Category Archives: Computers, User Interfaces

We can all help search for missing avation pioneer Steve Fossett

Over the past few days, I’ve spent most of my lunch break looking for missing aviation pioneer Steve Fossett. Did I hop in a jeep/plane/helicopter and go cross country searching in the Nevada desert? No, I looked for Steve Fossett from the comfort of my office cubicle. If you want to help with the massive online search effort, just visit Amazon’s Mechanical Turk website, sign in, and start looking at the newly released satellite images: http://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?groupId=9TSZK4G35XEZJZG21T60

. Looking for Steve Fossett

Stardust@Home is cool!

If you’re kinda geeky like me, and don’t mind looking through a virtual microscope for the good of science, you need to check out StardustAtHome! It’s pretty cool!

What’s in it for me?

“The discoverer of an interstellar dust particle will appear as a co-author on scientific papers by the Stardust@home collaboration announcing the discovery of the particle. The discoverer will also have the privilege of naming the particle!”

I’ve looked through my fair share of microscopes in my old failure analysis job, and this is actually quite fun for me. I would suggest that anyone who has 10 or 15 minutes to spare every day during their lunch break ought to review stardust samples too. You might just discover something “out of this world”!

stardustsnapshot.jpg

Kurt