TechLifeBlogged

Steve Fossett has been missing for several days. If you don’t remember, he is the first person to fly a plane around the world without refueling and the first person to fly around the world in a balloon. It is assumed his plane is somewhere in the Nevada desert.

Now with the help of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and new satellite imagery from Google Earth, you can help find him from your desk.

Mechanical Turk combines an API with humans that do the work.

From the site:

When we think of interfaces between human beings and computers, we usually assume that the human being is the one requesting that a task be completed, and the computer is completing the task and providing the results. What if this process were reversed and a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the results? What if it could coordinate many human beings to perform a task?

You can read more about it at amazon: What is Mechanical Turk?

Here is the HIT on Mechanical Turk that describes the job: Steve Fossett Missing: Help find him by searching satellite imagery

Be sure you have the latest KML file loaded from that page. It might also help to have the scale on. In Google Earth you turn on the scale legend by going to View -> Scale Legend.

via: Amazon Web Services Blog