Search and rescue 5 Feb 2007

When famous computer scientist Jim Gray went missing last Sunday, the US coast guard launched extensive search and rescue activities. Unfortunately, they were unable to find him and reluctantly abandoned the operation on Thursday.

But there's still hope. TechCrunch reports that Amazon has stepped in:

"[Amazon] arranged for a satellite sweep of the area and stored the images on their S3 storage service. They then created a task on their Mechanical Turk service to allow volunteers to scan the images to look for the boat. It's a tough task - the boat would only be about six pixels in size in an image, and there was a lot of cloud cover obscuring large parts of the area scanned. But volunteers are pouring in to help out."

If you want to help, go to this task on Mechanical Turk. (You'll be asked to examine five of the satellite images and point out any that require closer inspection).

It's great to see the web being put to such good use - and to all those in the media that have given crowdsourcing a beating over recent weeks, I hope this proves that it does have a place.