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Search For Evi Nemeth Continues
oneiros27 writes "Although the initial search for Evi Nemeth (and some other people who didn't write Unix books) ended, family and friends of the missing crew are funding a private search effort for the crew. They've managed to get more images from DigitalGlobe of the drift area, but now need help looking through the pictures. If you've got some free time, you might be able to help save some lives."
This is an instance where you would want to have Google and its awesome machine learning and image processing skills to do the work for you. Do an image search for something like 'snake', ignore the pages with the word snake on them so you get only the ones where the Google image processing algorithm finds the subject matter ... You'll find images where you wouldn't recognize theres a snake in the picture if you weren't told.
Its REALLY impressive at this stage of the game how well it works. I'm sure there are others that have good tech, but I've never seen anything at their level.
BitZtream
For Jim Gray, wherever he may be
- Principles of Transaction Processing, 2nd Edition, Morgan Kaufman 2009 (Philip Bernstein and Eric Newcomer)
(Gray and Bernstein were leading researchers in the theory of transaction processing)
If they managed to get into their dinghies and survive that long, it'd be one of the most amazing feats of seamanship... right up there with the lifeboats from the Bounty or those awful voyages where 19th century whalers cannibalized each other.
You people who imagine anyone from the boat Nemeth was on is still
alive obviously have no idea about the conditions in the southern ocean.
If drowning doesn't kill you, hypothermia will, and if that doesn't kill you,
a few days without fresh water to drink will do the trick.
Unless those on board the boat were able to don survival suits and carried
food and water with them and were able to get into their life raft which may or
may not have deployed such that it could even be used, the chance that anyone
survived is as close to zero as it gets. Sure, it's nice to hope people survived,
but these people are all fish food by now.
Evi Stopped teaching Unix Sys Admin the semester I took it (you were a good teacher Tor, I just was looking forward to Emi). I remember her smiling at me going through the hallway between classes, funny how I remember that. I think I was a little star struck because she was the equivalent of an A list celebrity in the UNIX world.
Were they highly trained survivalists? Sorry, but they called off the search for a reason.
They called off the search because statistically it's unlikely that anyone could have survived at sea that long.
But if it were my loved ones, without proof that they died at sea, I'd still hold out the hope that perhaps they washed up on an island somewhere and are living in Gilligan's Island style Tiki huts.
This is a private effort, so you don't have to participate if you don't want to.
I don't get it. The tomnod page seems to shows a map of the area, not satellite images. How are you supposed to search for anything in an empty pale blue picture?
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
The HMS Endurance and Shackleton.
The Endurance became trapped on January 19, 1915. The crew was rescued, after Shackleton and his lieutenants' heroics, on August 30, 1916. Nineteen months in Antarctica.
It might take a try or two to get it to load correctly. After a couple-three tries, it worked correctly for me and I spent about 30 minutes perusing the area. Saw one unusually red spot but it could have been a trick of light. I marked two "items of interest" in about 10+ square kilometer area. The more votes an item gets the more likely it is to be something.
I've been looking for a while just to help, but it would be tons more efficient if I could download about 100 square KM of images at a time - it only takes a second to tell a page has no items of interest, but many seconds to load each movement either to a new area or to scroll the minim-map any direction.
I could probably have searched the same area in a tenth the time if the transition between areas was seamless, which would enable me to allocate time to search a much larger area.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Possible sail? (4 inches from right, 2 inches from top): http://tomnod.com/nod/challenge/ninarescue2/map/207355
Not to make light of the situation, but did anyone else glance at the headline and see 'Search for Evil Nemesis Continues?'
~Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, but Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.
How do you actually get other people to see what you've found? Is it built in the tool somehow? Shouldn't I then be able to see other people's finds? Or is the whole of slashdot meant to start posting random map links to each other?
Anyway for what it's worth, what do you think of this? http://tomnod.com/nod/challenge/ninarescue2/map/207268 oblong structure around 70ft with a homogeneously white (eye-of-faith-reddish?) 10-20ft structure slightly left and above it? Top mid-right of the map (on my portrait-oriented monitor)
but who sees this aggregate result? I didn't find a way to do so, all I can do is share the map link
True, that's probably why there's a Sign in as a Guest link right below the username/password fields ...
To my mind, at a minimum of 10ft (3.3 m) size of the raft, one'd be looking for objects about 5-7 pixels to my estimate
That's about right.
No seriosly, am I doing wrongs searching for so small "redish" objects?
I think so as bright sunlight on red could easily wash out to white, just look for anything around the size you mentioned that looks more "solid".
I flagged two items that were about two to three pixels wide, but looked slightly more solid than the other whitecaps you could see at times.
As I said it takes only a moment to see if the page has anything interesting or not, most are quite flat with elements only a pixel or two large, or else regular repeating wave patterns where it would be easy to discern a break in the pattern.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's not claimed to be the state of the art, and yeah, it is a bit crude. I'd at least like to see the ability to shift colour palettes and adjust contrast - zoom too would be nice. I suppose they're probably not looking for detailed forensics here - more a just a lot of skimming, with the idea that possible leads could be more closely explored. On that basis, to what end would tide tables, drift rates and weather reports add value?
I'd hope in the background that they would be cataloguing possible matches, which would then be randomly slipped in to grids being searched by other users. How do you know that this isn't automatically being done in the background - might be an interesting question to pose to them. Giving the user a "click here to look at new stuff" wouldn't be useful, as most people would probably just click that anyway. Better to have an algorithm feed content based on the needs of the project.
I agree though that turning this in to a game could be useful. Adding some false positives could be useful and would reduce the monotony - so long as the user is told on selection that they have found a test image. To some extent they are turning it in to a game by awarding the user with progress reports based on areas covered. Slow load times might be due to an influx of Slashdotters. Loaded fine for me, and where it took a few seconds to load it was not a concern. Are you actually looking at the images or just clicking through? If the former, then you're probably spending much more time viewing an image than you are waiting for one to load.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
Yes, with stereo-viewing two images of same area with identical
magnification taken at different times (or quick shift-viewing).
What's possible in astronomy should be possible on earth.
It looks as though Earhardt might have washed up on an island somewhere, so yeah, it seems worth holding out hope.
I was just reading the other day about some Japanese guys whose boat was blown out to sea and they eventually wound up in the US. At the time it was illegal to leave Japan, so it was decades before some of them found a safe way back in. Their families were stunned.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
Oh, this is the Nina story. Here in NZ we've been getting this in the news over the last few months, but they never mentioned that anybody 'famous' might be on board. I'd just assumed it was another recreational fishing boat that went missing.
I really, really hope they find them, dead or alive. At least there would be some closure. Just going missing all this time is like a splinter that won't heal, you know?