{"id":2061,"date":"2007-12-26T23:01:45","date_gmt":"2007-12-27T04:01:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/12\/26\/crowdsourcing-search-for-missing-pilot\/"},"modified":"2007-12-26T23:01:45","modified_gmt":"2007-12-27T04:01:45","slug":"crowdsourcing-search-for-missing-pilot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/12\/26\/crowdsourcing-search-for-missing-pilot\/","title":{"rendered":"Crowdsourcing search for missing pilot"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A short time ago, I was contacted by a man named Lino Ramirez, asking if I could help with the search for Ron Boychuk, a pilot who <a href=\"http:\/\/www.canada.com\/victoriatimescolonist\/news\/story.html?id=22f53087-2505-475f-b6d0-6367d1aeaf9a&amp;k=69992\">went missing<\/a> somewhere over the interior of British Columbia on October 23. Lino had read about the <a href=\"http:\/\/s3.amazonaws.com\/fossett\/thanks.html\">search for Steve Fossett<\/a>, the billionaire adventurer who also disappeared while flying in September, a search that used Amazon&#8217;s &#8220;crowdsourcing&#8221; service, Mechanical Turk. In that experiment, Amazon was provided with satellite photos of the route Fossett took, and anyone who wanted to could help to search the terrain.<\/p>\n<p>Lino told me he was hoping to put something similar together, but he wasn&#8217;t having much luck finding the satellite photos necessary. About a month ago, he managed to make contact with someone at DigitalGlobe &#8212; one of the companies that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.digitalglobe.com\/sample_imagery.shtml\">provides satellite imagery<\/a> for Google Earth &#8212; and they agreed to take some shots of the area on their next fly-by. To make a long story short, he just emailed me to say that the photos have come in from DigitalGlobe, and a Google Earth site called InternetSAR has agreed to integrate them into their system.<\/p>\n<p>Anyone with Google Earth can now go to <a href=\"http:\/\/internetsar.org\/searches\/boychuk\/index.html\">the InternetSAR site<\/a> and be given (after registering) a random portion of the area to search. Lino says he got a total of about 5 gigabytes worth of data, which was divided into nine chunks and then sub-divided into smaller portions by InternetSAR. There is some misalignment with the existing Google Earth images (it&#8217;s easy to tell where because the new images show winter landscape and the existing ones are green) but other than that the two are relatively close.<\/p>\n<p>In any case, a fascinating use of satellite imagery and the Internet to continue a search long after the authorities have given up (there&#8217;s some discussion of the search and the imagery <a href=\"http:\/\/bbs.keyhole.com\/ubb\/showflat.php\/Cat\/0\/Number\/1081035\/an\/0\/page\/0\">here<\/a>). For the sake of the Boychuk family, I hope the search is successful.<\/p>\n<div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A short time ago, I was contacted by a man named Lino Ramirez, asking if I could help with the search for Ron Boychuk, a pilot who went missing somewhere over the interior of British Columbia on October 23. Lino had read about the search for Steve Fossett, the billionaire adventurer who also disappeared while &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/12\/26\/crowdsourcing-search-for-missing-pilot\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Crowdsourcing search for missing pilot&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2061\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}