The power of many.
by T. Colin Dodd
Amazon is now searching for Mr Fossett - Download Squad
Amazon has joined the search efforts for Steve Fossett after his balloon small plane trip ended in a disappearance somewhere in the Nevada desert last week. This news comes after Steve’s friend British Billionaire Sir Richard Branson has reportedly contacted his friends at Google to see if they would join the search efforts of over 6 airplanes and three helicopters.
Now Amazon has enlisted its Mechanical Turk system to search for the pilot. They’re using human researchers to complete tasks that cannot be automatically analyzed, such as photo analysis, surveys and audio transcriptions. Amazon is also asking volunteers to look through satellite images and mark any areas that could demand any closer looks. 53,000 locations are currently awaiting further investigations.
More on Mechanical Turk:
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk uses human researchers to complete tasks that cannot be automated, such as photo analysis, surveys or audio transcriptions. People submitting such tasks to the system normally pay a small sum for each task.
The service is asking volunteers to scan a series of satellite images of the area and mark any objects that might warrant closer inspection. At the time of this story’s posting, there were over 53,000 locations awaiting analysis.
Volunteers are asked to load a series of recent satellite images into Google Earth and browse to a specific location by pasting longitude and latitude coordinates.
And here is an NPR version of the story.
