Looking For A Man Lost At Sea From My Computer

One of the places I earn money is at Amazon Mechanical Turk. They always have a variety of hits to work on that only involve a small amount of time and most often, an opinion about a topic. Today was different though. Today, they were paying nothing, but asking for help from the family of Jim Gray who is lost at sea. NASA had taken photos of the area where they think *Mr. Gray might have gone missing, and we were suppose to look at the photos and determine if there was anything out of the ordinary that showed up.

At the altitude (I presume from a satellite) the pictures were taken, the boat Mr. Gray was sailing on would look pretty small, so we were looking for anything that might have been similar to the example shape in an image that they provided. I don't know if I really saw a boat, but I did see one photo that had something the right size and had definite edges, so I don't think it was a rogue wave. When I began, there were about 700 pictures to peruse, but some other people must have been working on it too, because the amount went down pretty fast. I hope our efforts were helpful. I never thought I would be looking for a man and his boat lost at sea from my home computer.

Originally posted on Pentimento.

 *

James N. "Jim" Gray (born 1944) is an American computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1998 "for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation."

Jim Gray in 1999

Gray studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his B.S. in Engineering Mathematics (Math and Statistics) in 1966 and his PhD in Computer Science in 1969. He was the first recipient of a PhD from Berkeley's Computer Science Department.

Gray worked as an industrial researcher and software designer at a number of industrial companies, including IBM, Tandem Computers and DEC. He has been a Technical Fellow for Microsoft Research in San Francisco since 1995. Gray has contributed to the building of several major database and transaction processing systems, including the groundbreaking System R while at IBM, Terraserver and Skyserver for Microsoft, as well as an extensive record of publication in academic journals. Among his more well known achievements are granular database locking, two-tier transaction commit semantics, and the data cube operator for data warehousing applications. He also helped in the development of Virtual Earth.

After a short solo sailing trip to the Farallon Islands near San Francisco to scatter his mother's ashes, his 40-foot yacht was reported missing on Sunday, January 28, 2007. The Coast Guard searched for four days using a C-130 plane, helicopter and patrol boats but found no sign of the vessel. ^{[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]}

On February 1, 2007 the DigitalGlobe satellite did a scan of the area, generating thousands of images. ^[6] The images were posted to Amazon Mechanical Turk to distribute the work of searching through them in the hopes of spotting his boat. View the HIT for more details. ^{[7] [8]}