All Things Distributed

FEBRUARY 11, 2007

As Mike Olsen just wrote on the Tenacious Search weblog, today was the first day that action could be taken on the boats found in the satellite and ER-2 streams. Bad weather has kept any aerial search parties on the ground until now. This morning two planes were dispatched to locations derived from images coordinates combined with drift models.

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All Things Distributed

FEBRUARY 6, 2007

Over 530,000 Mechanical Turk assignments have been completed by more than 12,000 volunteers in the search for Jim Gray. We need a little more of a push and then all the images will have been processed. A team of experts lead by Alex Szalay of John Hopkins University has been working through the thousands of images marked for further investigation.

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All Things Distributed

FEBRUARY 4, 2007

It is now 3 PM on Sunday afternoon and the group of volunteers in thethe search for Jim Gray has worked their way through almost 100,000 assignments since Friday 5 PM. Since then we have seen over 6000 individual workers completing anywhere from 1 to almost a 1000 assignments. And there are still more to go.

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All Things Distributed

FEBRUARY 3, 2007

We have now added the data captured by the NASA ER-2 plane yesterday over the ocean area outside of San Francisco. We were very fortunate that this flight was scheduled for yesterday and that the NASA folks were interested in having it capture these images. We have been able to split them just like yesterday’s satellite images and create HITs (Human Interface Tasks) from them.

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All Things Distributed

FEBRUARY 14, 2007

Today in the opening session of FAST there are two papers on the studies of hard disk reliability. Both these papers present very interesting results that blow away some of the common assumptions in failure modelling of systems. Bianca Schroeder and Garth Gibson from CMU in their paper Disk Failures in the Real World: What Does an MTTF of 1,000,000 Hours Mean to You?

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All Things Distributed

FEBRUARY 12, 2007

I have had the luxury of almost 4 months with any real conferences. Don’t get me wrong it is not that I do not enjoy the public speaking side of my job; it is just that I experience it always as rather disruptive. It is great to focus for a while and get things done.

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All Things Distributed

FEBRUARY 2, 2007

Computer science icon Jim Gray mysteriously disappeared after a solo trip with his sail boat outside San Francisco Bay. The coast guard has been searching for 4 days but has not been able to locate anything, not even debris. On Thursday 3 private planes searched through the coastal areas and they also returned unsuccessful.

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