look for on these images. This is good, but to substitute for experience in looking at such images.
To be fair, most missing persons are hiding in bus terminals and seedy motels. Even if it sadly takes someone of celebrity, even someone whose personal hobby is to put themselves into ridiculous danger, to develop a new form of distributed wetware computing, it's still for the better.
Maybe if someone had thought of this earlier, that unlucky family in Oregon wouldn't have been stranded in their car for a week. Or maybe, now there's a new option for the next time that does happen.
Forget SETI-at-Home. I'd much rather play "FindTheLostPeople-at-Home".
One day we'll be telling our children, "When I was your age, we actually had people comparing satellite imagery to find lost people!"
Seriously, though, can't computers do this sort of thing more efficiently? I'm no expert on the state of image recognition research, but you think it would be good enough that a computer could pick out potential "hits" for further review by trained professionals, perhaps by searching for what looks like man-made objects in remote areas or comparing old imagery with the current, updated samples.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Hmm. I found something that was interesting that is of correct sizr and somewhat airplane shaped. Probably nothing, but there's still the possibility. However, the frigging site doesn't accept my clicks on either of the radio buttons under the sample image. The browsers I'm using are Safari, Camino and Firefox
Am I doing it wrong or is the page really picky when it comes to peoples' browser choises?
"No Windows, no helping"?
Anyone got it working?
Where have your banknotes been?!
The scale make it a little bit small, but I think it is exactly the sort of thing that they are telling us to report to them. Contact the HIT requestor via Amazon perhaps?
Looks like a plane to me too.
These pictures are lousy - to really get useable images would require a fly-over.
Manned flyovers are expensive, slow, and often dangerous if a person is lost due to inclimate weather;
However Unmanned flyovers can be conducted in poor weather, at very low cost, and without pilot fatigue or airspace crowding concerns.
It is ironic that private pilots have been objecting to uav, and now their hero doesn't have the benefit of private UAV flights for search and rescue in his time of need.
Not to gloat, but this would be a fitting time for the private pilots associations to change course on elbowing out UAV's and giving another nascent industry to europe.
AIK
I'd say that's a hit. The object matches the dimensions of a Super Decathlon, according to Google Earth.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
This is a very good use of the technology. I hope this works if for no other reason than to bring closure to his family if he hasn't survived.
My problem is the way they've got the web page set up. Every time I submit a new "HIT", I have to scroll all the way down the page again to see the next image. It's great that they have a "primer" a the top, but I've done a couple hundred now... I don't need to keep seeing that over and over again. Just cut to the chase and show me the next picture to examine.
Also, looking at the Google Earth swath that this is covering, I can't help but think that he might be outside of that. Can anyone comment? Or do they know "if he's anywhere, he's in that area."?
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
What, you thought there was no interesting CS research left to do?
The last time an effort like this was undertaken, it was for Jim Gray (Database researcher, Microsoft Fellow), who had disappeared sailing from San Francisco. I checked on that for a while, but never saw any more information.
Was anything ever found in the search for Jim Gray? No remnants of his boat, or other signs of what happened?
Ok, so what do we do if we find a plane just browsing in Google Earth? (way more efficient than refreshing the webpage).
38 7'34.00"N, 11929'4.81"W
Much more fuzzy than the AC plane, so this is probably nothing, but the size and shape is about right (a bit shorter, but of the plane is angled, it could easily show up shorter).
True, it could be a publicity stunt. But if it isn't intentional, then he's dead. He had enough experience to know to have an ELT/EPRIB on his plane. If he didn't activate it when he went down, it's because he was too injured to flip a switch to turn it on. Id the wreck was bad enough to break his ELT/EPRIB, then he didn't stand a chance.://www.nctackle.com/acraq406mhzg1.html http://www.avionix.com/store/elt.html
We are all just people.
...as Steve Fossett originally set out to take this journey to find a flat and long enough place to do his world land-speed record. Now Google has high-resolution imagery of the whole place, which makes the whole undertaking a bit obsolete in retrospect ?
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38 3'24.02"N 11914'56.55"W It looks like a plane, it's about 20 ft in length and has a 23-24 ft wingspan. I don't know how to contact them but if anyone here can communicate with them, please do. Don't forget to credit me if it turns out to be his plane.
They found SIX separate undocumented plane crash sites while searching for Fosset... why is it they can find these plane crashes while searching for Fosset, but couldn't find any of those before hand?
It's also quite illogical to ask "who" didn't get attention -- if they got attention, then we'd know who they were.
You can't look for people if you don't even know they're missing. If they were flying below the radar (not hard to do in the mountains), filed no flight plans, and left behind no one who cared about them enough to notice they're missing, then how exactly were the rescue agencies supposed to find them?
Further, if they were doing all those things, what're the odds the undocumented wreckage contains remains of undocumented would-be workers or non-medicinal pharmaceuticals?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
How often does that happen with light aircraft? Do they vanish entirely very often?
The correct Spanish word for mountain is montaña, not a plain n but n with ~ on top.
That is correct.
Going on an offtopic tangent, I find it funny how many Spanish-derived English words have seemingly been adapted from their Spanish spelling, rather than from their pronunciation, as you would perhaps expect. Montana is a good example; if it had been adapted from the pronunciation it would have been something like montanja. Also Texas or Mexico: they have kept the spelling from a time, a few centuries ago, when in Spanish the "x" represented the gutural sound usually written as "kh" in English. Of course, English speakers now pronounce the "x" in Texas or Mexico as "ks", which has precisely nothing to do with the original pronunciation. There are many more examples of this.