Joho the Blog
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February 04, 2007
Jim Gray, a computer scientist at Microsoft, was reported missing at sea on Jan. 28th. Thanks to Google and Amazon, you can help search for him by going through some of the tens of thousands of satellite images, looking for his boat. The search site is here. You have to register with Amazon to participate. When I did, I didn't see the Jim Gray search in the list of available projects, but it showed up when I searched for "gray." The NY Times has covered this. Microsoft has an update page. There's a FaceBook group for the project. And here's the U of Texas image analysis site. (Thanks to Bill St. Arnaud for the links.) (This type of effort is known as a "mechanical Turk" because, like the chess playing machine it's named after, there are humans at the heart of it.) [Tags: gim_gray mechanical_turk google amazon collaboration emergency everything_is_miscellaneous ] Posted
by D. Weinberger at February 4, 2007 09:29 AM
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Comments
I hope they find him. I was disappointed to see some of the local coverage starting to yellow, with insinuations that he may be off in Baja drinking margaritas, rather than "missing" and in need of help.
But this outpouring of help made me think about another level of inequity. How many people go missing that don't lead to such a story and generate such high-level and highly-talented support. Largest privately funded search effort the coast guard has ever seen?
Life isn't fair and resources get allocated where they do, and we can't all give everything to help everyone, but if someone you love goes missing next week won't it suck extra that this sort of thing won't happen for them?
Posted by: Steve Portigal | February 4, 2007 12:31 PM