Search For Evi Nemeth Continues 67
oneiros27 writes "Although the initial search for Evi Nemeth (and some other people who didn't write Unix books) ended, family and friends of the missing crew are funding a private search effort for the crew. They've managed to get more images from DigitalGlobe of the drift area, but now need help looking through the pictures. If you've got some free time, you might be able to help save some lives."
A Google solvable problem (Score:2, Interesting)
This is an instance where you would want to have Google and its awesome machine learning and image processing skills to do the work for you. Do an image search for something like 'snake', ignore the pages with the word snake on them so you get only the ones where the Google image processing algorithm finds the subject matter ... You'll find images where you wouldn't recognize theres a snake in the picture if you weren't told.
Its REALLY impressive at this stage of the game how well it works. I'm sure ther
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Maybe not Google, but this task does seem tailor made for automation. Find any colors that are out of place. Find any lines that are at a significantly different angle or of a different length. Use humans to categorize the hits. It's so obvious, I'd be surprised if they aren't doing something along these lines. While I do empathize with them, having humans go through the raw data smacks of wishful thinking. Also, the victims have been missing for over two months. Putting it nicely, the odds do not lo
stereo viewing (Score:2)
Yes, with stereo-viewing two images of same area with identical
magnification taken at different times (or quick shift-viewing).
What's possible in astronomy should be possible on earth.
Re:save some lives? (Score:5, Insightful)
Were they highly trained survivalists? Sorry, but they called off the search for a reason.
They called off the search because statistically it's unlikely that anyone could have survived at sea that long.
But if it were my loved ones, without proof that they died at sea, I'd still hold out the hope that perhaps they washed up on an island somewhere and are living in Gilligan's Island style Tiki huts.
This is a private effort, so you don't have to participate if you don't want to.
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It looks as though Earhardt might have washed up on an island somewhere, so yeah, it seems worth holding out hope.
I was just reading the other day about some Japanese guys whose boat was blown out to sea and they eventually wound up in the US. At the time it was illegal to leave Japan, so it was decades before some of them found a safe way back in. Their families were stunned.
Dedication to a book I bought recently (Score:1)
For Jim Gray, wherever he may be
- Principles of Transaction Processing, 2nd Edition, Morgan Kaufman 2009 (Philip Bernstein and Eric Newcomer)
(Gray and Bernstein were leading researchers in the theory of transaction processing)
Two months at sea? (Score:1)
If they managed to get into their dinghies and survive that long, it'd be one of the most amazing feats of seamanship... right up there with the lifeboats from the Bounty or those awful voyages where 19th century whalers cannibalized each other.
The southern ocean doesn't take prisoners. (Score:5, Informative)
You people who imagine anyone from the boat Nemeth was on is still
alive obviously have no idea about the conditions in the southern ocean.
If drowning doesn't kill you, hypothermia will, and if that doesn't kill you,
a few days without fresh water to drink will do the trick.
Unless those on board the boat were able to don survival suits and carried
food and water with them and were able to get into their life raft which may or
may not have deployed such that it could even be used, the chance that anyone
survived is as close to zero as it gets. Sure, it's nice to hope people survived,
but these people are all fish food by now.
Re:The southern ocean doesn't take prisoners. (Score:4, Interesting)
The odds are not good, to be true. However, if you ever knew Evi and heard stories from her life, this story will end "and then after X days, they were found having survived using make shift fishing gear and drinking rain water.
The odds are long. However, in the past few years there have been instances of people beating the odds. They survived for 60 or 90 or even 120 days on their life raft after their boat sank. Not many, mind you, but it is possible.
Finally, no wreckage has been found. Usually for these events some wreckage is found. This increases the odds. Not by much.
Looking at the TomNod stuff can't hurt. The worst that would happen is that people waste time looking at snippets of the Tasman Sea rather than watching TV, porn, movies, etc.
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long term survivors of have a couple things in common: island chains nearby and water temperature close to body temperature.
it's sad, but the folks on that boat don't have either of those things going for them. no amount of smarts or strength are going to help you with hypothermia and lack of fresh water.
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You people who imagine anyone from the boat Nemeth was on is still
alive obviously have no idea about the conditions in the southern ocean.
If drowning doesn't kill you, hypothermia will, and if that doesn't kill you,
a few days without fresh water to drink will do the trick.
Unless those on board the boat were able to don survival suits and carried
food and water with them and were able to get into their life raft which may or
may not have deployed such that it could even be used, the chance that anyone
survived is as close to zero as it gets. Sure, it's nice to hope people survived,
but these people are all fish food by now.
OK, so unless she had a reverse osmosis pump and warm clothes, she'd be dead by now. But since the odds are good she had those two items, your entire post is unlikely guesswork.
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Who says you have to be looking for survivors? Finding bodies in a life raft or even the schooner itself would bring closure to the families. Not knowing what's happened to a loved one can be worse than finding them dead.
I went to CU (Score:5, Informative)
Evi Stopped teaching Unix Sys Admin the semester I took it (you were a good teacher Tor, I just was looking forward to Emi). I remember her smiling at me going through the hallway between classes, funny how I remember that. I think I was a little star struck because she was the equivalent of an A list celebrity in the UNIX world.
Re:I went to CU (Score:4, Insightful)
And Slashdot needs to let you edit after posting...
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And Slashdot needs to let you edit after posting...
No, Slashdot has it right. Editing posts is like trying to edit history, 1984 style.
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I don't know - an "Oops" button available for a couple minutes probably wouldn't hurt anything, and likely catch 90% of problems that the preview misses (can't tell you how many times I've spotted an error out of the corner of my eye as I click "submit"). Another 1984-proof options would be adding a long-term "postscript" option - several times I've wished I could append corrections to the first post in a large tree when somebody points out a significant error. Or for a more comprehensive option you could
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Actually I wasn't the GGP, just thought I'd chime in. I've got to agree though, and I largely ignore both obvious typos and grammar nazis (unless they invite a humorous response). Occasionally though I've forgotten something like a critical "not" that fundamentally changes the nature of an argument, and it would be really nice to be able to at least attach a corrective addendum.
maps or images? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Did you manage to log in? I tried, but couldn't get an account. I gave it an email address (one of my throwaways, natch) and password, and it did nothing but ask me to log in again. No email seems to have been sent. The login I had created didn't work, and trying to create one again produced the same non-result. I gave permissions for that web site to run scripts, but there was a lot of other crap that wanted permissions, so for now I'm not bothering.
Re:maps or images? (Score:4, Informative)
I ignored the login stuff, just clicked through to get to the images. There is a primer on what they're looking for in that initial part, but also some login stuff that I just clicked through. The page initially didn't load once I got to the blank page, but a couple of reloads and it finally loaded and I could start moving the viewfinder through the search area.
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One set of images is smoothed data. You likely got a frame from that.
Trapped in Antarctica for 19 months (Score:3)
The HMS Endurance and Shackleton.
The Endurance became trapped on January 19, 1915. The crew was rescued, after Shackleton and his lieutenants' heroics, on August 30, 1916. Nineteen months in Antarctica.
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There is an amazing documentary of this.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0264578/ [imdb.com]
Who knew what can be endured?
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They still had their boat, and supplies, and the crew were all highly trained in polar survival.
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It might take a try or two to get it to load correctly. After a couple-three tries, it worked correctly for me and I spent about 30 minutes perusing the area. Saw one unusually red spot but it could have been a trick of light. I marked two "items of interest" in about 10+ square kilometer area. The more votes an item gets the more likely it is to be something.
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Wish you could pre-load sets of images (Score:3)
I've been looking for a while just to help, but it would be tons more efficient if I could download about 100 square KM of images at a time - it only takes a second to tell a page has no items of interest, but many seconds to load each movement either to a new area or to scroll the minim-map any direction.
I could probably have searched the same area in a tenth the time if the transition between areas was seamless, which would enable me to allocate time to search a much larger area.
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Agreed, too slow, too many bland blue pages. At the very least someone with a half a days time should program up a simple algorithm to only display things that are not solid boring blue.
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I've been looking for a while just to help, but it would be tons more efficient if I could download about 100 square KM of images at a time - it only takes a second to tell a page has no items of interest, but many seconds to load each movement either to a new area or to scroll the minim-map any direction.
Ummm... are you sure?
To my mind, at a minimum of 10ft (3.3 m) size of the raft, one'd be looking for objects about 5-7 pixels to my estimate (about 1/6 of the 20m scale unit shown below).
No seriosly, am I doing wrongs searching for so small "redish" objects? (what if it wet and, by a misfortune, strongly reflecting at the moment the photo was taken... so that only a small number of pixels would show red all the rest being toward white - high value/small saturation?)
Quite sure (Score:2)
To my mind, at a minimum of 10ft (3.3 m) size of the raft, one'd be looking for objects about 5-7 pixels to my estimate
That's about right.
No seriosly, am I doing wrongs searching for so small "redish" objects?
I think so as bright sunlight on red could easily wash out to white, just look for anything around the size you mentioned that looks more "solid".
I flagged two items that were about two to three pixels wide, but looked slightly more solid than the other whitecaps you could see at times.
As I said it tak
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Possible hits (Score:2)
Possible sail? (4 inches from right, 2 inches from top): http://tomnod.com/nod/challenge/ninarescue2/map/207355 [tomnod.com]
oops (Score:1)
How do you share the result?! (Score:2)
Anyway for what it's worth, what do you think of this? http://tomnod.com/nod/challenge/ninarescue2/map/207268 [tomnod.com] oblong structure around 70ft with a homogeneously white (eye-of-faith-reddish?) 10-20ft structure slightly left and above it? Top mid-right of the map (on my portrait-or
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I couldn't get the site to play nice, but the red blob looks like a dead whale to me.
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It's not claimed to be the state of the art, and yeah, it is a bit crude. I'd at least like to see the ability to shift colour palettes and adjust contrast - zoom too would be nice. I suppose they're probably not looking for detailed forensics here - more a just a lot of skimming, with the idea that possible leads could be more closely explored. On that basis, to what end would tide tables, drift rates and weather reports add value?
I'd hope in the background that they would be cataloguing possible matches,
Oh (Score:2)
Oh, this is the Nina story. Here in NZ we've been getting this in the news over the last few months, but they never mentioned that anybody 'famous' might be on board. I'd just assumed it was another recreational fishing boat that went missing.
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Also they didn't mention that internet users are helping the search.
Distressed ships should come with Google Maps (Score:1)