Finding the Hero

One of the forums recently started on M opened with the question, "Think 18th century through today...who are your heroes?" One of mine was Amelia Earhart, who had some amazing accomplishments in the field of aviation, especially being a woman in that age. Talk about daring, risk and adventure. Kind of along the same lines as Steve Fossett, who has been missing for a few days now.

I spent just a few minutes contributing to the Amazon Mechanical Turk "HIT" for finding Steve Fossett. The basic idea is that images from the overall search area are loaded in to the Turk and the power of the Web is harnessed for people who have the time to scan those images using Google Earth, identify whether they see something suspect or not, and the results cataloged. Hopefully the more people involved, the more images can get scanned and maybe some hits on possibilities for where Steve is. D just told me that they have found 5 or 6 plane crashes that no one could find before.

Here is a fascinating article about Jim Gray, a Silicon Valley technologist who disappeared sailing earlier this year, and the high tech search used to try and find him as well. To date, no one has found him or evidence of his boat.

There is risk for it's own sake and there is risk for a greater cause.