Sunday, September 16, 2007

Collaborative, Distributive Searches for Lost People

Must be a trend. Two weeks in a row, the New York Times Week in Review on page two had a story of a geospatial nature. This time the short piece, by Steve Friess, discusses the mapping technologies used to find the millionaire Steve Fossett who went missing in northern Nevada on September 3.

Through the use of high resolution photos donated by Google (the image above notwithstanding) and the use of Amazon Mechanical Turk, arm chair searchers are voluntarily viewing orthophotos to decipher any on the ground clues as to Fossett's whereabouts.

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