Fascinating

Has anyone ever heard of Amazon Mechanical Turk? I had never heard of it before I stumbled upon it while clicking through some Digg stuff this afternoon. I can't really explain it all that well as I'm still trying to understand all the ways in which it can be used. If you're really curious, click here to read all about it, but basically, Amazon has a beta application called Mechanical Turk where one can sign up to do a HIT (Human Intelligence Task). Some tasks are paid, some are not. Examples of typical tasks:

• Trivia research
• Podcast transcription
• Test you can hit a website from your mobile device
• Provide the URL for a well known website with a major user flaw in it

When you complete your HIT, you submit it, if you have completed it sufficiently (judged by a human most of the time, it seems), then you get paid via your Amazon account. The prices for a HIT vary, but you don't get paid much. The idea seems to be to get people to sign up to do grunt work that is easy, quick, and doesn't require much skill and then you pay them a very small amount (e.g. $.05 for some HITs).

That you can get paid is not what fascinates me; what fascinates me is how they've thought to use it in the search for Jim Gray. If you haven't read about him - and this is probably all of you since the only reason I have heard about him is due to Digg - he's been missing off the coast of San Francisco since Jan. 28th (more details here).

His friend, Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon), set up a HIT to find Jim's missing boat using satellite images. They were able to do a satellite run over the area where he disappeared and made those images public. Then they split those images up into smaller images. What the little person does is create a Mechanical Turk account (only a formality as this is an unpaid HIT), then you go in and review 5 images per HIT. You mark each image as showing nothing or a something to be examined further. Basically, they're using human volunteers to do what computers don't do very well: examine images for small things that might turn out to be his boat. I think it's a long shot that anything will come of it. And I would assume (hope) they are cycling all images through multiple HITs such that each image is reviewed at least twice to try and avoid those people who undoubtedly want to screw things like this up. However, the concept just fascinates me. Imagine if they found him using this as a method? Anyway, I've done about 7 HITs for him and I will do a few more. The images can be tough to tell if it's something that needs to be examined or if it's just more water; since some guy's life is on the line, it's hard to make that call with some images, but I figure it's better to take a chance and review it. What have we got to lose? Each HIT takes about 30 seconds to 1 minute. If you're bored, curious, or just want to help, click here.