Mechanical Turk Hunts for Steve Fossett

Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk, a service which uses Human Intelligence to perform tasks (HITs, or Human Intelligence Tasks) that humans are best suited for, such as image identification, is joining the hunt for Steve Fossett.

In an email we received this morning, Amazon.com said,
On Monday, September 3, 2007, Steve Fossett, the first person to fly a plane around the world without refueling and the first person to fly around the world in a balloon went missing in Nevada. An airplane he was flying failed to return. No one has any idea where he is.

Through the generous efforts of individuals at several organizations, detailed satellite imagery has been made available for his last known whereabouts.

HITs have been created to ask volunteers to help review these images and flag potential areas of interest which will be instrumental in the search and rescue efforts.

If you are interested in helping, please click here to participate in the search effort.

If you're interested in helping, even if you don't currently have a Mechanical Turk account, visit the link.
Tags:  Nic, steve, mechanical, OS, FOSS, OSS, SSE, K