Search for Steve Fossett Moves Online
There are those amongst the world’s population – Elton John
comes to mind as a recent example – that believe that the internet is not
necessarily all it’s cracked up to be. They believe that it is just a
playground for the pornographic, lazy and artistically challenged. Newspaper
journalists feel threatened by bloggers, old fashioned musicians are frightened
by the online growth of music and parents feel their children are only being
exposed to pornography and pedophiles.
The simple fact of the matter is, the internet is a whole lot more, and will be a force of change over succeeding generations.
A current example of the benefit the internet is providing is the help that internet users’ are currently providing to the search team looking for lost adventurer Steve Fossett.
Amazon.com – the online retailer based in Seattle – has created an online tool that is organizing the online-search. Named ‘Mechanical-Turk’, users are able to sift through frame after frame of satellite photography taken by satellites involved with the Google Earth initiative, in search of signs that could lead rescuers to Fossett.
The “human intelligence” tool created by Amazon is named after a fake chess-playing robot from the 18th century that, in reality, was nothing more than a container for a real flesh and blood human chess master. Mechanical Turk is a name that refers to projects in which humans are set tasks to complete by computers.
Already numbering in the thousands, users that find a satellite photo that might show some signs of wreckage or a plane – we are all praying for the latter – then mark it and send it in to a team of experts who will then determine whether a rescue team should be sent there. However, as time passes by authorities are realizing that the area in which the plane is thought to have disappeared is already a mass graveyard.
Apparently, over 150 small aircraft have disappeared in Nevada over the past 50 years. “We’re finding them left and right. Nevada is a graveyard,” said Kim Toulouse, a spokesman for the Nevada Department of Wildlife, which has been helping with the hunt.
This is not the first use of the internet to help a common goal however, though possibly the most widely publicized. For a long time tools such as SETI@home and Folding@home have been used to help scientists in their own studies.
The latter has been around since late 2000, and is involved in performing computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics simulations. One of the largest distributed computing projects in the world, Folding@home’s mission statement is "to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases."
We here at Daily Galaxy offer our prayers and thoughts to the family of Steve Fossett, and the hope of a safe and quick return to his family. May God bless you all, and Steve, hang in there! We’re coming!
Posted by Josh Hill.
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