Dec062009
MIT team wins DARPA “red balloon” challenge - in 9 hours
Filed under Internet / online by david brooks at 3:27 pm
It’s official: Thanks to the Internet and social networking, nothing whatsoever can be kept secret.
An MIT team won the DARPA challenge I mentioned earlier this week - teams had to locate 10 red weather balloons placed randomly around the country - in just nine hours.They win $40,000 for charity. (The contest was designed to see how online groups would go about gathering scattered information; the balloons were tethered in easily seen locations near roads, but could be anywhere in the contiguous 48 states.)
As this map shows, none of the balloons were closer to us that Delaware. Bummer! Also note that, except for one balloon in Memphis, Tenn., all were in coastal states. The fly-over country is ignored by experts again.
December 6th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Since the Telegraph updated their website, many photos are not showing on my screen - just that annoying box with a red 'X' in it. Is anyone else experiencing this?
December 6th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
I'll check with our Web guy, but we are having some difficulties with the new Web host … very annoying.
December 7th, 2009 at 7:34 am
The problem, I'm told, is that for a while the photos were accidentally put up as CMYK - a type of color thingamajigification - instead of RGB, which Internet Explorer can't handle. (Firefox and other browsers handle it fine.) In theory, the color type has been fixed.