Help Find Steve Fossett 439
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.
what's he wearing? (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:what's he wearing? (Score:5, Funny)
Not all missing persons can be seen from space (Score:5, Interesting)
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".
Re:Not all missing persons can be seen from space (Score:4, Informative)
Like who? (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you just make this up because it makes you seem like a Sensitive and Thoughtful Person? Or can you actually name someone who went missing in the wilderness and "got no attention"?
FYI, rangers and such take their jobs very seriously. So far as I know, everyone reported missing in the wilderness gets a full spare-no-expense search and rescue effort. They look for "nobodies" just as hard as they're looking for Fossett, and the dedicated folks who do those tough jobs would take great offense at your ignorant suggestion otherwise.
Re:Like who? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's also quite illogical to ask "who" didn't get attention -- if they got attention, then we'd know who they were.
Re:Like who? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Like who? (Score:4, Informative)
I couldn't find Steve (Score:5, Funny)
Google Earth (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Google Earth (Score:4, Funny)
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Read the article, and you'd see that they explain how authorities helped facilitate new images.
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In my defense, I was so anxious to start looking for Steve that I immediately jumped to Amazon to start looking rather than stopping to read the article. Who has time to read articles when there is a man out in the wilderness waiting for us to Amazon or Google him?
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The map is different in Google Earth- there, you can see that each one of those short stubby little roads ends in a nice stately circle.
Does this really improve the odds of finding him? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Does this really improve the odds of finding hi (Score:3)
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Re:Does this really improve the odds of finding hi (Score:3, Interesting)
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 curren
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The One-click Mechanical Turk is highly inefficient as it requires loads of clicks and scrolling for each of the impossible small search areas provided.
While something is better than nothing - what's the point of a large community effort if not to advance the technology, and maintain the technology so that in future cases, it can be deployed more effectively.
If this is the best google can do - i'd sell their stock.
AIK
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Dan East
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I submit that if reduced to a single keystroke - not carpel-inducing-mousing clicks, and enlarged 4 times,
one could expose the average user to 10 times the number of pixels in the same time; moreover, the pixels searched would go up 100 times as people would stay with it longer if it we're so tedious.
as is - it is embarrassingly horrid.
Ben
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The Face on Mars (Score:2)
But what exactly are you looking for?
Remember the "Face on Mars?" It is very easy to find significance in patterns that are pure chance. The computer can be no more rational and objective than its programmer.
In World War T
Re:Does this really improve the odds of finding hi (Score:4, Interesting)
What, you thought there was no interesting CS research left to do?
Re: (Score:2)
I'll have to disagree with the poster that claims this can't be done.
Yes, it can. It's known as "pattern recognition." The problem is that for the most effective recognition, you need either before/after images (which would be normalized and then overlaid at appropriate registration points), or a series of pics fed to the algorithm, one of which contains the artifact you're interested in (supervised learning). The former is often us
Re:Does this really improve the odds of finding hi (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Does this really improve the odds of finding hi (Score:3, Informative)
I spent a few years on the local search and rescue team and fortunately only got to see one serious crash up close. From the air, it looked more or less like a bunch of trash strewn across a 100-foot stretch of hillside. Nothing you'd identify immediately as an aircraft, though in this case the huge burn m
high-resolution satellite imagery (Score:3, Funny)
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Try Microsoft (booo! hisss!) Live Search. Google had only the usual low-res satellite image of my neighborhood, but MSFT had high res airplane photos... and from multiple perspectives!
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Reason i know its at least 5 years old is due to the lack of any car in the driveway. No way for me to know how much older tho.
Nevada (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Nevada (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 centu
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Doesn't work over here. (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
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Found a plane... (Score:5, Informative)
119 24' 21.64" W
Re:Found a plane... (Score:5, Interesting)
Looks like a plane to me too.
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What do we do if we find a plane???? (Score:3, Interesting)
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).
I maybe found some older wreckage (Score:3, Insightful)
38 27'2.88"N 119 25'25.17"W
as possible wreckage of another plane, from some time ago?
I think this is a great chance to go back and bring closure to those families of people missing in unrecovered crashes in the past, in the area. I hope they go ahead and let the survey complete, even if they find Fossett soon.
Mod Parent Up (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Found a plane... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Found a plane... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, the lack of north-west facing shadows around the plane (see the trees) suggests that this is a plane in the air, not on the ground.
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Note that the old maps are offset around 640feet to the North, compared to the new maps. Lakes and peaks show that pretty conclusively.
All that said, I've found several plane-shaped bright images (of roughly the right size) that were not in the old map data, but where do I alert someone to the coordinates? This was not done through the Amazon thingie, but directly in Google Earth...
If you figure it out (and maybe how to un-offset maps) post here. If I find something close to the area turk says, I just put it in comments, but that is certainly not the best solution.
Meanwhile, there is something at 38 2'13.93"N, 11920'41.43"W - not very clear but seems to fit the dimensions perfectly.
-Em
Re:Found a plane... (Score:4, Informative)
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38 2'25.47"N
119 22'16.26"W
It looks like a streak on the mountain - possibly caused by something hitting it, especially viewed with 3d terrain on as it appears to go along the mountain and not down it.
hate to be a pessimist but...
-Em
This is wrong on so many levels... (Score:4, Insightful)
The time to test this type of technology out isn't during a live SAR mission. Leave the search and rescue to the experts, and please don't tie up their time with your well-meaning, but ultimately time-wasting, suppositions.
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Most of us aren't SAR experts, and wouldn't know a burn mark from a ridge shadow. The SARs that will be sifting through the public's mostly incorrect identification of accident artifacts would be better utilized in direct search efforts
They don't re-send those images to other random users to filter out the results before passing them along to a pro?
'you sure?
Because, if they did that, then "x people think there's something here" might make a nice priority queue for those pros, rather than trying blind.
And for other searches (Score:2, Funny)
Too bad UAV are illegal (Score:3, Interesting)
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
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With very simple GPS, point-to-point radio systems - every thing in the air and more importantly on the ground could participate in active collision avoidance.
UAV can be made small, light and from foam-based materials which would render them less harmful than birds even in the event of a collision,
At some point the benefits outweigh the risks, full-on paranoia is unproductive.
AIK
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I doubt that colliding with a cropcam, is any worse than colliding with a bird.
UAV's are a half-order of magnitude less expensive than manned craft (7,000 for crop cam vs. 70,000), and two orders of magnitude less expensive to operate. (battery charge vs. fuel and maintenence)
Air-based search is often called off due to ba
Great use of the technology, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
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
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What I really feel is missing: why aren't they putting up an older set of pictures alongside the new pictures? If there's a borderline case, knowing that "this white shiny thing wasn't there nine months ago" could be very important. It would also provide important context.
Ah well, back to searching.
Perhaps.. (Score:2, Funny)
Turn off the "terrain" (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Turn off the "terrain" (Score:4, Funny)
Had a chance to meet her ex, but never took her up on it.
Fast Turk Interaction (Score:5, Informative)
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
Why am I looking at Yosemite? (Score:2)
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Re:Some people are apparently more important than. (Score:2)
what is this? (Score:2)
There is a strange rectangular object to the left of this coordinate. It doesn't seem like it would be a rock. I imagine if a plane crashed the wings would be gone and such. I dunno, just wondering because I thought it seemed odd.
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Too bad it's Amazon (Score:2, Informative)
Fuck you, Amazon.
Jim Gray (Score:3, Interesting)
Was anything ever found in the search for Jim Gray? No remnants of his boat, or other signs of what happened?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"On February 1, 2007, the DigitalGlobe satellite did a scan of the area, generating thousands of images.[9] The images were posted to Amazon Mechanical Turk in order to distribute the work of searching through them, in hopes of spotting his boat.
"On February 16, 2007, the Friends of Jim Gray Group suspended their search,[10] but continue to follow any important leads. The family ended its search May 31, 2007. The massive high-tech effort d
Quite ironic.... (Score:4, Interesting)
I think I found something... (Score:4, Interesting)
Question (Score:3, Interesting)
How often does that happen with light aircraft? Do they vanish entirely very often?
Solution (Score:3)
Take several detailed pictures and look for the diffs; there he is; if he's alive.
amazon work units increasing, area, false pos (Score:4, Informative)
However over the past half hour the work units available have been *increasing*. Currently 12,000 and increasing. Clearly they are adding more to be done faster than we're doing them. So anyone who helped out at the beginning - don't assume the hits are "all done". There could be more at any time.
In my old version of IE I couldn't see the scale bars or the example image, looking at the same coords of a unique scene in google maps I estimated the image was 125m x 125m - which would be half meter resolution. Now I see they claim the images are actually 85x85m, which would be 1.08ft resolution.
Based on that and that I've done 400 units, that mean's I've searched one full square mile.
It also means the 32,000 units I saw when I started is only 10 miles x 10 miles, 100 square miles. I heard someone else say that they only have 500 square miles of imagery. Looking at Google Earth, assuming the new imagery is the kinda-rectangular patch that is all the same color/brightness - they have approx 1700 square miles. That means there is approximately 600,000 work units in total that need done. If everone does a square mile (shouldn't take more than an hour) then we need 1700 people helping.
But as someone else noted - they're really artificially limiting the search area, considering the range on his plane. Assuming he went certain places or crashed on his way back to the ranch. That doesn't bode well.
PS: It'd be way way more effective if they showed a "image before crash" so that people could self-discover their false positives, without forcing people to download google earth and figure it's before/after out, and/or be smart enough to copy/paste the coords into google-maps satellite view.
PPS: If they were really smart, they'd have a second private pool of the public's false positives being reviewed by amateurs or employees whom they know have much much smaller false positive rates, whom they know are comparing the two available before images (google maps and google earth) against the current images.
BTW: Here are images of the actual specific plane he was flying. http://www.airport-data.com/aircraft/N240R.html [airport-data.com] (Aviation buffs take pictures and index online everything that flies, apparently
Re:I, for one... (Score:4, Funny)
walking into the light (Score:5, Interesting)
Going by MTurk's past history.. (Score:2)
Re:Obligatory question in capitalist America (Score:5, Insightful)
For helping a millionaire in his hour of need? Who knows, maybe 15 minutes of fame, a few opportunities that you would otherwise not had and maybe a modest reward.
For most, doing the former is enough.
Re:Obligatory question in capitalist America (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Obligatory question in capitalist America (Score:4, Insightful)
I am sure that this technology and effort would be made, also, for any pretty white girl. Especially if she's blond.
And unless you're a white millionaire or a pretty white blond girl, who cares if you're missing? I've watched Fox News enough to know that nobody except pretty white blond girls ever go missing *anyway*.
What I don't understand is . . . who does some rich wealthy adventurer not have some sort of backup plan or beacon or something? And besides that, what has he ever done for society other than be rich? Traveling around the globe in a hot air balloon hardly benefits mankind. *shrug*
I'm not saying he shouldn't be found or that I wish any ill will on him. I just don't see what he's done to warrant such a high concern on an international level beyond any other missing person... except at least someone who was kidnapped is less responsible for their situation than some adventurer who puts himself in harms way for hobby.
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Re:Obligatory question in capitalist America (Score:5, Insightful)
I have just completed my 729th image looking for Steve Fossett on the Mechanical Turk. I guess thats a lot more than I originally intended to do, but my reasons for keeping going are:-
In the 729 views, I've reported one image that contained a feature that looked like a rock formation impersonating an aircraft. The instructions tell us to be conservative so I reported the hit.
Plenty more to go around folks! How often are you given the chance to personally save the life of a billionare? Sounds worthwhile even in capitalist America to me.
-F
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"Amazon did something horribly crappy, let's not try to find & rescue someone using their site"??? Sorry, but I think that is petty.
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Re:Amazon's incompetence (Score:5, Insightful)
So they have an infrastructure in place that can easily organize & manage a massive search like this and you want to bitch because you had to "like... sign in" and occasionally fill out a CAPTCHA? Jeez, dude. A man's life is likely at stake here and a company stepped up to try and help the cause and you're complaining because they didn't implement the solution exactly as you would've liked. Why don't you spend more time checking out HITs and less time posting stupid shit on /. if you care so much about the process being impeded?
I sorted 100 images while you posted your advice (Score:5, Insightful)
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Oh yeah, totally. (Score:3, Insightful)
You're right - this is obviously yet another demonstration of our inability to defend against terrorism.
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Actually I think you need to be reminded that Bush's plan is to catch folks while they are planning, i.e. when the are talking, emailing, etc, before they actually start the flying. That seems like a pretty good plan. I'm not saying this plan is being well implemented, just that the broad plan seems like a good one. And I'm not against a *backup* plan that does
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Will work - imagery is new (Score:2)
I hate to rain on this parade, it would be nice if we could help, but the imagery on such sites isn't updated in real time. I'm not sure about Google earth, but Google maps uses satellite images that are several years old. Unless by some chance a new image was taken since Monday and already sent to whichever system they are using, the best that we might be able to do is identify some of the older wrecks that they are finding during this search.
You are missing the part where GeoEye re-scanned the area since Monday for this specific search, which is why it is B&W instead of color as other images around the area are.
What I wonder though is how hard would it be to do some image processing and find the differences between images before and after monday - would not be perfect but may really cut down on amount of searching
-Em
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That said, what about this object... a wing? It doesn't seem to be there in the old sat images.
3817'31.59"N 11920'12.93"W
I've been searching for hours and other than the best things other people have posted, that's the most interesting that I've seen.
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Hint: If you're using GEarth, and not seeing a black and white photo, you're doing something wrong.
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But the way amazon divides the work, probably makes more sense if there are large group of people searching.
(1) Plan (2) Stick to plan (Score:2)
That's only half of it. The second half is sticking to the plan. Flying, hiking, scuba diving, etc, its the second half that makes the first half work.