Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Jim Gray, one of the men behind modern database design, is missing. You can help find him.

On Sunday, January 28th, 2007, Jim Gray, a renowned computer scientist was reported missing at sea. As of Thursday, Feb. 1st, the US Coast Guard has called off the search, having found no trace of the boat or any of its emergency equipment.

Follow the story here.

Through the generous efforts of his friends, family, various communities and agencies, detailed NASA aircraft imagery has been made available for his last known whereabouts.

An Amazon Mechanical Turk has been set up to help analyse this imagery. Just spend half an hour or so on the task - marking imagery for further analysis.

I've met Jim a couple of times. He's a fascinating speaker and entertaining conversationalist, with much still to give the world - especially in his current area of research, tools to help manage large-scale distributed scientific computing projects. It's somewhat fitting that we can use the fruits of his research to help his family...